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

Senator Bernardi—with a little bit of humour—asks why our offices are on the ground floor. They are not. It is a humorous interjection from an arch sceptic. But he should pay some attention to the reality and seriousness of this matter, because he is going to be here long enough to see worse coming down the line.

It is an extraordinarily serious burden of duty on every senator to consider this motion brought forward by Senator Milne this morning in the Senate. This inquiry should be set up. To oppose the inquiry is simply to say that we wish the parliament, the Senate and ipso facto the Australian community, including the business community, to be denied the information that will allow us to make the decisions to (a) mitigate, as best we can, the causes of climate change and (b) meet the massive disruption to our environment, our economy, employment prospects and the quotient of human happiness that is coming down the line from a climate change impact which the former Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, pointed out could relegate the spectre of terrorism.

Senator Milne said earlier that the effects of climate change have been likened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies—which normally studies the nuclear threat around the world and has been a leader in looking at the nuclear threat around the world—to the catastrophic level of a nuclear war. The International Institute of Strategic Studies said the effects from climate change would cause a host of problems, including rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts, floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics, crop failures and famines. Australia is right in the firing line. We are not an island unto ourselves. In fact, because we have a 12,000 kilometre coastline we are more vulnerable to this coastal impact than almost any other country on the planet.

And yet there is the frightening possibility for us here this morning—and we will know in a minute, when Senator Eggleston gets up to speak on behalf of the government—that the government will vote down an inquiry into the impact on Australia’s massive coastline, where the majority of Australians live and where all our big cities except this one are situated, and opt for no inquiry. I have no doubt we will hear that somebody has been asked to study this and some group has been asked to study that, but this Senate and its inquiry system has the primary responsibility on issues just like this for coordinating the state of knowledge and converting that into a call for action or study to the body politic. We will wait and see, but, if the government is going to say no to this inquiry, it will echo the failure of Prime Minister Howard in dealing with this enormous issue for Australia in the last weeks or months of his prime ministership.

Senator Wong said, ‘I’m getting a little tired of Green hyperbole on this matter.’ If only Senator Wong and the Labor Party had listened to the Greens over the last decade, we would be a long way further down the line. Senator O’Brien is shaking his head. Senator O’Brien is the shadow minister for forests in this country. He agrees with Prime Minister Howard that we should keep logging and burning the great carbon banks, the great natural forests, of Tasmania, Victoria and southern New South Wales. This is a completely irresponsible act of sabotage of the environment by the government and the Labor Party at this stage of the nation’s debate about climate change. How can you be knocking down these great wild forests, which hold carbon back out of the atmosphere, and then burn them? To be in Tasmania and see the Senator Kerry O’Brien outcome—huge columns of greenhouse gases—