ADJOURNMENT

Ms STEGGALL (Warringah) (13:00): Recently, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story with a headline that should stop every member of parliament in this place: '"Never seen so many grown men cry": The everyday Aussies who can't afford another disaster'. That is what failing to prepare for climate risks looks like: families unable to afford insurance; communities rebuilding from one disaster while fearing the next; people who simply cannot absorb any more losses; communities devastated; droughts and bushfires; and risks escalating.

Australia's insurance system is flashing red, and the government is not responding with anything like the urgency required. APRA estimates around one in seven Australian households are likely to be uninsured because of affordability pressure. By 2050, that could rise to one in four, with the protection gap exceeding 40 per cent in rural Australia—not that I'm hearing too many members representing rural Australia elevating concerns around climate risks and the issue that poses for insurability.

This is not just an insurance problem, though. It's a housing, cost-of-living; and financial stability problem. If a home cannot be insured, it becomes harder to mortgage and harder to sell; if businesses can't get cover, investment suffers; and, when disasters strike an uninsured community, the cost does not disappear.

It lands on families, banks, councils, taxpayers and businesses that simply shut. Insurance is a safety net, but you can't insure your way out of the climate crisis. The government continues to spend billions cleaning up after disasters while underinvesting in prevention and resilience.

The Disaster Ready Fund provides up to $1 billion over five years, but the current round is only $142 million. I ask the government: what are you doing? Meanwhile, natural disasters are already costing Australia around $40 billion a year, with costs projected to reach at least $73 billion annually by 2060.

The mismatch should alarm everyone in this place. We know the risks are increasing. We know the cost of inaction, yet adaptation is still treated as a grant program rather than essential national infrastructure.

We know what works: stronger homes, flood mitigation, better drainage, bushfire resilience, updated building standards, smarter land use planning and investment in natural protections. For every $1 invested in resilience, we can save up to $11 in future recovery costs. Yet, on 30 June, the government allowed funding for the Multi-Hazard Resilience Ratings Scheme, one of the only elements that actually help householders mitigate and adapt their properties, to expire.

This scheme had assessed more than 63,500 homes and helped drive around $218 million in resilience upgrades. That's exactly the kind of practical program we should be expanding, not abandoning. It was a program with support from the insurance industry and the banking industry.

So I've called for a massive increase to the government's investment in adaptation and resilience. We had a one-off national risk assessment plan but no clear and funded adaptation resilience planning to follow it. If we want this to be commensurate to the threat, we need a quarter of one per cent of GDP to be invested each year in climate adaptation and resilience and back that with a climate resilience facility.

We need to make polluters pay for the damage that they are causing to individual Australians. Households should not be left carrying the growing bill for climate damage while major fossil fuel companies continue to profit from the pollution driving it. Of course, that can be done through PRRT reform or proper gas taxation when it comes to exports.

The government has completed a national climate risk assessment and a national adaptation plan, but knowing the risk and actually responding to it are quite different. We need to act on it. You can't acknowledge escalating climate danger and yet continue to approve fossil fuel expansion, underfund adaptation and then claim to be keeping communities safe.

The government must stop managing climate disasters after they happen and start seriously investing in preventing the damage and the scale, because ordinary Australians are paying the price, especially in rural and regional Australia. Climate adaptation is not optional. It's a core responsibility of government, and Australians deserve a response that is proportionate to the threat they now face.

It is insane—the lack of investment in prevention, resilience and adaptation that is occurring in the face of the threat we face.