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

Thank you, Madam Deputy President. I will take Senator Smith's point and I will return with razor-sharp focus to the piece of legislation which he has put before this parliament today. There is not a scientist in this country—there is not a qualified individual on the face of the earth—that would say anything other than that there is a direct causal link between the burning of coal and the creation of dangerous climate change. And there is not an individual—a scientist or any other qualified person—who would deny the link between climate change and the disasters which we are experiencing today. It is hypocrisy in the extreme—it is inappropriate beyond words—for this government to propose that, in this moment of national crisis, we should be using the powers of the federal government to maintain a system of burning coal for energy generation. That is what this bill seeks to facilitate. You, funded by your corporate backers, interested only in your continued political survival, have played a role in driving our country to the edge of an ecological abyss from which we may never recover. Your selfishness and your ignorance have known no bounds for decades, and now our communities are paying the price, just as your spinelessness—your contemptible inability to formulate yourselves into anything like an opposition, anything vaguely approaching an organisation capable of countering the bunch of self-obsessed corporate elites that is the Liberal Party—has let this community down again and again. We heard your feeble mutterings in the chamber yesterday about the idea that, at some other point in the future, it might be the appropriate time to raise the issue of climate change. Now! Now! Now!

In the past, when we as a community have confronted issues of national tragedy and crisis, such as we did after Port Arthur, we have come together as a nation and acted. We had a national firearms agreement within 11 days. How dare you suggest that our country is beyond the ability of rising to a similar challenge. How dare any of you suggest that, in this moment, at this time, it is appropriate to be prosecuting a piece of legislation with the aim of propping up coal. You are no better than a bunch of arsonists—borderline arsonists—and you should be ashamed—