Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is hard to know, really, where to start with that interesting contribution from the previous speaker. But can I assure the chamber that in the six years that I have been discussing the health of the reef with relevant coral reef scientists, with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, with the Institute of Marine Science, they are speaking with one voice in saying that the reef is under serious threat and that the biggest threat to the reef is human-induced global warming. There are a whole lot of other threats to the reef as well, many of which centre around water quality which, of course, has implications for how we manage our land and how we support farmers to adopt more sustainable practices and reduce sediment and pesticide run-off. But they are united in accepting that global warming is the biggest threat to the reef.

This is not some conspiracy. This is not some notion that has been cooked up by me or my party. This is something that the UN World Heritage Committee, the government's own Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the actual experts are begging government to listen to. Instead, what we see from government is an agenda to increase coal exports, to do more dredging and more dumping of that dredge spoil to expand coal export ports, more coal seam gas wells and unconventional gas wells to be sunk—often in our best farmland—again much of which is for export out through our reef. So our reef is under threat from global warming, but it is also under threat from those water quality issues, as well as those issues of industrialisation and increased shipping.

What has been really difficult for the tourism industry is the tricky position that they have been placed in. These people get to swim and be near and on the reef every day—they have perhaps got the best job in the world—and it is a very difficult position for them to be in to acknowledge that actually their product is seriously being changed by human activity. That is, of course, why some of them have been reticent to go public on this issue. I have had many of them talk to me privately and say: 'Look, we can't even take the tourists to the same place anymore because it doesn't look good anymore. We've had to change our location.' But when I urge them to speak out to increase the pressure on government so that we can change these policies and save the reef, you can understand their reluctance to deter potential tourists from coming to see the reef. This has been one of the most vexed issues—how do we ensure that the policies can change so that we can save what is left of the reef in the time that we have before we cook this planet, and how do we make sure that we can keep those jobs alive? Seventy thousand people and their livelihoods depend on the reef staying healthy.

This government has been shamelessly prioritising the needs of multinational fossil fuel companies in letting them open new coalmines, expand ports and send yet more ships out through the reef to further worsen global warming. Of course, the Queensland state Labor government has been no better and many of those approvals have been ticked off by them as well. So we have seen a full-on onslaught of the fossil fuel sector on the reef. It is why it has led eminent scientists like Professor Terry Hughes, who is in fact the world expert in the health of the reef, to say that we need to choose between new coal and the reef, and that we cannot have both. They have been his words on many an occasion; they have been his words before Senate inquiries that I have instigated into the management of the reef and how we can do better to try and protect it, and they have been his words to the media in the last two or three years. This is not some conspiracy to try to further some cooked-up agenda—if only it were. Sadly, this is the reality of what we are facing.

The reef has just seen the worst coral bleaching in its entire history. As the previous speaker said, sometimes corals can recover from bleaching. You need the conditions to be right: you need no more spikes in water temperatures, and you need to make sure that they have enough fresh water; that there are not other pressures like sediment or pesticides which are inhibiting that regrowth. So, if everything remains equal, they can sometimes regrow. Of course, it is not the same species that regrow, so the composition of the reefs still change. But they can regrow. What happened earlier this year, though, was that the bleaching was so severe and the water temperature remained high for so long that they lost that potential to regrow. The scientists at GBRMPA and at AIMS—all of the relevant people who actually study this—have said that, in fact, 22 per cent of all of the corals in the entirety of the reef—concentrated in the northern end, but 22 per cent of the whole reef—those corals have now died. The bleaching was so bad that they are now dead. So we now have to wait for the appropriate conditions for new corals to start to regrow, assuming that there is a proper substrate for them to take onto.

Senator Di Natale and I went and looked at some of these reefs that had been so severely bleached. It was truly heartbreaking to see fields of, effectively, brown rubble. I did not think it could look that bad. I thought that maybe the corals might just look a bit white, but actually the algae had come in and smothered them and they were starting to disintegrate. It was a sea of brown. And there was a lone clam in the middle, which obviously had no food source, and it was not going to last long either. It was extremely distressing to me. The scientists that were on that trip with us were shedding tears about the future of the reef.

This is not scaremongering. This is a desperate plea for a change in policy—to do everything we can to try to save the reef, as much as possible, given that we know how much global warming has already been locked into the system. Some of the scientists have lost hope, and they do not think that it is possible to save the reef. I refuse to accept that. I still think that we must do everything we can, and that we must work together in this chamber to change those policies that are seriously threatening the reef. We must do everything we can to save what is left of it, and whatever is savable. So I will continue to try to raise awareness of the peril that the reef is in, with the intention of getting a change in policy from the big parties—who are, sadly, beholden to the donations that they get from the fossil fuel sector, whether it is the coal-mining companies or whether it is the coal-seam gas companies, who simply want to get more and more of their product out through the reef—products which, when burnt, worsen climate change and make it harder for the reef to thrive.

I want to take issue with the comments by One Nation senators after a visit to the reef which they undertook at the end of last week. They went to an area that was in the south of the reef, off Great Keppel Island, assuming the reporting was correct. And they say that, because bleaching happened there ten years ago and the reef came back, therefore the whole reef is fine. Well, if only that were the case—if only you could stand in the streets of Brisbane say: 'Sydney doesn't have a traffic problem, because look—there are no cars here in Brisbane.' That kind of misguided logic is not only looking in the wrong place but is mixing up and confusing the difference between the bleaching of corals and when it gets so bad that they actually die. Unfortunately, 22 per cent of the reef has gotten that bad: it has died. That is an incontrovertible fact. It is not a UN hoax. It is not some bizarre Greens conspiracy. It is actually what the science has found. But we have the ability to change direction. Rather than simply jumping on the climate-change-is-a-hoax bandwagon—which, sadly, many of their backbench want to do—I would urge the government to stop sacking those scientists and to stop cutting funding to those bodies, and to actually listen to the advice. Let us collectively put our shoulders to the wheel, because this is an organism that is ancient; it is the largest living thing that can be seen from space; it is bigger than all of us, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. We can do so much better by it, and by the 70,000 people who rely on it for their jobs. If we are talking about a changing economy, and bailing out companies that go bust—well, that is 70,000 people. I do not see any outrage from the Labor opposition or the government about the fact that those jobs are under threat; they are simply propping up the profits of those multinational coal and gas corporations, who then make very generous donations to the government.

I want to finish by saying that I welcome the attention on the reef. It is something that I and many folk in my party have continued to raise for many years now. We have had multiple Senate inquiries. We have had some very good work done by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, despite the funding cuts that this government has brought down upon them. We have some excellent work being done by our coral reef scientists, and they are speaking with one voice, begging for us to listen and begging for this government and the opposition to change policies—so that we can save what is left of the reef. As a Queenslander who grew up visiting the reef, it affects me deeply. I will fight like hell to protect this beautiful place, and all of the 70,000 people whose jobs rely upon the reef remaining healthy. That should be a job for all of us in this chamber, rather than simply dismissing it as some cooked-up, bizarre frolic. I think that that is a real abrogation of our duty as senators to get across the facts, to listen to the people, to listen to the scientists and to then take good decisions where we can actually make a difference, not just to the future of those peoples' jobs but also to the future of this amazing organism.