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

As I rise tonight, I want to acknowledge that we are in a climate emergency. Our planet is headed for a level of global heating that will cause unimaginable devastation. We're going to see mass civil dislocation, water shortages, food shortages, wars, death and disease on an unimaginable scale. Much of our world is on track to become uninhabitable in our lifetimes. Here in Australia, our rivers are running dry. Our fire season now extends well beyond the summer months. In parts of the east coast of Australia and in my home state of Tasmania we've seen forests that just don't burn—and in Tasmania's case have never burned before—but have burned in recent years.

This is the new normal of climate catastrophe, the inevitable end result of disaster capitalism. In response, the major parties in this place have simply doubled down on the fossil fuels, the extraction and the burning of coal, oil and gas. They are the prime drivers of this devastation. Worse still, they have created and are in the process of creating systems of protection for themselves, their families and their mates. They're creating a 'fortress Australia' that they hope will insulate people like them from the breakdown of our climate. It's why the major parties are criminalising protest right across this country. They are preparing their response to the mass civil disobedience that they can see blooming on our streets right now. They're doing this by enacting a rolling series of draconian bills that create the powers of a police state and a surveillance state. Those powers march us down the road to authoritarianism, totalitarianism and ultimately fascism. If people don't think that is possible in 21st-century Australia, I suggest that they study a bit of human history.

The so-called border protection regime will be a key plank. It's been set up to keep out those unfortunate people who will bear the brunt of the climate emergency, just as surely as it has been used to punish those fleeing war and persecution. Make no mistake: in the coming decades, unless we change our ways, this offshore detention regime and the boat turnbacks will be used ruthlessly against climate refugees. Those who are white, wealthy and permanent citizens of this country will be kept on one side of the fence, or the moat, and those who are not will be forcibly kept out. We are being marched down the road to a new form of eco-fascism—or, if you like, eco-barbarism.

But there is another way. We have to dismantle the systems of oppression and of capital accumulation that are causing so much damage to our planet and its people. The climate movement that we are seeing around the world, including Extinction Rebellion, carries within it the seeds of hope for our future, because young people are not scared of big ideas, and more and more we are seeing middle-aged and older people joining—and power to their collective arms. People on the streets don't want to be there. They feel that they have to be there. They are there because they see more clearly than most in this place the fundamental injustice of climate change, and they have the willingness, the capacity and the ability to fight back. And I make a personal commitment that the Greens and I personally will stand with them in their fight.