Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This debate clearly shows what the fossil fuel companies have bought through their donations to the major parties. They have bought deliberate ignorance. There is a clear and present danger between burning fossil fuels and dangerous climate change. There is a clear and present danger between strip mining our native forests and burning most of them on the ground, which is what the logging industry does, and dangerous climate change.

You will hear words, accurate words, like 'a climate emergency' or 'a climate crisis', but we need to be clear what that means: there is a clear and present link between burning fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—between strip mining our native forests and burning what's left on the ground and the bushfires that we have seen so tragically destroy so many millions of hectares and so many communities. Over a billion animals and 33 people are dead. Fires are made more dangerous and more likely as a result of the breakdown of our climate.

To those who come in here and keep running the agenda of the big emitting corporations—for the avoidance of doubt, that is the LNP and the ALP in this place: you are nothing but climate criminals and history will remember you as such, mark my words. Those who come in here and shill for big coal, big oil, big gas and big forestry are stealing. To them: you've stolen from those communities who were devastated by bushfires and you are stealing from your children, from your grandchildren and from their children. It is our descendants and billions of the poorest people around the world who will pay the price, just as many have paid the ultimate price in the bushfires that we've just seen.

I want to talk quickly about my home city of Hobart. We are one of the most vulnerable cities in Australia to bushfires. I tell you now, I shudder to think what will happen if, in one year's time, we get dry lightning strikes up in the Derwent Valley when it's a 40-degree day and the big nor'-westers and the big northerlies are all blowing. We could lose whole suburbs in Hobart as a result of bushfires. Whole suburbs could go. We are extremely vulnerable.

But we can't just focus on the risks. We have to focus on the solutions and what gives us hope. Renewables are a solution. We can plant trees instead of strip mining our forests. Plant trees to draw down carbon instead of emitting it. We've got to end those fossil fuel subsidies. We've got to break that nexus, that corruption, those links in the big donations from the big emitters to the major political parties. When I need hope, you know who I look to? I don't look to either of the major parties in this place. I look to the kids who come out on the climate strikes and say: 'Enough is enough. We are no longer prepared to sit quietly by and watch our future get trashed by people who will not act in line with the climate science.' So to those kids I say the Greens are with you. We back you in. We support you in what you're trying to achieve. Every day in here we will demand the major parties get with the program; end their shilling for big forestry, big oil, big gas and big coal; and start taking the action that the climate scientists have been telling us for decades that we need to take to reduce emissions and give us all some hope for the future.