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

RICE (—) (): We seem to be living in a parallel universe here. We've got a government that wants to put more money into fossil fuels, more money into polluting our atmosphere, more money into destroying our climate and more money into helping to exacerbate the climate crisis. The planet is on fire. The climate crisis is the most existential problem facing humanity and facing the planet. When I arrived in Canberra this morning, it was great to be back here, and no more so than to meet the brave climate protesters out the front of Parliament House—particularly Frances, who was in her yellow onesie, as she has been, rain, hail or shine, every parliamentary sitting day this year. She was joined this morning by a whole troupe of people in yellow onesies—Extinction Rebellion and other protesters—because they know this matters. Our future is at stake.

Last Friday we had young people all around the country protesting and rallying, both in person and online, about their future—about our future. We are in an absolutely existential dilemma as a world. We need to take urgent action to reduce our carbon pollution now, urgently. 2050 is too late. Delay is the new denial. 2030—this is the decade. This is the decade when we can take action to save the Great Barrier Reef and save ourselves from a future of more intense and more frequent fires and floods, of sea level rise and of being unable to grow food in our current food areas. The climate where we grow most of our wheat today, under three degrees of warming, would be more like the climate of the central deserts. You cannot grow wheat in a desert.

So it's pretty clear. This is the crisis that we're in. What we need to do is to stop the mining, burning and export of fossil fuels. Yet this government actually wants to put in more money and to change regulations, as my colleague Senator Waters said, in a way that is probably unlawful so as to actually support more mining, burning and export of fossil fuels, just at the time when the government really need to be seriously saying—as governments all around the world, including conservative governments, are saying—'Okay, maybe it's going to be a bit tricky, but we've got to work out how to get out of fossil fuels, safely transition away from the mining, burning and export of fossil fuels, and transition our economy to protect jobs as well as protecting our environment.'

There are so many ways forward. If we had a government that was actually willing to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and play a role as part of the global community, we could do it. We could make those massive investments and supercharge our investments in renewable energy, in encouraging more forest cover and in doing everything across all of our economy and our society to shift to a zero-carbon economy. But what have we got? We've got a government that wants to introduce regulations that have already been knocked off by this Senate—regulations that actually make it easier to keep on burning, mining and exporting coal, gas and oil.

As I said in the beginning, we seem to be in a parallel universe where the world—Australian society and global society as a whole—knows that we need to be determined, resolute and focused. On every bit of legislation that goes through this place, we should look at it and say, 'Does this mean that we are going to have less carbon pollution or more carbon pollution?' There is no doubt that, if these regulations aren't disallowed today, it would result in more carbon pollution, the exact opposite of what we need to be doing.

I call upon this government: please think of your children, your grandchildren and even yourselves. There is action that we can take here. We can take action. It is not too late now. We've already got massive losses. Our society and our environment are already being damaged, but we can take a stop. We can say, 'Now is the time that we are going to move in another direction.' That means taking serious action. It means leadership. It means leadership here in Australia and joining with other countries around the world. It is possible to do it, but not by going in the direction that this government is taking us in.