Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The opposition will be supporting the Meteorology Amendment (Online Advertising) Bill 2014. This bill is sound and it gives effect to a number of decisions made by the previous Labor federal government. As all members of this House know, the Bureau of Meteorology is an extraordinarily important Australian institution, a longstanding Australian institution whose staff and systems have given wonderful support to the Australian community for many years. The bureau helps Australians make decisions from the relatively banal, like whether or not to take a brolly to work, to the incredibly important—when to sow crops, if you are working in agriculture, or whether and when to move out of the path of an extreme weather event, such as a tropical cyclone in Queensland or a bushfire in the more southern parts of Australia. The bureau has been helping Australian families and Australian businesses make these decisions for many years.

The bureau is also incredibly important to Australia's economy, given how exposed many sectors of our economy are to the vagaries of Australia's weather and Australia's climate. The aviation industry, for example, makes literally millions of decisions every day about air traffic movements—and it bases these on the good advice it gets from the Bureau of Meteorology. As I have previously indicated, Australia's extraordinarily important agricultural sector also relies on advice from the bureau for daily decision making. Those are just two important sectors of our economy that rely on the bureau.

No matter how good the advice the bureau has provided over many years, no matter how good the work it has done, there is always room for improvement. The previous Labor government initiated a review—it had a very long name and I will just refer to it as 'the Munro review'—in response to the extreme weather events of the 2010-11 summer. Members of the House and people in the gallery will probably remember the events of that summer. There was not really a part of Australia that was not impacted in that extraordinary summer by floods, by bushfires or, particularly in the north of Australia, by cyclones. I was the minister for ageing at the time. Over the course of only a few weeks, there were evacuations of aged-care facilities in every single jurisdiction in Australia, with the exception of my state, South Australia. Because of the extraordinary cyclone and flooding events in Queensland, flooding in New South Wales, Victoria and, from memory, Tasmania, and bushfires in Western Australia, there were around 35 aged-care facilities, with incredibly frail elderly citizens of Australia, evacuated at very short notice.

The expert advice about that summer was that the resources of the bureau were stretched. They were particularly stretched on occasions when more than one extreme weather event was happening at the same time in different parts of the country. The bureau was stretched in its capacity to deliver very quick, timely advice to communities in the path of those events, whether those events were cyclones, bushfires or flooding.

The Munro review made a number of recommendations about how the government of the day—our government back then, now this government—would be able to equip the bureau to respond to what expert advice told us would become a more frequent scenario for Australia, with more-frequent, more-intense weather events, often happening at the same time in different parts of the country.

On receiving the Munro review, the former Labor government's response was very quick. We provided additional funding to ensure the retention of meteorologists, particularly international meteorologists, as well as a program to recruit and train additional graduate meteorologists to ensure that the staffing profile of the bureau was sound into the future.

I was the environment minister for an extraordinarily short time, which I am sure will never be beaten by any environment minister in the Commonwealth. It was for only a matter of weeks between the return of Prime Minister Rudd to the prime ministership and the commencement of the caretaker period. During that very short time, I was able to announce a second response by our government to the Munro review, amounting to a package of almost $60 million of additional resources to the bureau. I am happy to say that package is being kept in place by this government. That package, announced in July last year, established a national centre for extreme weather to lift Australia's capacity to deal with, and its understanding and knowledge about, extreme weather events, particularly when they occur simultaneously in different parts of the country. For example, funding was provided for the employment of additional frontline forecasters—including 42 meteorologists and 23 hydrologists, recognising the increasing importance of flooding events as part of Australia's weather—over the course of the next couple of years until 2016-17.

The package also provided funding for the delivery of new, world's best-practice flood forecasting systems for Australia, which currently operate in the United Kingdom and the United States, to improve the timeliness of the flood forecasting that the bureau provides to communities, particularly regional communities, who are in the path of extreme weather events that lead to flooding. It also provided funding for a much better storm tide prediction system that would provide very accurate, very timely advice from the bureau to communities about the likely impact of storm tides. At the time, we advised that this was particularly important, in light of long experience, for Queensland coastal communities. This was a very important package and a very important part of the response to the Munro review.

The Munro review also recommended that the bureau explore alternative sources of funding to keep the budget and the capacity of the bureau expanding in order to provide the sorts of advice that I have been talking about. In particular, the Munro review recommended that advertising on the bureau's website be considered as an option to provide additional revenue. The Labor government acted immediately on this recommendation by announcing a 12-month trial of online advertising on the BOM website through 2012-13. Following that trial, we announced in our last budget in 2013 that online advertising would become a permanent feature of the bureau's operations.

As members of the House and people watching and listening to this debate would know, the BOM website is an extraordinarily popular website. The number of hits that it receives is quite mind-boggling. Last year, it received about 500 million hits, increasing by about 12 per cent a year. Those hits resulted in, I am told, about 3 billion page downloads. If they were hard copy pages, a pile of 3 billion page hits would reach to the orbital altitude of the International Space Station. That is the popularity of this website. About half of all of the hits come from smart phones and mobile devices. As we know, there are apps that you can get on your smart phone that give you some advice about weather in your community but they are nowhere near as accurate as the BOM website. If Australians want good, accurate, timely advice about weather in their community, the BOM website is increasingly the place that they go to.

This online advertising will build on the extraordinary popularity of what is the most popular government website in Australia and will continue to allow the bureau to defray its increasing costs and the increasing demands that the Australian climate and Australia's weather place on its operations. It is also important to state that this is not a world first. We undertook a trial, as I indicated, to test how this would operate on the BOM website. It also follows experience pointed to by the Munro review in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France and Denmark, where the relevant agencies, the equivalent agencies to the BOM, in those jurisdictions provide for advertising on their websites. So we are not entering uncharted territory here. It follows a trial. It follows experience in a number of jurisdictions to which Australia often compares itself. The bill formalises the ability of the bureau to do this and, for that reason, the opposition supports it. It also ensures that guidelines are put in place so that the advertising on the site is appropriate to the sort of flavour that Australians would expect from such an important Australian institution.

I do want to say, though, that all of the work which follows the Munro review—the initial package that was announced, the package that I announced of $58½ million in July at the trial of online advertising, the assurance that is included in this bill that money raised through online advertising is kept by the bureau to improve and expand its operations—is all good stuff. The opposition supports the government continuing this and putting in place this bill.

However, it must be said that, at the same time these very positive initiatives have been put in place by the new government, they have also made a decision to cut 58 staff from the bureau, including the closure of the Launceston office of the Bureau of Meteorology, which I know is causing distress to communities in and around Launceston. We do not know quite where those 58 staff are going to come from. We have not been able to get clear information from the government through the Senate estimates process or otherwise to indicate what services will be cut by this government, with a very significant number of staff going from the bureau. We certainly hope that it will not be in an important area—it is hard to see that that will not be the case, because all of the areas of work by the bureau are important—but it is reasonable to have a suspicion that the government will want those cuts to happen in areas of advice that the bureau has been providing, along with the CSIRO, for years now, which are uncomfortable for the government. The State of the climate report, for example, that the bureau provided the community with, only a short while ago, along with the CSIRO—our two pre-eminent scientific institutions in this area—makes for very uncomfortable reading for members of the government, given their attitudes to the science on climate change.

We will be keeping an eagle eye on where these cuts land for bureau staff. We will be watching very carefully whether the government is going to deploy these cuts in a way that suits its particular political prejudices about climate change and the scientific advice that the Australian community expect the bureau and the CSIRO to give without fear or favour.

These budget cuts, these job cuts to 58 staff at the bureau, add to an increasing pile of job losses initiated by this government in their cruel budget. Only this week, we heard and read about dozens of staff in the Australia Network at the ABC losing their jobs as well—staff who have been working hard for so long to project Australia's soft power, if you like, to project the great things about Australia, into the Asia-Pacific region. This is a program that has been operating for years and years, supported by people who are certainly no friends of many of Labor's initiatives and policies. Maurice Newman, for example, has been a strong supporter of the Australia Network. Yet, we see dozens of people this week losing their jobs who have been working hard to improve Australia's image and project all of the wonderful things about our country to our region.

The shadow Assistant Treasurer has been talking this morning already about the job cuts at the ATO. The government intends to save $189 million, apparently, by slashing hundreds and hundreds of staff at the ATO, but advice indicates to us that they are going to lose a billion dollars in revenue by doing that—a six to one loss. They are going to lose a billion dollars in revenue because the specialist staff—the highly qualified, experienced staff—at the ATO who will be gone will no longer be able to battle the corporate lawyers that companies or high net-worth individuals seeking to minimise their tax deploy against ATO staff. It is really a mind-numbingly silly decision by this government that is going to cost Australia very significantly.

We support this bill. We support the continuing implementation of the Munro review and the government's decision to continue to implement the decisions that former Minister Burke and I made over the last couple of years to expand the bureau's capacity to deal with extreme weather events. We do sound, as I indicated, a very serious note of caution on the job cuts that come from this budget to the bureau. We will be watching those job cuts with an eagle eye, as I am sure a number of Australian communities are doing; but, beyond those comments, I commend this bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.