Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

By a clear margin, 2023 was the hottest year on record. We are now closer than ever before to breaching the 1.5-degree global heating limit. These are not records that the world should be smashing. This warning is just another in the long list of warnings over the years that the planet is on the brink. How many more red alerts, code reds and alarm bells will ring before the world decides to act? How many more species will become extinct before Australia decides to act? How many more lives and livelihoods will be lost before we decide to act? We know who the culprits and the villains are. Coal and gas are the biggest contributors to the climate crisis. Australia's insatiable appetite to dig up, ship off and burn fossil fuels is killing the planet.

We know this has to end, yet here we have a Labor government doing the bidding of their mates Santos and Woodside to fast-track their climate-destroying offshore gas projects. Rather than strengthening nature protections, as Environment and Water Minister Plibersek promised at the last election, Labor is doing a dodgy deal with the Liberals to make gas projects exempt from environmental laws altogether. They are trying to sideline and silence First Nations communities who have been fighting against these projects.

The millions of dollars in dirty donations to major political parties by fossil fuel corporations is working, like it's meant to. They are writing our environmental laws. Well, the Greens are not going to stand by and let this happen. We will fight tooth and nail. Join our fight. Tell Labor to work with the Greens to strengthen our environmental laws, not with the climate wreckers to trash them.