Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I come before the Senate today to speak to every member of this parliament on the destruction of our marine landscapes and the widespread climate disasters we are seeing and to ask the question, 'When?' When will it be enough for you to act not in alignment with corporate greed but on behalf of our planet and Australians, who actually deserve your help?

Our national treasure, the Great Barrier Reef, is being described as a graveyard. This summer, 75 per cent of reefs surveyed across the entire Great Barrier Reef system experienced extreme heat stress. It was the fifth mass bleaching event since 2016. In Western Australia, in our south-west, our forests are dying. We have gone months and months without rainfall, with residents of the south-west forced to travel outside of their region just to have a shower or borrow water. Their lands are dry and barren, and the risk of fire is truly terrifying. People do not feel safe in these conditions.

And yet, just one day after scathing reports from the world's climate experts established that we are on track for 2.7 degrees of warming, this Labor government reaffirmed their commitment to expanding fossil fuel operations. Labor's new gas strategy has been condemned downright and rejected across Australia. Not only does it double down on gas as an energy source; it increases our reliance on gas through its expansion of gas projects. The Labor government's decisions, which they have actively made in the face of this evidence, condemn our people and our planet to a future that is unliveable.

This goes beyond being neglectful. We are reaching the point of planned suffering. The Labor government is not acting in the interests of the collective safety and wellbeing of the community but in the interests of corporations and fossil fuel moguls, giving them, in this budget, $50 billion in public funds over the next four years alone. The experts surveyed as part of UN and Australian processes—internationally renowned people who have spent their entire lives learning about our climate system and working on the impacts of climate change—warn us again and again that we are on track for disaster. It is in this reality that so many in our community are fed up and are asking this government one last time if it really has no better hope for the future of our country than to bring upon the world the climate disaster and to speed it up by ensuring that, as the world burns, it does so based on fuels found here in Australia. Shame upon them all. (Time expired)