Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

And then there is the circumstance of the Spanish navy, which had whales with blood coming from their ears wash up in the Canary Islands immediately after impact. The point here that I want to demonstrate is that the minister said earlier that ecological sustainability depends on, amongst other things, a lack of scientific certainty not being used to allow a process to go ahead. The point that the minister has amply demonstrated is that there is a lack of scientific certainty here. Scientists simply do not know at this stage, so we should not proceed. But this legislation, as Senator Milne said, does not even mention cetaceans. It does not even mention oceans. It is certainly not about protecting the creatures that move through the oceans. When it comes to marine protected areas, it is all about allowing the invasion of the seabed, upon which the rest of the food chain in the oceans depend. So this is just a farce. The term ‘ecological sustainability’—and the minister read out the principles of it—which was defined at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and since then the added principle of intergenerational equity are simply being steamrolled here. They are simply being put into the mud, as if they do not matter.

There is no point in continuing the debate here. The Labor Party is going to support the government on this. But it is a very sad indictment. There is a studied ignorance and a determination to turn the back on the fragile living ecosystems on this planet—and two-thirds of them are in the oceans—to the loss of coming generations. This is a studied insult to the concept of intergenerational equity by this government, backed by this opposition. It is the job of the Greens to continue to point that out until we get sanity, probity and decency back into debates like this so that the term ‘ecological sustainability’ is treated with integrity and honour instead of simply being used as a window-dressing opportunity and dropped from legislation. Senator Milne’s motion simply says: let us put it into the object of the legislation. Seeing that that is what this nation has agreed to internationally, let us put it into the object of this legislation. The government is saying, ‘No, we won’t,’ and the opposition is saying, ‘Ditto, we won’t either,’ because they know that they dishonour any such concept.