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

I want to take you back to the first day of parliament last year. When all of us members of parliament arrived in Canberra it was shrouded in smoke. The bushfires were raging from last summer's Black Summer. We know that when the fires were finally out we had 33 people who had died in those fires. An estimate is that 445 people died from smoke inhalation from those fires. We had thousands of people's livelihoods and their homes affected, homes which are still being rebuilt. They were the worst fires ever in Australia's history. Twenty per cent of our mainland forest was burnt and over three billion animals were killed.

Those of us who had been seeing our hotter, dryer climate, resulting in the weather conditions that we experienced last summer, thought what devastation, but maybe seeing these fires occur finally as a country we would listen to the science, we would recognise that, yes, this is a climate crisis, that we need to take action, that we need to act on reducing our carbon pollution in accordance with what the science says.

The science is very clear and it was reiterated last week by the Climate Targets Panel. It says if we are going to meet our Paris target globally, of keeping global heating to below two degrees, that we need to have at least a 50 per cent cut in carbon pollution by 2030. If we want to keep global heating below 1½ degrees we need a greater than 75 per cent cut in our carbon pollution by 2030.

The science is so clear, but we have a government and we have a Labor Party that are still in absolute denial, because delay in acting on our climate crisis is denial. If you are serious about acting on our climate crisis we need that urgent action now to get those cuts of at least half of our carbon pollution, if not three-quarters, in the next decade. That means getting out of coal and gas and oil. That means transitioning completely to a clean energy economy.

I've heard the contributions from both sides talking up renewables. Renewables are great and we need them, and all of this technology is terrific, but it is not going to amount to a hill of beans unless we also get out of coal, gas and oil, both domestically and in our export markets. We need to get the coal, gas and oil industries—those big industry barons who are currently determining what's in the climate and energy policies of both the government and the Labor Party—out of that role. We need to be listening to the science, listening to the people and taking action which is consistent with the science in order to keep people safe. Just as people were concerned about keeping people safe in last summer's fires, we need zero carbon. We need action urgently to keep people safe.