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

The end of the year is a time that we all hold out for. Many of us hope that for just a moment the struggles of life will ease and we will have the opportunity to spend time with the people we love in the places we love, creating a couple of memories to help us get through whatever the new year has in store. For others, it is a time of frenetic preparation for that rush of visitors that might just mean that this month you can pay the bills on time and that that knot in the pit of your stomach loosens just a little. So many in our community so deeply needed these hopes and aspirations to be realised.

Yet, for so many of us, these hopes, these aspirations, were replaced with terror and with desperation. Instead of messages of love and celebration and excitement, our phones were filled with emergency alerts ending in those words: 'You have to act now to survive.' In that moment the only thought in so many minds was not of the opportunity to grasp a piece of time, to forget, to reconnect, to gather strength. The thought in the mind was of survival—survival of family, of pets, of livelihood and of home as they faced that dreaded choice and were torn by the decision: defend your place of memory, of history, of community, or get out.

In the days that followed, the relief of immediate safety was replaced by the relentlessness of reality. Our towns and cities choked as millions of hectares of our precious bushland were reduced to ashes. Parents sat up through the night with their asthmatic children, counting every breath. Cars were left packed in fear that the wind might change. And thousands of volunteer firefighters took leave, often unpaid, to throw themselves on the frontlines, from the Stirling Range in southern WA to Mallacoota on the south-eastern tip of Victoria. People desperately reached out to each other, asking that same desperate question, 'Are they okay?' I will never forget that plunging sense of shock that I felt when I found out that Senator Hanson-Young's brother had not been able to make contact, that he had been fighting fires in South Australia and they couldn't get hold of him. Sarah, I am so glad that he is okay. I'm so sorry for all your community has lost.

All of this is against a backdrop of excuses and self-interested spin from individuals who, after ignoring the countless pleas of our community to take action to prevent this crisis, still to this very moment dare to call themselves our leaders and act as if we should respect it, respect them for their service. There is no other word for what we are experiencing than a national crisis—perhaps the greatest in a generation. Thirty-four lives have been lost. Thirty-four families now have space where life once was. Thousands of homes have been lost. Eighteen million hectares of bushland have been burnt. That's larger than the state of Tasmania. And one million animals have perished, vanished forever.

Right across our national community, the nearly 26 million of us, there is hardly a soul who has not been affected by this crisis in some way. Together we are struggling to make sense of just what is happening to us. Sadness and grief are present within us all. The enormity of all we have lost and are still losing feels almost too much at times. I remember watching the ABC, as so many of us were doing through this crisis, and taking in the story of a woman by the name of Rae Harvey. Rae runs a kangaroo sanctuary on the New South Wales Mid-South Coast. On New Year's Eve she found herself trapped at the end of a jetty, watching her home and the bushland burn around her. She barely escaped that day with her life, helped to safety by a neighbour who came along on a boat as the jetty crashed around her. She was good at putting on a brave face. As she talked to the reporter, you could tell that she was trying to be stoic, trying to keep it together. She even tried to share a joke with him. And then you could see on her face and on her body that the realisation that the creatures that she cared for so much had perished rose up in her. Her face cracked and she began crying.

Grief is not immediate in these situations. Adrenaline powers you through until it doesn't. After the Gippsland fires, I picked up the phone and spoke to a friend of mine whom I knew had family in the area. He said that he was fine but that his grandparents had lost their home and that with it had gone many generations of memories. A wonderful woman called Wendy reached out to me and told me the story of her niece's family who had lost their home on New Year's Eve. They now had nothing but the clothes on their backs and were struggling to feed their kids and pay the rent ahead of the beginning of the new term. Their eldest son is 14 and he is struggling to process everything that has happened to him.

These are just some of the stories that we are sharing together and, amongst all the pain and the grief and the deep frustration, there is comfort at least in the knowledge that we are experiencing this together. However you are feeling, know that it is okay that you feel that way. You are not alone. The community response to this crisis has been to come together, support each other and unite in our calls for action. I had the opportunity to attend an incredible event organised by Imam Mohammed Shakeeb and the Perth Islamic community. Commencing with a powerful welcome to country and performances by Haka for Life and Corroboree for Life, the event was grounded in a powerful understanding that we were gathered on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, and that the land, so horrifically scarred, wherever it was in our country, was and always will be First Nations land. Hundreds of people came together to share space and food and to hear music, and together we raised $30,000 for bushfire survivors. This is just one of the countless events that are continuing to take place across our community. As we come together, united in our support for each other, we are also united in our understanding that this crisis is being driven by climate change and that urgent action is needed.

The very first thing I saw when I got out of the car yesterday were two women by the entrance of Parliament House. They were clutching pictures of their kids in their hands. Until a week ago, these two people did not know each other and yet they were united in a shared experience of being asked by their kids why more was not being done to protect their future. Unable to answer these questions, these two mums, Megan and Natasha, got together with many other parents of Ballarat and made their kids a promise—that they would go to Canberra and put that question to the people who were sent here, were elected, to represent them. The #YOUTELLOURKIDS campaign is just one of so many examples of grassroots activism, of people coming together to take action, often led by young people, because we understand that, when we consider the climate crisis, our very future is on the line.

Today, thousands of people gathered on the lawns of parliament in the smog that surrounds our nation's capital to do the same—to demand climate action. It is clear that our community is united in understanding the cause of this crisis and in a desire for action. Although we are feeling pain, grief and frustration, we are also united in our support for each other—and, together, there is hope.