Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to commend this bill, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Climate Trigger) Bill 2020, to the Senate. I do so with the voices of thousands of my Victorian constituents ringing in my ears, calling for strong action on the climate crisis. This past weekend I joined thousands of people who gave up their usual weekend activities to rally together in solidarity as part of the national day of climate action. We put climate action first this weekend because we know what's at stake. People gathered in cities and towns across the country calling for a safe climate. It's our job as elected representatives to listen to those constituents and to act. The weekend before that I joined 2,000 people who were at the National Climate Emergency Summit at the Melbourne town hall. And this morning, on my bike ride to parliament, I met a couple and their young baby who were there, standing up for action, saying that young people, our kids, need a safe climate future.

We Greens are acting. We are listening to these constituents and we are acting. This bill is just one of the actions that this parliament needs to take to make sure that we take action, the speed and scale that is needed to tackle a requirement emergency. The Greens are the firefighters in our parliament. We are the ones who are ringing the alarm bells about the emergency and then finding a safe path through the emergency to the emergency exit. This safe path needs action now, not in 20 years time. The next decade is critical. Zero by 2050: it may be great or it may be too late. We need action in the next decade to find that safe path through. Part of that safe path is this legislation.

This bill focuses on our key national environment protection legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, and seeks to bring it into the 21st century by closing the major loophole that exists in that act. The EPBC Act absolutely must take carbon pollution into account. We know that climate change is producing hotter conditions, more droughts, more floods, more extreme and intense bushfires, as we have all experienced this summer, and longer fire seasons. It is producing coral bleaching—the Great Barrier Reef is about to have another extensive bleaching event—sea level rise and warming oceans. It is a massive threat to our precious natural environments and our wildlife. So it makes no sense that activities that are actually causing climate change currently aren't assessed by our national environment laws. We must close this loophole. No, it's more than a loophole; it is a chasm. It's a chasm that's big enough to drive a fleet of coal loaders and bulldozers through. The Adani coalmine wasn't assessed for what impact it would have on global heating. The Beetaloo Basin, which Labor and Liberal alike want to open up, is a massive carbon bomb. Under our current environment legislation that will not be assessed for how much it is going to increase global heating.

Assessing the emissions of fossil fuel projects and tree-destroying developments is one of the easiest steps that this parliament can take to tackle pollution and its devastating impacts on us, our kids and our grandkids, who are staring down the barrel of a future filled with more fires, more floods, more heatwaves, droughts and crop failures. We have a choice, and I call upon the Senate to support this bill with a safe climate future firmly in mind.

This bill defines 'land clearing' as one of several emission-intensive actions. That is really appropriate, because we know that land clearing has got critical consequences when it comes to greenhouse gas pollution. I would like to read a summary from the Climate Council's 2018 report. It said:

In 2015 the land use sector in Queensland generated 19 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution, which was more pollution than the agriculture sector or around 20% of the pollution from the entire energy sector including electricity, stationary energy and transport.

If that isn't shocking enough, let's put it in an international perspective. That land clearing in Queensland in 2015-16 amounted to the equivalent of almost half of the vegetation cleared in the entire Brazilian Amazon rainforest. This report outlines key ways that land clearing contributes to increased carbon emissions in terms of our climate emergency. It outlines how clearing vegetation releases the significant carbon it contains, and that vegetation that's cleared can no longer store the carbon that's so necessary, which makes it harder for us to stay within our carbon budget. That's why this bill builds land clearing and other triggers relating to emissions generation into the legislation: so we can stop making the climate emergency worse.

We have got a whole lot of clearing up to do to tackle our climate emergency, and the first thing we can do is stop making the problem worse. Clearing of vegetation across huge areas of the Australian landscape has escalated in recent years. It's contributing to a massive increase in carbon pollution and a massive loss of habitat for threatened and critically endangered species as well. Adding a climate trigger to the EPBC Act means we can assess the double whammy of this clearing: both its impacts on habitat reduction and the emissions implications.

Let's consider the Great Barrier Reef. The reef just does not stand a chance with the enormous amounts of clearing into the catchments feeding into it. Climate change is wrecking the reef. As I said, we're about to face another massive coral bleaching. It might be the end of the Great Barrier Reef. We know that land clearing and run-off are wrecking the reef, and they are both reinforcing each other. Australians are mourning the loss of our magnificent Great Barrier Reef, and this government is doing nothing. This bill does something. This bill says that land clearing and its effects on the climate crisis cannot be swept under the carpet any longer.

I note here too that rampant deforestation occurs in areas of land across Australia that are not subject to consideration under the EPBC Act due to the outdated regional forest agreements. Yes, it's the 21st century, but we've got significant areas of native forest with clear felling of complex ecosystems and destruction of significant carbon sinks for low-value outputs like copy paper and pallets for cartons of beer.

The Greens are working to improve our federal environment laws here today, but we're also working to scrap those regional forest agreements, which were made last century and which don't meet the standards and needs of our current challenges, both environmentally and economically. Every other extractive industry has to meet the basic provisions of the EPBC Act, so why not logging? We're working here to strengthen the EPBC Act with this climate trigger bill, and we also have legislation to scrap our destructive logging laws. There is a very clear choice. Only the Greens have a plan to tackle our climate crisis and to protect nature. We're the only party that does not take donations from those coal, gas and oil industries, or donations from any large corporations. We are the only party that will hold the major parties to account. We must act if we want to prevent the climate emergency from destroying so much that is beautiful in our natural world. There is no time to waste if we're going to prevent further global heating, and assessing the pollution from fossil fuel projects and tree-destroying developments is one of the easiest steps that this parliament could take to ensure that humanity has a future. I call upon my fellow senators to support this bill. I now seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.