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

I thank the late Anita Roddick for the other analogy, following upon Senator Back’s reference to the bee and the elephant, which is: if you don’t think a small entity can change the world, think about the mosquito that comes into your bedroom at night, because it changes the whole way we think about whether we are getting to sleep or not. Yet what we have had from the opposition-side speakers tonight is speaker after speaker reference the insignificance of this great country of Australia. Senator Back says 1.4 per cent of emissions come from Australia. Well, we are 0.3 per cent of the world’s population. On the basis of our potential sportspeople, if we were to look at that statistic and say that we are insignificant we would never send a team to the Olympics—