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

We get an interjection from the quite uninformed senator-for-a-short-time-yet from Victoria on the opposition benches that it cannot be that there is a Green MP from Mongolia. Catch up, sir. It is the case, and he is a very erudite, dignified and informed man who helped to set up the IT industry in Mongolia, amongst other things. He tells me that that country is suffering an average rise in temperature of two degrees since records began at the start of last century. It is having a huge impact. Everybody in that country, like this country, is talking about climate change.

I return to this extraordinary situation in Australia where we have Xstrata with its Wandoan coalmine wanting to do—if we take the raw figures I have given to the chamber—$40 billion worth of damage to this nation’s future through one coalmine. That ought to be—and must be, I would think—rejected out of hand by the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Mr Tony Burke, or by his fellow ministers when it comes to national consideration of this outrageous proposal which will also compromise a third of producing farmlands in the Darling Downs.

Mr Acting Deputy President Barnett, in our home state there is currently a move for a wood agreement. It is not a wood supply agreement—that was part of the mistakes of the past—but an agreement to end logging in high conservation value forests. However, last week I flew over the western end of the Wellington Range, which connects Mount Wellington above Hobart city—that great and beautiful mountain that we all look to in Hobart every morning to see how things are going; to see whether there is snow up there, whether the clouds are around it or whether the rainbows are bringing us rain from the west—