Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thought I was directing them through the chair. My, my, how sensitive we are in the chamber today, talking about climate change and the LNP's and One Nation's decades of opposing it! Farmers, as Senator Ciccone said, are on the front line of climate change.

We've got a movement of Farmers for Climate Action around the country who are coming together—there are over 10,000 of them now—and who are talking to each other about how they can take climate action. Senator Roberts might be interested to know that a new report just commissioned by Farmers for Climate Action—which they're talking about on their social media today—surveyed 1,000 farmers, and 70 per cent support clean energy projects on farmland in their community. In fact, this reporting shows, as CEO Natalie Collard stated today:

… the quiet majority of rural Australia is clearly in favour of clean energy projects locally, although many don't realise they're part of the quiet majority …

And that is because we have a noisy minority in this place who call themselves the Liberal and National parties and who continue to say that they're advocating for farmers and that they speak for farmers when they clearly don't. They clearly don't speak for farmers. Farmers are on the land. They are the ones subjected to droughts, to pestilence—we're seeing significant new biosecurity threats arising because of climate change—to floods, to bushfires, to extreme weather events, to disruptions to their supply chains, to disruptions to port infrastructure, to export markets, and I could go on. They're the risks of modern-day farming, and they're made worse by climate change. But, ultimately, they're made worse by people in here like Senator Roberts who actually don't even want to understand the science. They waste the Senate's time and the taxpayers' time by coming up with motions like this, which are so cooked up with all the different elements to them that they just don't make sense.

But I have no doubt that Senator Roberts will find a few seconds of clips to cut out and put on his social media to show that he's got some kind of international conspiracy agenda around climate change and is taking action to support farmers. I look forward to hearing the rest of the contributions. It's been fascinating.