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

Concluding from where I was yesterday, the Greens will be supporting this legislation, but we do want to underline that this is just a minor tweak to our biosecurity legislation. It is not the main game. It is not where the attention of this government should be. We're doing these minor tweaks, fiddling around the edges; meanwhile, the country has been on fire. We are facing a climate emergency. The government cannot claim to be doing things in the interests of streamlining agriculture and supporting farmers while they are ignoring the elephant in the room. This legislation is just like a flea on that elephant's back. We need to be addressing that elephant in the room. We have reports on the front pages of the newspapers this morning absolutely outlining the reality of the science: unless we get to zero carbon emissions much earlier than 2050 we as a society and our civilisation on this planet is facing an existential crisis. It's not hyperbole. It is reality. We know that we need to be taking rapid, urgent action to reduce our carbon pollution. We need to be taking action to be rapidly reducing it far earlier than 2050. We need to have the strategies in place to be getting out of fossil fuels, to stop burning coal, gas and oil, to be shifting to renewable energies, to be transforming our agriculture sector so that it is sustainable.

Otherwise things are looking pretty grim. It is a very scary future that our farmers are facing, that we are facing, that our children and grandchildren are facing. We are facing a world where the climate of our wheat-growing areas under four degrees of warming—which we are well and truly on the road towards—becomes like the climate of the central deserts. We know that you cannot grow wheat in Hermannsburg.

We are facing a future of ongoing, more-intense, more-frequent droughts. We are facing a future of ongoing, more-intense other extreme weather events. We are facing the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. We are facing a future of fire events such as we have just experienced this summer, where 20 per cent of the forests of Australia have been burnt—massively, compared with any other fire event in forests around the globe; a massively greater proportion of our forest estate has been burnt. That is the future we are facing. We have only had just over one degree of warming so far, and even if we meet our Paris targets we are signing up to a world of 3.4 degrees of warming.

We cannot go on this way. We cannot continue just having tiny, minor tweaks to bits of legislation and this sense of, 'Oh, well, we're keeping busy in here,' when the huge issues that are facing us are going unconsidered and certainly without the necessary action being taken. So yes, the Greens will be supporting this legislation. But we call upon the government and we call upon Labor to actually take stock of where we are headed as a society and to take the action that's required to address the huge existential issue that we're facing: our climate emergency.