Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to this debate on coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef and Kimberley reef. In particular, I want to focus on my home state of Western Australia. While I care very deeply about the Great Barrier Reef and am devastated that those reefs up there have been devastated by coral bleaching, I am particularly concerned about the reefs off the coast of the Kimberley because these reefs have been hit before by coral bleaching and it is happening again. We had AIMS off the coast of Western Australia recently, and they came back and confirmed what we feared: there are a number of reefs up there—for example, Scott Reef—that have suffered the worst bleaching they have ever seen. I remember that when I first entered the Senate I talked about the coral bleaching event that was happening at the time, in the mid-1980s, while the reef was still recovering from a previous hit. But this is the worst that they have ever seen, and there are other reefs off the coast of Western Australia that are also affected.

Crucially, unlike the east coast—where, as I understand it, the waters are starting to cool—the waters in that northern area of Western Australia remain warm at the moment. As I understand it—as has been explained to me by scientists—that water does remain hotter and is not expected to cool down until some time in May. In other words, we have not seen the end of this coral bleaching event off the coast of Western Australia. Of course, as coalmines continue to be approved and as those mines get going and pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we will have more and more events like this. The point with coral bleaching is that sometimes you have a bleaching event and the coral recovers. Quite often a fairly large percentage will recover. But you can get between five and 10 per cent that dies and is dead forever. These repeated coral bleaching events, driven by global warming, will kill these reefs—make no mistake.

The dinosaurs on the other side of this chamber need to get their heads around the fact that continuing the fossil fuel cycle will kill off our reefs. That is what is going to happen. The reefs cannot take this sort of pressure and, as the events speed up, they will not have time to recover. It is also why we need to make sure that we get our marine parks back in place. Some of those reefs that have been bleached off the coast of Western Australia are the very reefs that right now should be covered by management plans and marine parks. But this government has cancelled those management plans that could be in place to remove the pressure from the reefs, to enable them to recover much more quickly. We are setting up a disastrous situation for our coral reefs around this country, and this government has to learn that. (Time expired)