Kaya, ladies and gentlemen.
I’d like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples as the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet. And in particular I acknowledge representatives from First Nations communities and organisations here today and I thank them for sharing their knowledge and insight about how we can better care for country.
First Nations land and sea management practices established through thousands of years of observation, trial and error, and proven outcomes should be a touchstone of Australia’s broader national resilience and recovery approach.
Thank you all for being here at the opening of the Higher Risk Weather Season National Preparedness Summit, hosted by the National Emergency Management Agency.
I especially want to thank the front-line emergency management professionals for contributing to this third instalment of what is now an annual rallying point before the higher-risk season begins.
As with previous years, the 2025 Summit is an opportunity for us to come together around our shared mission: namely to anticipate, prepare, respond and recover to the highest possible standard, and to do that more effectively over time. When we bring together people with a stake in Australia’s emergency management systems and capabilities, we are fostering shared situational awareness and shared lessons across all levels of government, industry, and community.
Among us today are meteorologists who predict weather trends and critical events, firefighters and paramedics who apply their skills on the front lines, policy experts who design programs and allocate resources, local and regional representatives who know the reality of the risks in their communities, supply chain experts who understand the necessity and challenge of keeping all the key channels connected and open, and of course the volunteers who mobilise and deliver grassroots support.
In the short time I have been in my present role, I’ve had the privilege to meet with many of you and your organisations – but of course it speaks to our present circumstances that there is no shortage of opportunities to see response and recovery work occurring across our continental domain and as the frequency and intensity of hazards continues to increase.
Only a few weeks after the election I visited communities impacted by flooding across the New South Wales mid-north coast and in so doing benefited from the insights of the NSW police, Rural Fire Service, SES and Reconstruction Authority. Those communities have faced multiple events in a relatively short space of time and while that has brought a certain amount of trauma and weariness, it has also built resilience and resolution. That sense of resilience is deeply underpinned by the consistent professionalism, effectiveness, and compassion of the teams that mobilised to respond during a time of crisis.
And while each State and Territory handles their emergency management procedures and systems with some local distinguishing features, that high-level can-do professionalism and that caring generosity of spirit is the common bedrock of all our efforts. It is an expression of our Australian values and character.
Last week I was in Townsville and Cairns to meet with Queensland police, SES volunteers and council teams who have helped their communities through intense rainfall and flooding over the last couple of years.
Again, the respect and trust that attaches to your organisations was plainly apparent, and again that confidence is the key difference between a community tackling adversity with resolution and reassurance and hope, rather than having a tough situation made worse through fear and confusion.
And because the trust and responsiveness of communities faced with a severe hazard is a critical element of the best outcome in dealing with an emergency, we will never take that trust for granted. It is hard-won and must be protected, especially in the face of more disasters that are likely to be compounding, cascading, and concurrent in future.
Certainly, my experience of meeting with organisations that focus on continuous research and learning, like Hazards Research Australia, and people like Rob Webb at AFAC, and through gatherings like this gives me confidence about our clear commitment to building and maintaining trust.
Friends, today is personally significant because it marks my first formal address as the Assistant Minister for Emergency Management.
While that’s neither here nor there in the great scheme of things, it is helpful in my view that I’m now able to combine this work with my existing portfolio responsibilities as Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy. Needless to say, I think it was characteristically forward-looking decision of the Prime Minister to make sure that our national efforts with respect to both climate adaptation on the DCCEEW side of things and disaster resilience and recovery on the NEMA side are better aligned in future as we advance and expand both those efforts.
Not so very long ago, neither of these areas of responsibility – Emergency Management or Climate Change – would have featured in the Ministerial line-up for an Australian government.
Today, no one would question the roles that my senior Ministers, Chris Bowen and Kristy McBain hold in each of those critical portfolios, and where those responsibilities overlap in my role as the Assistant Minister tells you a fair bit about the challenges of our time.
I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to work with all of you on the crucial task of charting and then steering the convergence and alignment of our approach to shorter-term emergency hazards and longer-term climate change risks.
Tomorrow, I understand you will all take part in an exercise, which, I’m told, is where the magic happens ….
By exercising your skill sets together, well before a real event strikes.
We know that genuine preparation isn’t just about planning on paper – it’s about practice. Throughout this exercise, you will have the opportunity to fine-tune your own processes in a calm and strategic environment before you take them away and apply them in a real disaster context.
As you all so deeply and personally understand, in a real disaster, there’s no time for introductions and very little or no scope for trial-and-error. Today you will hear from experts about the impacts of disasters on some of our most vulnerable communities – and I encourage you to reflect on the value of that session as you step through the exercise tomorrow.
Planning together builds trust and models interoperability, ensuring that when the alarm sounds, everyone knows their role and everyone has a clear sense of where they fit into the bigger picture.
With climate change bringing more intense and frequent extreme weather, our higher-risk season – from October through April – demands more preparation than ever, because it will demand greater capacity and capability over time.
As the Glasser Review into national disaster arrangements outlines, it’s not just the increasing severity of individual hazard events that’s the problem, but how they compound and interact with other climate-amplified hazards and have broader cascading impacts across society.
We’re already seeing evidence of this. Black Summer, which involved multiple simultaneous, record-setting hazards, directly affected close to 70% of Australians, and had major consequences for the economy, biodiversity, and public health.
I don’t think there’s any real question that climate change is the challenge of our time – and how we respond to that challenge will define our path through the 21st Century.
As a Government we are committed to rising to that challenge, which means an ambitious and practical emission-reduction agenda, and it means supporting Australian communities in relation to the impacts of climate change that we can’t avoid.
And yesterday we took a significant step forward in that work with the release of Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment and an accompanying National Adaptation Plan.
The release by Minister Bowen of the most comprehensive, detailed, and science-backed climate risk assessment – commissioned by our government from the Australian Climate Service – will put us in a much better position to take the informed, concerted, and coordinated work that is required.
The accompanying National Adaptation Plan makes it clear that implementing well-considered adaptation measures is far and away the best approach to minimising the impacts and costs of climate hazards – and these new resources will support that effort from all levels of government, from the private sector, and from the broader community.
I want to pay tribute to the leadership of Vicki Manson at the Australian Climate Service who has been working tirelessly to coordinate the agencies who make-up the ACS and has brought their expertise to bear in creating the National Climate Risk Assessment.
The “NCRA” – as we call it – pulls together data and analysis from world-leading experts and scientists drawn from the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Geoscience Australia. Together with more than 2000 participants, including the input of more than 250 climate risk experts, the ACS has built on existing work across jurisdictions and filled-in key national evidence gaps to strengthen our future decision-making capacity.
And yes, some of the projections in the Assessment are confronting.
Treasury modelling shows that under the worst-case temperature scenarios Australian Government funding under the DRFA alone could increase by over 7 times by 2090.
In my home state of Western Australia, under a 3 degree global warming scenario, we could see the number of severe and extreme heatwave days quadruple.
And in far North Queensland where I was recently inspecting recovery efforts and the delivery of ‘betterment’ funded infrastructure projects in the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Jasper, coastal flooding could increase from 43 days to 283 days per year.
These are sobering outcomes to contemplate, but they do give us the impetus to continue our work in reducing emissions; the best information on which to base our adaptation work; and the foresight to ensure that risk-reduction and resilience become a constant frame of thought in everything we do.
In saying that, let me make sure that in addition to acknowledging the Bureau of Meteorology’s contribution to the Australian Climate Service, I also thank the BOM for providing their long-range forecasts and climate outlook as part of this summit.
Friends, the NCRA is the latest instalment in the Albanese Government’s whole-of-system approach, which links the proper consideration of future impacts to the resilience-building aspects of initiatives like the DRF and DRFA arrangements. That’s how we shift the dial when it comes to national, systemic resilience.
Of course, for many of you, the projections contained in the NCRA won’t come as a particular surprise. More than many others, you are have direct experience of hazards that continue to come around too often, and continue to break new records of a bad kind.
The most important take-out from the NCRA and the NAP is the reinforcement of a pretty simple and sensible idea: every action we take to reduce emissions as part of global cooperative action matters, and every action we take to implement smart adaptation will prevent both harm and costs down the track.
The Australian community should take note and take heart from the fact that climate pollution is coming down and we’re on track to reach our 2030 Paris Climate Agreement target, which of course we increased by more than 60% in coming to government. The Australian community should take heart from that fact that today there is record investment in renewable energy and that in the last 3 years we’ve already lifted renewable by more than 40%.
Not surprisingly, the research tells us that every dollar invested in climate adaptation today can create a return of around $10 dollars in saving future costs – and our newly delivered National Adaptation Plan sets out a pathway for governments, communities and industry to better coordinate action and prioritise our investments in order to create more resilient communities.
Of course, there is a lot more to be done – and I know, with both of my Assistant Ministerial hats on, that our shared effort will be better for the NCRA and the NAP, and it will be better for the outcomes that flow from the Colvin Review into disaster relief funding arrangements, and the Glasser Review into the governance that enables the management of natural disasters.
Friends, it is a privilege to be here this morning with you, even briefly. I am grateful to the generous engagement and advice I’ve had from many of you in the short time that I’ve been in this role – and I know that I’m on a steep learning curve to make sure I can support your work, elevate your expertise, and match your commitment to seeing Australia rise to the challenge that climate change presents in keeping with our character as a resilient and resolute, no-nonsense, creative and caring community.
Thank you.
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