Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to follow my colleagues Senator Faruqi and Senator Waters in contributing to this debate on the Emergency Response Fund Bill 2019 and Emergency Response Fund Bill (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2019—even if, after quite a detailed investigation, it seems that Senator Waters is in fact the source of my current deep morass of man flu which I'm struggling against. Yes, 'morass of man flu' is now in the Hansard. We can all be happy! I noted during Senator Faruqi's contribution the very apt observation that this seems to be the embodiment of the logic-free approach to politics that is pursued by this government and its coalition partners. Not a surprising occurrence given, I believe, last time I checked, logic-free politics was the dictionary subheading to the National Party of Australia. You can see the intellectual vacuity dripping throughout this entire legislative proposal with the National Party's particularly distinctive pen all over it.

Considering how I would approach my contribution to this debate, I couldn't seem to go past a moment that I experienced a couple of weeks ago while taking the flight from Perth to Canberra to reconvene for the first parliamentary sitting week of the year. I'm a proud Western Australian. I live upon the land of the Noongar Whadjuk people and I always am cognisant that, as I move from WA to the ACT, I pass over thousands of hectares of land the sovereignty over which has never been ceded and that was sung, curated and cultivated for countless generations before any white person stepped foot on the shores of this ancient continent. On the recommendation of a good friend, at this particular time I had downloaded and was listening to the, I think it's fair to say, seminal work by Bruce Pascoe: Dark Emu. I would recommend it to anybody in this chamber who hasn't had the opportunity to explore it. In his work Pascoe explores in great detail the intricate agricultural arrangements particularly used by First Nations peoples in cultivating and propagating the land on which they have lived for almost 100,000 years.

Just before I'd taken off, news had come of a fire that had broken out in Perth, and we were staring down the barrel of that first wave of what turned into horrific bushfires across the states of New South Wales and Queensland. I could not escape the realisation of the damage that we have done to the delicate ecosystems of our ancient continent. Nor could I escape the profound learnings about that ecosystem, held by First Nations peoples, that we so arrogantly and ignorantly dismissed upon the arrival of settler populations in Australia. For hundreds of years, Australia has played catch-up to that ignorance and has borne the cost of that ignorance. And we see that playing its part too in the various natural disasters which now plague our communities. It is the price we pay for being a nation in some ways founded upon a baseless belief in the superiority of the white imperial British class.

As a former university student, as a young person—although I'm now informed that, as a 25-year-old, I no longer technically fit the category of young person—and as somebody whose friends and family members will experience the brunt of climate change and the natural disasters that are so intimately linked with it, I've got to look upon this bill and just wonder where the hell we've come to in this country on this question. I mean, fire and flood, natural disasters, are so intimately part of the Australian experience. The devastation they've wrought upon communities is so well known that nobody in the Australian community would resent a government taking action to address those issues. But that's not what this bill does.

This bill seeks to ram-raid education infrastructure spending in this country and funnel it into an opaque scheme which doesn't do a thing to address mitigation or to address the great big flaming elephant in the room: climate change. The National Party might not like to hear it, the Liberal Party might not like to hear it and their donors most bloody certainly don't like to hear it, but climate change is driving these natural disasters. That ain't a question of political position; it's a question of scientific fact. So, to put forward a bill such as this, which seeks to address the issue of natural disaster emergency response and funding but does not address climate change, is rather akin to putting a really expensive bandaid on the crack in a dam wall. It just won't do the job.

We have many debates in this place on climate and many debates on the influence of corporate donations on the major parties. Senator Waters is absolutely right to draw the chamber's attention to the reality that the tin ear of the major parties when it comes to climate change is due to those canals being stuffed with the cash of their fossil fuel mates. There will come a time when each of you, in your own ways, will have to confront and come to terms with the reality that you were warned, that you were told, that people made great effort to present to you the evidence of the dangers inherent in your inaction and you decided to nothing, simply because you wanted to retain your own personal position of power.

You will have to look your kids in the eye—you will have to look your grandkids in the eye—and explain to them why you decided to make the problem worse, why you decided to walk alongside the great conflagration of global climate crisis and, instead of pitching in, instead of doing what you could to make the situation better, decided to make it worse. And those members of the Nationals who so often proclaim their undying service to the rural and regional community of Australia will have to look farm family after farm family in the eye and explain just why continuing to take money from the gas giants and the coal merchants, continuing your cosy bedroom relationship with the Liberal Party, was more important to you than protecting the viability of farmlands that they've worked for generations. That will be the explanation that you'll have to give.

On the other side of the chamber we've got a party that is caught between their pre-election flirtations with political courage and their current imbibing of that swill of post-election defeat, compromise based miasma. You don't look like eels, but you're doing a really good impression of them—you can almost hear the jellied spines jiggling. I've seen some crappy deals made in my time in this place, as brief as it has been. But I've got to say, $50 million in return for $4.5 billion is one of the more badly calculated. Imagine the debate you could be having in this place if you weren't undermined by Fitzgibbon in the other place.