The Shoalhaven City Council’s commitment to climate change is significant and manifests itself in the form of increased numbers of people recycling waste, conserving fuel, changing their chosen form of transport, moving to renewables and putting energy back into the grid.

One can readily identify an ever increasing number of community members taking action to combat climate change.

While preparing for climate change issues is important, so too is resolving the social and economic issues of housing affordability, social housing, youth unemployment, health and well-being, public transport, roads, recreational infrastructure and the like. Residents are consistently demanding a drive towards action to have infrastructure repaired, replaced and regularly maintained within their lifetime.

Preparing for climate change events must not be detrimental to equity and inclusion nor unnecessarily add further expense to building or living costs. Nor make ratepayers wait one moment longer than necessary to receive improvements in services and infrastructure that in some cases have been requested 10 or 20 years ago.

Given the projected budget deficits of approximately ten million dollars per year for the next ten years and recent residential rate increases, one would expect council to live within its means and provide for the many urgent issues causing social tension in the Shoalhaven in the present day before taking on more challenges related to climate change.

Council must take a pragmatic view rather than a philosophical one and spend ratepayers’ money helping residents who live here now, to deal with social inequalities together with the immediate impacts of severe weather events, rather than spending ratepayer’s money now, on climate change predictions for people who might live here in the future.

We were all horrified to see two people being rushed to hospital after shark attacks in the Whitsundays last week, in an area that has been free of such incidents for a long time. But the response of the government has been a panicked, knee-jerk reaction – five sharks have been killed in the space of a week, with no evidence that any human has been made safer.

Humans pose a far greater threat to sharks than they ever will to us. Every year, humans pull roughly 100 million sharks from the water, slice off their fins to make soup, and throw their mutilated bodies back into the sea to bleed slowly to death. Yet we are afraid of them?

Polls have consistently shown that an overwhelming number of Australians oppose culling of sharks. In almost every case of a shark attack, people are back in the water, often before the beaches are officially reopened, well aware that the sharks in the water prevent an infinitesimally smaller risk than that posed by driving their cars to the beach.

So anti-environment Ann is leaving us and I expect we can now be a little more certain of keeping intact what environment we have left. I hope it does not take as long to remove a plant from the EPBC List as it does to have one listed, as one currently under assessment was nominated three years ago but the latest advice gives September 2019 as the likely end point for a decision. As there are only 29 of these plants alive and all in the Shoalhaven, my hope is they all last the distance. Also I expect there will be less slandering and abuse of those who care for our environment.