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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to my question.

While I was sitting here I was thinking to myself how good it would be to get this energy in the chamber that I've just witnessed in the last 25 minutes and to get senators to focus on the question that I asked today about the slow and tragic death of the Great Barrier Reef. This is the greatest living organism on the planet. It can be seen from space. It's home to incredible biodiversity, and it's much loved by Australians and, indeed, by the international community. It's UNESCO world heritage listed, and it's an absolutely stunning part of this country.

Yesterday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, the US premier ocean science agency on this planet, warned in their latest set of data that they predict a 90 per cent chance—nine out of 10—that the Barrier Reef is going to bleach again in three weeks' time. Indeed, the bleaching has already started. It was already reported two weeks ago.

For senators who aren't focused on this, I urge you to think about the consequences of a third mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in the space of five years. I chaired a Senate inquiry back in 2015, and we were told by the scientists that the best climate models they had didn't predict the possibility of mass back-to-back bleachings until at least 2050 based on current emissions trajectories, and yet we saw in 2016-17 that 50 per cent of the corals on the Barrier Reef were bleached. Most of those have subsequently died.

We've seen extreme weather events cause severe damage to the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef. Unfortunately, given how warm the water is right now, it's extremely likely we're going to see the same thing again. Who wants to guess what the consequences will be of a third mass coral bleaching on the Barrier Reef? Don't underestimate it when I say that another mass coral mortality on the Barrier Reef will certainly be the end of the Barrier Reef as we know it. It's in our lifetime and on our watch. And yet, do you think you could get an answer out of the government today on whether they're concerned about this or on whether they agree with our American scientific counterparts that this is the prognosis? What happens if this mass mortality occurs on the Barrier Reef in the next few weeks?

Yes, 64,000 jobs will be at stake if the Great Barrier Reef dies, but it's a lot more than that. And it is not just the Barrier Reef, sadly. The seagrass off Shark Bay, which is critical habitat for dugongs and other marine life, have been severely impacted by warming oceans. I have been talking about this for the last five years. Indeed, the previous Labor government, with Mr Tony Burke in the other place, listed the giant Tasmanian kelp forest as a critically endangered habitat in 2012. They're gone—all the way from the north-east of Tasmania to the south of Tasmania. On our watch one of the great oceanic ecosystems has gone, and gone are the marine life and our commercial fisheries that depend on it. You wonder why our fisheries are in so much trouble.

Yet we can't even get an answer from the government. They won't even acknowledge it. It's just not good enough. We need to be doing everything we possibly can to take action on climate change. We will never get that until we get acknowledgement. We need to move out of denial into understanding the problem we have before us and the magnitude of changes we need to make. It starts in this place.

I will just finish with this. People think climate change is an environmental problem first and foremost. Well, it's not. It's an economic problem because all of the damage that we're seeing to places like the Barrier Reef is happening because we are polluting the planet. It is coming from business activity. It is an economic problem. Even more than being an economic problem, it is a political problem. We could fix it if we had the political courage. We could make businesses pay for their pollution. We could regulate and pull companies into line. We could transition to a clean energy future, to a zero emissions future, and we could do it quickly if we had the political courage. The reason we don't, the reason it's a political problem and the reason the machine is broken is that big special interests run this place and they will not let that happen. We have to make it happen. We need to get truth first in this place. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.