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

I stand in this place as a proud Gunai-Gunditjamara-Djab Wurrung woman. Our people thrived on this continent for tens of thousands of years, and we are the oldest continuing living culture on the planet. Everything on country—the water, the air, the sky, the animals our totems—carries the memories of our ancestors and the stories and law of our elders. We have cared for everything from the roots of the grasses to the leaves of the highest trees and every living being that relies on them for thousands of years just for them to be destroyed in 250 years of colonisation. Bang! Wiped out.

The dispossession, desecration and destruction of country, the pollution of our waters, the theft of our homelands—these stories are not unique to our people in this continent. At COP26 we heard from First Nations people from around the world who told the same stories of dispossession, desecration and destruction. Climate change is simply a failure of First Nations' participation and empowerment. It is your failure, because we didn't fail this country. The reason why our ecosystems are collapsing is that you failed to hear us, you failed to care about the things that mattered and you failed our ancestors and their stories.