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

We are entering an era of global boiling. Last month we saw the hottest three-week period ever recorded on the planet. Countries around the Mediterranean are being devastated by fires that are burning as we stand here today. There are heatwaves across the Northern Hemisphere: in Europe and in the United States. Canada is burning, ocean temperatures are soaring, and the ice sheets at both the north and south ends of this planet are melting away. The Gulf Stream, one of the great drivers of global climate patterns, is flickering in and out of existence and, in coming years, will likely cease to circulate in anything like the way it has.

I shudder to think about the bushfires that will burn in south-eastern Australia, particularly this summer. The climate is breaking down. It's breaking down because there is a blanket of suffocating and stifling pollution surrounding our planet, and that blanket has been caused, in the main, by burning fossil fuels and by deforestation.

As the climate continues to break down around us, before our eyes, it's becoming abundantly clear that our governments and our entire apparatus of state have been captured, purchased and co-opted to defend the fossil fuel and forestry corporations. It's nothing less than complete and utter state capture. The institutional bribery of political donations has corrupted our democracy to the extent that our parliament has become an agent of corporate profit and planetary destruction, rather than an agent of the people who vote to put us in this place. It is an utterly perverse situation.

Instead of protecting people and protecting the environment that underpins and sustains all life on this planet, governments are protecting the people who are destroying the planet's capacity to sustain human life. But what's worse is that governments are persecuting those who protest the destruction of this planet's capacity to sustain life.

Governments around the world, including those in so-called liberal democracies—and I include Australia in that definition—are implementing draconian antiprotest laws that threaten the very foundations of our democracy. Governments here in Australia and around the world are trying to arrest their way out of a climate crisis, but that is a response that is doomed to fail because they will soon figure out, I hope, that the jails are simply not big enough. We are seeing the early stages of a movement around the world that is refusing to allow governments and corporations to compromise the future of our kids and our grandkids and rip opportunity, prosperity and even the potential for life away from future generations. That movement is going to continue to build.

In my home state of Tasmania, someone who I hold in the absolute highest regard, Dr Colette Harmsen, was recently jailed for her part in a protest that was organised by the Bob Brown Foundation to defend nature in beautiful takayna/Tarkine in north-west Tasmania. This is the first time in over a decade that an environmental activist has been sentenced to jail time in Tasmania. Dr Harmsen, a veterinarian, was sentenced to three months imprisonment for trespass. Just think about that, colleagues. She was sentenced to three months imprisonment, three months deprivation of liberty, for trespass. It was not trespass in her own interests. It was trespass in the interests of the public good, trying to defend nature from the relentless assault it is under from corporate interests prioritising profit over nature, facilitated by the major parties in this place and parties like them around the world.

When sentencing Dr Harmsen, the magistrate, Mr Webster, said, 'No doubt she will learn a lesson from her imprisonment.' Just what is that lesson? Is it that corporate interests trump environmental values? Is it that profits are more important than the planet's capacity to support human and other life? Is it that the livability of this planet for future generations is not as important as the bottom line for business? I think those are the lessons a rational person looking at where we collectively are today would learn.

Prior to her sentencing, Dr Harmsen said:

… I am standing up for the forests, for takayna, a safer planet and if that makes me a dangerous criminal then I think we are going to need bigger prisons.

Indeed, Colette, I couldn't agree more. I want to say thank you, Colette—thank you for your courage, for your bravery, for your fortitude, for your determination and for your self-sacrifice. You are a hero to many people, including me. Strength to your arm, and I'm going to pop into the Risdon Prison to see you not too long after I get back to Tasmania if you are interested in a visit from me and from others. Thank you, again, Colette.

Overnight we also saw some arrests in Western Australia. People were arrested, and, again, these are people who are understandably extremely frustrated about governments' failures to act on climate change and biodiversity loss. I want to warn people here that this is only the beginning, and that human history will show you—if you bother to read it—that when enough people feel abjectly let down and abandoned by their governments for long enough they will take matters into their own hands. We've seen it repeatedly, time after time after time.

If you wonder why civilisations have crumbled away through human history, let me tell you the two common factors that every civilisational collapse or crumbling have had in common. The first is environmental collapse and the second is wealth inequality. Are those two issues ringing any bells for anyone in here? We are living through environmental and climate collapse at a planetary scale and in a society where wealth inequality is massive and growing rapidly. Colleagues, if you can't feel or hear the social contract beginning to crumble away and fracture under our feet then you're just not paying attention. And I urge you to pay attention, because this social unrest is only starting.

I want to say to the people who are locking on to coal terminals and locking on to bulldozers to protect our forests, who are taking to the streets and blockading and causing what some conservatives and most people in this place would describe as 'rampant inconvenience', while waving their arms around and clutching at their hair, good on you! You want to talk about inconvenience? Can I explain to you what the climate crisis is going to deliver us? You ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the fires, the floods, the calamities that are coming down the line. You ain't seen nothing yet.