Thursday, 13 November 2025

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (17:29): I rise to make a statement on the report of the Legislative Council Environment and Planning Committee’s inquiry into climate resilience, which we tabled not too long ago. That report, following a detailed inquiry by the committee, made a series of really important findings and recommendations about the impact that climate change is having on the built environment in our state. It certainly attracted the interest of a lot of members of the community, and in talking with my parliamentary colleague the member for Footscray in the other place Katie Hall, we had a conversation about the community groups that she had been talking with about the issues of climate change and the resilience of the built environment. We agreed to go and jointly have a meeting with them. We met recently with Friends of the Earth Melbourne and with Climate Action Maribyrnong, with EP and Paul, at Katie’s office in Footscray to discuss the report. We talked a lot about the process and went through the investigations and the findings. We looked at and talked about in general terms across the board how climate change is impacting the places that we live and work and also some of the specific issues in and around Maribyrnong and Footscray and how climate change is affecting those communities. We know obviously the impacts of the devastating flooding that occurred in Maribyrnong in October 2022, which was the subject of a separate inquiry and report that the Environment and Planning Committee did.

In the course of that discussion we had some really thoughtful contributions about the way forward for this from Climate Action Maribyrnong. We gave an undertaking – Katie said that she would make a contribution about the report in the Parliament. The small matter of exclusive cognisance probably precludes her from making a statement on a report tabled in this place, so I decided to do it on our collective behalf instead. Friends of the Earth Melbourne and Climate Action Maribyrnong were keen to reiterate to us, as members of Parliament and members of the government, the need to continue to fund local climate resilience work and to adopt the recommendations in the report that go to adaptation and the importance of community-based climate adaptation funds. They, as we are, are interested in the government’s response, which the government, under the terms of the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003, will make within six months of the tabling.

One of the big things that we talked about was the impact of urban heat islands in our communities and the way that the urban heat island effect is very demonstrably affecting urban communities, and the very important need for our planning and environment system and the Planning and Environment Act 1987 to deal with these issues. I was very grateful to be able to explain to these people that the government has recently passed through the Parliament amendments to the Planning and Environment Act to make sure that climate change considerations are taken into account in the planning and environment framework in this state. That is just one of the many things that the Allan Labor government is doing to make sure that the places we live and the places that we love are resilient to the effects of climate change.

There is a suite of measures that we have taken to make sure that our built environment is resilient to climate change. The report also touched on the importance of making sure that our communities are resilient to climate change and are able to respond to natural disasters in the frequency with which they occur. I commend that report to the house. I congratulate Climate Action Maribyrnong for the work that they are doing, and also, on behalf of Katie Hall, the member for Footscray, and myself, I thank EP and Paul who came and met with us for the very thoughtful and engaging discussion we had on these issues.