Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of urgency today, because we would not be here, with a cooking planet and rising seas, if you fellas cared for country the way we have always done. You fellas brought this mess here, right! We looked after these lands for thousands and thousands of generations. And then what happens? The boats roll in and it's, 'Let's dig up as much as we can and destroy as much as we can and make as much money as we can, because money's going to save our lives, at the end of the day, and it's going to give us oxygen'—right?

These big problems that have been caused by burning dirty, dirty fossil fuels need big solutions—solutions that our people, the true experts, First Nations people, the oldest continuing living culture in the world—right here. Right here, right now you've got two of us. We've been here forever. We know how to look after the land. We didn't dig the coal. We didn't frack the gas. In blackfella way, you don't do that. You don't pull the heart out of your mother's chest. You don't pull the eyes out of your kid's head. Yes, it's horrible to think of that, but that's what is going on in our mother land, in our Mother Earth. There are resources being extracted that are equivalent to pulling your mother's heart out of her chest, or your kid's eyes out of their head. The mother is alive—our mother is alive—and every time you dig for coal or dig for gas, that is exactly what you're doing. Our mother is, to us, alive as a person.

Our law and our moral legal kinship and ethical obligations to country are older than your Magna Carta. To solve the climate crisis, we need to give country back its personhood. And this week I promise the Green's solution to care for country, which is to give personhood status to the environment. That's one way of solving the climate crisis. Environmental personhood is about giving the environment, or parts of the environment—like our rivers, lakes, forests and oceans—the rights, protections, privileges and responsibilities that actual people have.

For our people, we are no different to the environment. We don't see ourselves as different from the lakes and the rivers, the animals and the sky. We are them, and they are us. This is why giving the environment personhood is a solution that we must urgently adopt. This is not a new idea, despite some legal professors trying to pass the idea off as their own—as they do; this is how we've always done it for thousands of generations. And if corporations—the word literally means 'to have a body'—which actually only exist on paper, can have personhood, why can't our environment?

Of course, granting personhood to nature is a moment that isn't being led by academics or lawyers. Who's it being led by? It's being led by indigenous people all around the world. In 2014 Te Urewera, a beautiful forested area in the North Island, in Aotearoa, was given legal personhood. It owns land in its own right. It is also a special place for our Maori family, and I honour and salute them in the right to protect their country. The Whanganui River in Aotearoa was declared a legal person in 2017. The river is recognised as an individual, living whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating the physical, spiritual and metaphysical environment. We need to do it, and we need to do it now. (Time expired.)