Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We can all agree that we need a safe future for our children and for our grandchildren and their children. As a mother and a proud First Nations woman, my birthright gives me the responsibility to protect and nurture country with love and care—our Mother Earth.

First Nations people have cared for country since time immemorial. Yet in just over a couple of hundred years—in fact, in the blink of an eye—the legacy of colonisation has pushed us further into a climate emergency. Right now our country is hurting, crying out in pain. The science is clear: every tonne of coal and gas burnt increases the intensity and speed of change in our climate. That means more floods, more intense droughts and heatwaves, and more frequent bushfires, like we're seeing in my home state of Western Australia. Yet Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals continue to vote in favour of planet-destroying fossil fuel projects that we don't need. That's because every year they take millions of dollars in donations from the coal and gas corporations responsible for this destruction. Every day that passes, we fall further behind and the opportunities to make change are made harder.

But it actually does haven't to be this way. It is the responsibility of every single person in this place to provide a safe future for our children and the generations to come. The answers to the climate crisis are here, right in front of us, and we can protect country. We can and we must push the next government to go further and faster on climate action and to create hundreds of thousands of jobs to pivot to a cleaner and greener resources economy. We can turn this country into a renewable energy superpower that exports clean, cheap, renewable energy instead of coal.