Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (11:08): For millions of Australian households and communities, climate change is already an active environmental and economic issue. Climate disruption threatens the security of our nation and our region. Australian families are already living with heightened physical risk from increasingly intense and frequent bushfires, floods, storms and heatwaves. Now they're increasingly enduring a second threat: financial insecurity caused by insurance risk. Insurance is already unaffordable or unavailable for more than 650,000 Australian properties. Driven by climate risks and building costs, insurance premiums have soared by 51 per cent around the country in the last five years, but, irrationally, governments continue to spend overwhelmingly on recovery, not on resilience. We wait for disasters to happen and then we rebuild. This approach is an enormous drain on our economy. The CSIRO has reported that every dollar the government invests in adaptation or disaster risk reduction saves up to $11 in recovery costs. Australia faces a summer of deadly heat, with an unprecedented Super El Nino already underway and forecast to bring record global temperatures over the next year. Climate disruption, extreme heatwaves and drought threaten Australians' health and livelihoods and our energy and transport systems, water security, crops, livestock and food prices. Significantly hotter than usual temperatures are already driving increased bushfire and drought risk, piling pressure on vulnerable communities, infrastructure and emergency workers. The first responsibility of government is to protect their citizens from harm. That principle is accepted when we speak of defence, when we talk about biosecurity or when we talk about public health. It should be equally applied to climate risks. That's why I support the member for Warringah's call for an independent legislated national climate change risk assessment and adaptation plan, updated every five years. We desperately need a comprehensive evidence based up-to-date understanding of the risks that our communities face, a national plan to prepare for those risks and dedicated funding to remove or minimise harm and a plan which will transparently address food and water security, supply chains and the risk of economic disruption and regional instability. By properly taxing gas exports or by winding back the overly generous diesel fuel tax credit, the government could build a war chest to fight climate risks. The most dangerous and deadly of these risks is extreme heat. Heatwaves kill more Australians than floods, bushfires and cyclones combined. They worsen cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness and mental ill health. We know how to protect Australians from extreme heat. We can invest in cooling centres and grow urban tree canopies. We can improve building standards so homes remain safe during heatwaves. We can strengthen early warning systems, support delivery of local heat resilience plans and provide targeted energy assistance during periods of intense heat. Defence experts and our Pacific neighbours have warned for years that climate change is a threat multiplier. It increases instability, it displaces communities, and it puts pressure on scarce resources. Australia's future security hinges on our ability to create meaningful alliances with large and small nations across the region in supporting their climate preparedness. The Prime Minister recently acknowledged this threat, but his words are meaningless while the government refuses to accept any responsibility for the emissions released by our exported fossil fuels and while it hides what it knows about the threat to our national security posed by climate change. I call on the government to immediately release a declassified version of the Office of National Intelligence's assessment on climate security risk. The government commissioned this report. It owes Australians transparency and the power to arm themselves with knowledge and with evidence. No amount of denial or misinformation will make climate change go away. Its risks and its harms are escalating. Our government's responsibility is to anticipate those risks and to prepare and to protect communities, not to respond after a tragedy occurs. We can't control every flood or fire, but we can decide whether our communities are prepared to face them. We can take action to prevent unnatural disasters supercharged by fossil fuel induced global warming and human inaction. I thank the member for Warringah for bringing this critical issue to the House. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Mascarenhas ): The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.