Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the most extraordinary experiences of my almost five years in this place is being in close proximity to people who deny the science of climate change. Yes, Dorothy, sadly, they really do still exist in the Liberal Party, the National Party and, disappointingly, even in the Labor Party. It's incredible, isn't it, when you think that the scientific consensus about global warming has been known for over 40 years, that these people are still in positions of power in our parliament. I learned about climate change as a 20-year-old science student. It politicised me. I remember coming out of a climate science lecture thinking: 'This is bloody serious. The world needs to be doing something about it.' That awareness led me to a career as an environment campaigner and then to politics, to being one of the founders of the Greens in Victoria, building political power for the action that is needed to truly and properly tackle our climate crisis. Decades on, the Greens are still the only party that acknowledges that we are in a climate emergency and the only party that has a plan of the scale and the substance to tackle this crisis.

And it is a crisis. Have no doubt. The past Australian summer tells the story. We've just had the hottest March on record, which followed the hottest January on record, the hottest start of the year on record. We had south-eastern Australia suffering one of the worst droughts ever. We had two massive fish kills in the Murray-Darling Basin. We had 23,000 spectacled flying foxes falling dead out of the sky one hot summer Queensland afternoon, almost a third of their total population. We had bushfires around the country, including those that razed rainforests in Tasmania and in Queensland—forests that had never previously been burnt. In February, we had the record rainfall and flooding around Townsville that killed half a million head of cattle and destroyed the homes, livelihoods and infrastructure of entire communities. What is distressing, of course, is that we can't just turn the heat off now that we've realised that the damage is being done. Tackling climate change now is like taking a cast-iron pot off the heat: it keeps on doing an awful lot of cooking before it cools down.

Have no doubt Australia is a massive player in our climate crisis. Coal is the world's biggest cause of climate change, and Australia is the world's biggest exporter of coal. Eighty per cent of the coal that we dig up in Australia is exported, and it's burnt overseas. We have a responsibility and an opportunity to lead the transition away from a coal-fuelled economy and look after workers as we do so. Yes, this is a big change, and it's one which Labor and Liberal MPs alike seem to be having some difficulty coming to terms with, but it's absolutely necessary, because you cannot argue with physics. Without a plan to quit coal, we are not tackling climate change.

There's another area where Australia contributes to climate change needlessly and unnecessarily, and that is, of course, the logging of our native forests, our incredibly precious native forests that are being destroyed, mostly for woodchips, in Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia. These forests are incredibly rich carbon stores. Indeed, the Victorian mountain ash forests just to the east of Melbourne hold more carbon, tree for tree, than any other forest anywhere in the world. Yet the Labor and Liberal parties, on a destruction unity ticket, are allowing these precious forests, including trees hundreds of years old, to be clear-felled, destroyed for woodchips for paper, and the carbon stores are lost. If that wasn't bad enough, the rest of the vegetation left behind—the tree ferns, the tree canopies and the trees that aren't quite the right shape, size or quality—is bombed with napalm from above and set alight, sending all of that carbon pollution up into the sky. The plumes of smoke that blanket Melbourne and much of the state's east each autumn are from these destructive and unnecessary fires.

In doing so, the logging and these fires are killing threatened animals like the critically endangered Leadbeater's possum, which only lives in these critically endangered mountain ash forests. Across the country, logging is killing swift parrots, western ringtail possums, regent honeyeaters, koalas, Carnaby's cockatoos and giant freshwater crayfish. The list of threatened animals killed by logging goes on and on. These are animals that are only just hanging in there by a thread. In fact, a recent report by the Wilderness Society has found that there are 48 threatened animals and birds living in areas that are subject to state-run logging operations.

We have utterly weak environment laws, including outdated, destructive logging laws—the Regional Forest Agreements—that are failing to protect nature. The Labor, the Liberal and the National parties are standing by as the precious natural places that provide homes for our threatened animals are destroyed. Instead of leadership that recognises that our homes, our biodiversity, our towns, our communities, our country, our planet and our human civilisation is at risk, we have a Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who brings a lump of coal into parliament, and an opposition leader, Bill Shorten, who walks the line on climate change, saying one thing in Victoria and another thing in Queensland, and whose climate policy does not mention coal and, in short, is a dog's breakfast of Liberal leftovers.

The Greens are the only party that is committed to taking real action for a safe future for all of us. Our plan includes new powerful environment laws and serious money to protect nature and restore our damaged environments. It includes an end to native forest logging; scrapping our logging laws, the Regional Forest Agreements; and shifting 100 per cent of wood production to plantations, which actually isn't going to be that hard given that we are currently at 88 per cent. It includes 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030, including support for households and businesses for solar systems and batteries. It includes phasing out the burning and export of thermal coal, supported by a $1 billion transition plan for workers; the building of a solar export industry, including a direct interconnector into Asia; exporting renewably-generated hydrogen; and a shift to electric cars with all new car sales being electric vehicles by 2030. What's more, our plan will create 170,000 new jobs and drive Australia towards an economy free of carbon pollution by 2040.

The choice is clear: the Greens are the only party that has a plan to tackle climate change and protect nature. We're the only party that does not take donations from the coal industry, the gas industry, the oil industry or the logging industry or donations from any large corporations. We are the only party that will hold the major parties to account.

At this coming election, it's vital to keep Greens in our parliament. It's vital to re-elect me in the Senate in Victoria. It's vital to re-elect all Greens who are up for election—Senator Faruqi in New South Wales, Senator Waters in Queensland, Senator Steele-John in Western Australia, Senator Hanson-Young in South Australia and Senator McKim in Tasmania—and also to elect more Greens like Steph Hodgins-May in Macnamara, Julian Burnside in Kooyong and Adam Pulford in Wills, just to name a few of the great candidates who are up against MPs from the Labor and Liberal parties who vote for coal, who vote for native forest logging and who vote for climate change. If you care about tackling climate change, if you care about our native forests, if you care about threatened animals, if you care about our water security and if you care about your children's and your grandchildren's futures, you have to vote Greens.

Senate adjourned at 22:28