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

We're living in a time when the most important issues facing us by far are the breakdown of the planet's climate and the collapse of the ecosystems that underpin all life on earth, including human life. If we don't act urgently and radically to address these overlapping challenges, the world will inevitably, as it has already started to do, slide into social and environmental chaos. It is already starting, colleagues, and, if you can't see that, if you can't feel it and if you can't understand it, then you are simply not paying attention.

We have to be honest about what we are facing here. We are facing drowned cities. We are facing billions of people who will die by disease or be displaced by wars, famines, floods or fires. The human cost and the impact on nature will be incalculable. Part of the ecosystem collapse that we are living through is the extinction crisis. Around a million species across this planet are on the brink of extinction, and extinctions are now happening more rapidly than at any other time that humans have been in existence.

While our planetary survival mechanisms crumble around us, in this place, the political establishment uses public funds to encourage the burning of fossil fuels, uses public funds to encourage the poisoning of our rivers and our waterways and uses public funds to encourage the destruction of our precious native forests. We are literally subsidising extinction. You utter fools. You are leading us into catastrophe and calamity.

How else are you responding? You're responding by passing laws that criminalise the people that are actually demanding that we stop subsidising extinction, that we stop subsidising deforestation and that we stop subsidising the burning of fossil fuels. You want to throw people who are demanding you stop doing those things into prison—in some cases, for many years—rather than doing what we should be doing, which is profusely thanking them for taking such risks in the public interest. You utter fools.

I want to speak quickly about two species in my home state of Tasmania that are being subsidised into extinction. One is the maugean skate, an ancient species of skate found only in the Macquarie Harbour that is being driven into extinction by the industrial salmon farming industry. This is an ancient relic species that has been with us since dinosaurs roamed the earth is now down to less than 120 individuals and is being driven into extinction by an industrial salmon-farming industry that is owned by foreign multinational corporations, directly subsidised by the government. The Prime Minister came down to Tasmania a couple of weeks ago and announced funding for a so-called oxygenation trial in Macquarie Harbour.

The science is in: we know what is driving the maugean skate into extinction. Labor is putting off a decision about what to do about fish-farming in Macquarie Harbour, but indecision is actually making a decision. Labor is backing in the industrial salmon-farming industry over and above the survival of the precious maugean skate. Labor chooses multinational corporate profits over the survival of a species—it is an absolute disgrace, you utter, utter fools. One million species are sliding into extinction. The maugean skate is on the brink and you come down to Tasmania to try to win the seat of Braddon for yourselves, placing your own political self-interest over and above the survival of a species.