Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this afternoon's discussion on an issue that is so important: the survival of planet Earth—how we look after the environment, the environment that sustains all of us. We know the facts and figures. The environment is under stress more than ever before. Under the weight of human consumption, greed, negligence, Mother Earth is struggling, and she is crying out for help. When we look around at our local communities, we see that there are fewer green spaces, fewer native forests and fewer native animals. It's unthinkable that our iconic koala is even on the endangered list and slated for extinction in the next few decades if we don't act now.

Australians are increasingly concerned and are becoming more and more frustrated that, while politicians, political parties and leaders know the facts, know the issues and know what needs to stop, all we seem to get is more of the same and arguments like, 'We'll do it later on,' or 'That's going to cost money,' or 'But we need to destroy that particular part of the forest because somebody's job relies on it.' For far too long we have been asking Mother Nature to carry the burden for our greed and our expansion. We've got to do better. Australians expect that, in this place, when parliamentarians and political parties promise that they are going to act on the environment and are going to put in place environmental protection laws, those laws will actually do something to protect the environment. Currently, Australia's environmental laws are really weak and are less about protecting the environment and more about a pathway to approve mining projects and big development—more about approving those projects, rather than protecting the environment from their destruction.

We know Australians are becoming frustrated. All we need to do is look at the election results in Tasmania on the weekend, where we saw people overwhelmingly reject the state Liberal Party's push to log more, destroy more, and save less. We saw the local Tasmanian community reject that. We saw across the country on the weekend thousands and thousands of Australians rallying to protect our native forests—not just to save the animals that live in them and call those forests their homes but also to save these forests because we are in a dual crisis of extinction and climate. It is a double-whammy because, the worse the climate gets, the more stress our environment is under, and the more stress our environment is under the worse the climate crisis gets. It is a wicked, wicked cycle. We have to put a stop to it.

You do that by stopping the things that are making this situation worse. Stop burning those fossil fuels that supercharge the climate crisis; stop approving projects that are going to create more pollution that will supercharge the climate crisis and greenhouse gases and global warming; and put a stop to the destruction of the carbon sinks, our native forests, which really are one of the only things we've got in the battle against this climate crisis. Every time another tree in our native forests is logged, it makes it harder for us to stop runaway climate change. It doesn't just put at risk our native animals; it also puts at risk our community. We need laws that do something to protect the environment.