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

It's with great pleasure that I rise to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris. It is a momentous victory to stare down fascism and win. It's a win for women, for people of colour, for LGBTIQ+ people and for immigrants. It's a win against white supremacy and authoritarianism. It's a win for science and for the fight against our climate emergency.

Joe Biden has affirmed climate change as an existential threat. He has committed to net zero emissions by 2050 and he has a plan for net zero electricity emissions by 2035. Australia, in contrast, is lagging woefully behind on the world stage and is an embarrassment. But Prime Minister Morrison and the Liberal and National parties are not listening. They're not listening to the fact that the science is clear that climate change is driving natural disasters and extreme weather. At current rates we risk hitting 1½ degrees of global heating by the end of the decade and four degrees by the end of the century—within the lifetime of children alive today. Just one degree of global heating resulted in last summer's devastating bushfires. You cannot adapt to four degrees of heating. If Australia is going to play its part to keep global heating to under 1½ degrees then our targets have to be at least a 75 per cent reduction by 2030.

Tackling our climate crisis is not about whether we meet pathetic reductions based on abysmally weak carryover targets from 15 years ago. It's about our future. It's about taking the required action to avoid unliveable conditions for children alive today. I said in my first speech, in 2014, that my agenda for my time in this place is clear: I want to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye and tell them that it was during my time in the Senate that Australia turned the corner and legislated to begin the shift to a zero-carbon safe-climate economy. I said we had to stop subsidising fossil fuels, we should close coal-fired power stations, we should say no to new gas and coal and we should make the big polluters pay for all the damage they're causing.

But shame on this government that we are still having to call for this six years later. It has been six long years of the Liberal-National government doing nothing except the bidding of its fossil fuel donors. We know what we need to do to fight the climate emergency, but we need the political will to make it happen. It's clear that this government hasn't got the political will. We need to turf it out and get a government that has.