Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I was on my feet in this august chamber in 2016 when I saw a text come across my phone that President Trump had been elected. I remember stopping my speech and making a contribution about that and expressing my significant concern about what dark and dangerous days we had ahead under President Trump. I think, reflecting back on that, it's been entirely accurate.

What we learnt thanks to my colleagues' questions in estimates just last week about our current emissions trajectory in Australia and around the world was that, if Australia sticks to its current business-as-usual targets, we'll reach four degrees of warming by the end of the century. That will mean massive job losses in farming, tourism and trade, especially in Queensland, the Northern Territory and WA; extreme workplace risks for firefighters, health professionals and construction workers; huge price spikes for basic food, where only the wealthiest will be able to afford to secure what they want; 95 per cent of irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin will be wiped out, a former food bowl reduced to growing predominantly cotton; vast dead zones in the ocean with no more coral reefs and the extinction of all shellfish; mass migration and conflict over shrinking resources; equatorial zones will no longer be habitable, forcing people to find new places to live; intolerable heat stress and flash flooding across most of northern Australia, making it uninhabitable for most of the year; the end of Boxing Day tests and relaxed summer barbeques; and one in six animals in the world will become extinct. This is based on science; this is based on fact and what will happen if the world warms by four degrees by the end of this century.

We just heard two weeks ago in the latest scientific report by JCU in Queensland that 50 per cent of the corals have now gone from the Great Barrier Reef in the last decade. But there is a glimmer of hope, because on the weekend people in the US voted for change. They voted for a different vision; they voted to change the presidency. They voted for a president who campaigned on climate change, a green new deal and a green jobs recovery. I don't for one minute expect that that's not going to be a difficult thing for this President to achieve—it's a very divided country—but he has been very strong in his statements, as has his new administration, on acting on climate change.

Our Prime Minister and this government have been buddying up to a man who has been found to have lied 25,000 times to the American people and who, in recent days, has been attacking the principles of our democracy. It's time for us to change. It's time for us to accept that this is a new global reality, take real action on climate change and deliver a future for our grandchildren.