Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We have heard a lot about the so-called climate wars recently. We have heard about them from the Prime Minister, we have heard about them from the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, we have certainly heard about them from many in the press gallery. Do you know what? There actually is a climate war going on right now but it is not the one those people like to talk about. It's not between Labor and the Greens, as Labor would like people to believe, and so many journalists love to uncritically parrot. The real climate war is between, on one side, the big corporate emitters, their shills in this place and most of the media and, on the other side, those who are fighting for a safe climate for the ecosystem that supports our lives. That is the real climate war and, I will tell you now, it has barely got started. In the future it is going to get a lot bloodier and a lot more desperate, because the people who run the big emitting corporations are murderous psychopaths, and their agents in this parliament on both sides are too weak and too beholden to stand up to them.

Governments are already trying to arrest their way out of the real climate war but they will soon understand that the prisons just aren't big enough. The real climate wars will not end until either we have public policy that will ensure a liveable planet—and we are a long, long way from that in this country—or until the climate has broken down so irreparably that it simply doesn't matter anymore, and people are only concerned with scrounging enough food to feed themselves for another day. While the real climate wars are going on, I will be fighting them in this place, on the streets, online, in the forests or locked on to the fossil fuel infrastructure, because this is a crisis, it is an emergency and fighting for a liveable future is what the situation demands.

The crisis also deserves honesty, so here are some facts. We know that Labor's climate policy is nowhere near compatible with a liveable climate. A liveable climate demands that coal, oil and gas be left in the ground and it demands an end to logging native forests, because you cannot negotiate with the laws of thermodynamics. And here we are in 2022, with all that has come before us, all the information that we know, being held to ransom by the psychopathic cabal of the fossil fuel sector and its puppets in the major parties in this place. Instead of shining a light on the toxicity and highlighting the damage that is being done to climate and planet and instead of demanding that Labor go further, we are getting appeasement from many in the media gallery. With Labor so desperately trying to sell us short, so many in the gallery are focused on trying to rewrite history and pushing for a negotiation with people who are profiting so obscenely by cooking the planet.

There are plenty in the press gallery who are just as culpable in the climate debate as those who profit from cooking the planet, those nature-destroying corporations. The blind zombie stenography of Labor talking points from the incrementalists and the centrists in the press gallery is just as damaging for the chance of real action as the mantra from the climate denialists at Newscorp. You can neither negotiate climate policy with the psychopaths who run corporations that are responsible for driving climate change nor can you accept their donations and expect to be taken seriously. Unlike Labor, the Greens will not break bread with the people who are lining their pockets by cooking the planet. To the Labor politicians who say we have seen a decade of climate inaction, I say you are either ignorant or you are lying. And, to the press gallery folks who credulously report that rubbish and so frantically greenwash Labor's climate policies, I say this: please imagine the contribution you could make to the real climate wars by pushing Labor to go further and faster on climate, rather than trying to push the Greens to accept Labor's mediocrity. If you did that, you'd be on the right side of the real climate wars, not on the wrong side of history.