Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to oppose the repeal of the clean energy legislation package that is currently the law in Australia. As I stand here I am reminded of TS Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, where he says:

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

He was asked some years later whether that was still his view. He said that he would not write that again because he was not sure that it would end in either way. As a result of the H-bomb, he said there were people whose houses were bombed who 'don't remember hearing anything'.

That is where we are in this debate. There is such denial of reality going on in this parliament, but that is not shared outside the parliament. The people actually get it. They know that we are living in a world of accelerating global warming and they know that we have to act on it. There is a level of anxiety in the back of the minds of most people, but the people I particularly want to talk about tonight, and speak on behalf of, are our future generations—of those who are yet to be born. I want to speak on behalf of the voiceless, young people like those that I met outside the parliament today with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and others—young people around Australia who are marshalling and marching and wanting action on climate change because they know it is about the future. I also want to speak on behalf of the ecosystems of the planet, which do not have a voice in this parliament. All we have heard are superficial and trite three-word slogans about axing the tax and about power prices, but nothing about the real impacts of what we are currently living through.

Many, many years ago I went to the Barrier Reef for the first time. Going back there in recent years, I have seen that it is much deteriorated from what it used to be. That is a result of many things, but global warming is accelerating the degradation of coral reefs around the planet—not only our own Great Barrier Reef but reefs elsewhere in the world.

Some years ago, I campaigned hard for a long time to have the coral reefs of New Caledonia listed as World Heritage areas. It was an eight-year campaign and a huge amount of work went into it. I am very pleased to say that they are now listed as World Heritage areas. But it is a pyrrhic victory, because you cannot protect the coral reefs of the planet—here in Australia, in New Caledonia or anywhere else in the world—unless you act on global warming. Acidification is weakening the structures of the corals. Warming is leading to the bleaching of corals, and cyclones around the world are leading to the destruction of those reefs. We have been seeing the melting around the West Antarctic ice sheet; we have been seeing the melting of the Arctic; and now we are seeing the ongoing release of methane from the permafrost.

We are seeing extreme weather events around the world. Those extreme weather events are already displacing people and destroying culture. On many of our Pacific Island neighbours' countries, burial grounds are next to the lagoon, next to the sea. Now, with sea-level rise and intensified storms, our neighbours are losing some of the fundamental parts of their culture, and they are being forced to move internally onto higher ground. The nation of Kiribati is buying land in Fiji, where ultimately it will move 100,000 people if it has to. The people of Tuvalu are saying that they are not going anywhere. I hate to think about the fear in the hearts of people in Tuvalu in the storms that come through there, the storm surges and the over wash of those very low-lying islands. Funafuti is already severely adversely impacted, and only a month or so ago in this parliament I had young people here from Kiribati and Tuvalu begging us to respond to the climate crisis because, as they see it, they are going to lose their homes, their country and their culture.

With extreme weather events around the world, we are going to see a loss of food security. That is why the Greens have campaigned so hard to look after agricultural land and water. We have already seen, with the global food crisis in 2008—which was caused by extreme weather events wiping out crops around the world through fire and drought—an incredible rise in prices for grains. Ultimately, that led to the Arab spring. The first marches in the Arab spring were in Tunisia and were because of the increase in the price of bread. People were marching in the streets with baguettes, protesting about the increase in the price of grain. That is the reality. It is why the Pentagon has recognised global warming as a major security risk. The Pentagon says that future wars are not going to be planetary wars or global wars, they are going to be regional conflicts as a result of the displacement of people.

As I have said many times in this Senate over the years, if we think that the current issues that are driving the displacement of people are as far as it goes, we are wrong. We are going to see millions of people displaced in the coming years because of climate conflict, internal and external to various countries. This is the situation we find ourselves in: a four to six degrees trajectory of global warming and a loss of between a third and a quarter of all species on the planet by 2050. That is heartbreaking when you think about, in particular, alpine species that cannot go any higher—that is it for them. In Tasmania there is a cider gum which is heading for extinction because it is on the central plateau and it cannot go any higher. I mentioned earlier the white lemuroid possum in North Queensland: it cannot go any higher and it is likely to become extinct because of global warming. It is the same around the world. But it is not just global warming on its own; if you put that together with habitat loss and invasive species you will see an accelerated loss.

Just last week I heard the anguish from scientists who are talking about, for example, the Ebola virus. They are saying that they now have to consider trying experimental drugs et cetera on chimps and apes in zoos around the planet in order to try to save species in the wild. This is whey we are going to hear increasingly asked: what do we do when we have reduced habitats so much that animals are in contact with humans and equally humans are spreading measles and the like into those ape populations in Africa?