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

Well, this is a mediocre piece of legislation. It's one that does not come close to reflecting what climate science is telling us, and it falls even further short of reflecting reality. It's the reality, the truth, of what is happening on our planet that I want to talk about tonight. And here is the reality, here is the truth: the planet's capacity to sustain human life is crumbling away. The ecosystem—that beautiful, complex web of life that sustains everything about this planet and makes our planet so much more than just a ball of rock orbiting a star—is crumbling away. We are losing the very essence of this planet, and it is happening because of what one species, human beings, have done and are doing. This collapse, this crumbling of our ecosystems and the planet's capacity to sustain life is being caused by a relatively small group of people. They are genuine psychopaths, the people that are doing this. They are relentlessly pursuing profit at the expense of the very lives of billions of people, let alone all of the other species who are suffering and, in so many cases, are facing extinction. Those psychopaths are the people running the big polluting corporations: the fossil fuel corporations, the logging and land-clearing corporations, those big emitting polluters who've got their blinkers on and are lining their filthy pockets with these rivers of gold at the expense of the very lives of some of the poorest, most vulnerable people on the planet. It's those people—the poor and the vulnerable, almost overwhelmingly the brown-skinned and a black-skinned people on this planet—who are going to pay the price for the things that the overwhelmingly white male psychopaths have done and are doing. So that is the truth. That is the context in which we debate this bill today.

I want to make the point that this bill obviously, self-evidently, has not yet passed the parliament, and Labor has already started undermining it. I mean, just this week we had the Prime Minister get up at a dinner hosted by the Minerals Council of Australia, the peak body of the big psychopathic emitters in this country, and assure them that they could basically keep on exporting fossil fuels indefinitely. I bet he got a good round of applause from the merchants of death in the Minerals Council. I bet he did. Do you know why they would be so happy? Because their ROI, their return on investment, for their political donations is the best investment they ever made.

It is not just the CEOs of the big emitters who are psychopathic. There are psychopaths in this place, and I use that term advisedly. They are shills in this place, those who shill for the big corporate emitters. You know who you are. You are psychopaths, because you are putting your own political wellbeing, or at least what you perceive it to be, in the short-term ahead of the very lives, potentially, of billions of people this century who are facing death, who are facing starvation, who are facing dying of thirst, who are facing dislocation as a result of your greed and your self-interest. That is what is happening as we debate these bills. These big emitters, time and time again, make it clear that they want to continue opening new coal, new gas, new oil. They want to continue clear-felling our beautiful, precious carbon-rich native forests, despite those actions being contrary to every single piece of legitimate climate science that we know as humans.

What we get from a lot of the media in this place when they report on Labor's climate position is actually a prediction of what they wish the Labor Party was rather than an accurate reflection of what the Labor Party actually is, and that is a massive problem in our public conversation in this country, that so much of what happens is filtered through centrists and incrementalists in our press gallery. Why is that the case? Because far too many journalists are more interested in maintaining access to power than they are in reporting the truth. They will continue to peddle the lie that close enough is good enough when it comes to our climate, because if they call the Labor Party out for what this bill represents—mediocrity at best—they will get fewer contacts, fewer invitations, fewer texts out of the cabinet meetings or out of the Labor Party caucus, fewer drops from Labor ministers.

I want to be really clear about one thing about this bill and this debate. Contrary to what the Prime Minister would have us believe, this is by no means the end of the climate wars, because the climate war is not some cosy little dinner club conversation. The climate war is not some little political tizz in this place. The climate wars, and they will escalate into the future, mark my words, are being fought in our communities. They are being fought on the fossil fuel infrastructure. They are being fought in our native forests. They are being fought by people who are standing up. Strength to their collective arms, I say. They are standing up for our future and for the future of our children, to give our children and our grandchildren the chance and the kinds of opportunities in life that so many of us had and so many people in this place take for granted.

The climate wars are not some little chat between the backroom operators of the Labor Party and a handful of press gallery minions; they are actually and literally a fight for the future of humanity and for this planet's capacity to sustain life. That is what the climate wars are about. That is why it will continue to get more and more serious as time goes by. That is why I will be fighting until the day I draw my last breath on this planet. Do you know what? They can put me on the compost heap when I'm finished; I'll keep on fighting them.