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 Senator Gallagher to a question without notice I asked today relating to the Great Barrier Reef.

I appreciate that being a minister covering lots of portfolios makes it difficult, but I was very surprised that the minister didn't have a brief around reports that were in the media, that were across the media spectrum, today about a coral bleaching underway in the Great Barrier Reef. Reports were put out by James Cook University a week ago. Statements have been put out by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. And yet today the minister didn't seem to know that the single-biggest living organism on the planet, an organism you can see from space, was suffering another mass coral bleaching—a marine heatwave.

And it's not a surprise. Every year our oceans are setting new record temperatures. And guess what? In February 2024, this month, they've just set another new record. Temperatures never recorded in our history were recorded in February 2024. And while we are seeing records broken all around the world on land, in our terrestrial environments—in fact, I think this week was the biggest week in climate history given how many records around the world were broken—people don't see what's going on in the ocean. Unless you dive or you're a tourism operator on the Great Barrier Reef or you're an abalone fisherman or whatever, it's out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people. The ocean is the womb of the planet. It controls our weather patterns. It is so essential for life on earth. We've seen unprecedented record-low ice levels in the Antarctic, and—also updated this week—a record loss of sea ice on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The question we need to ask ourselves is: are we doing enough to stop this rapid march of climate change and the damage it's doing to our ecosystems? The minister came in here today and said, 'We're doing what we can.' No, you're not doing what you can! The target the minister came up with from her talking lines about what the Albanese government has done on climate is nowhere near sufficient to hold us anywhere around 1½ degrees of warming—which, by some research reports, we've already exceeded. We've certainly exceeded it in Australia; we're well on the way to two degrees of warming. And our best science tells us that a two-degree warming will mean a loss of 99 per cent of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef.

The decisions we make in this place can make a difference. While we have a government boasting about its climate record, which will do nothing to stop more mass coral bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef, we also see this government, just like the last government, lobbying UNESCO to not declare the Great Barrier Reef in danger. The outstanding universal values of the Great Barrier Reef are why it was declared a World Heritage treasure, and there is no-one on the planet who understands science who doesn't recognise that the outstanding universal values of the Great Barrier Reef are seriously in danger from climate change. Why do we stick our heads in the sand and try to prevent UNESCO from making this statement? That's the question I've been trying to get an answer to for over a decade in this place, but it's still ongoing. I would have thought UNESCO saying, 'You know what? The Great Barrier Reef is in danger. So are all the world's coral reefs,' might be a siren call to action, to governments and people all around the world.

Half a billion people rely on coral reefs for their livelihoods, and they are disappearing—dying before our eyes. And the minister hasn't even got a briefing on the bleaching unfolding on the Great Barrier Reef. All I asked was for an update and when we might know whether this is another mass coral bleaching—by the way, the fifth in eight years and the seventh since 1998, which was the very first mass coral bleaching ever recorded in history. We need to do better.

Question agreed to.