Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Canberra for her question, because she knows, and she is representing her constituents when she says, that climate change is already having a devastating effect on our natural environment, including through more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Those communities that are cleaning up after floods right now will never be the same, just as those communities that have lived through bushfires, like the 2019-20 bushfires, will remember forever the lives lost, the homes lost and the regional economies devastated. These weren't just human disasters; these were ecological bombs ripping through our natural environment. With those bushfires, we're talking about three billion animals that died or were displaced from their homes. We're talking about 80 per cent—as the member for Macquarie knows—of the Blue Mountains area burnt to the ground. More than half of the Gondwana forests also were lost in those bushfires. We can't afford to relive the past decade of inaction, when Liberal governments simply gave up on our environment, blocking action on climate change, sabotaging the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, ignoring the extinction crisis and pretending that the mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef wasn't happening.

This is no surprise coming from the Liberals and Nationals—they've never pretended to care about the environment—but I think that Greens voters would actually be shocked to see Greens members of parliament getting ready to sit next to Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce to vote against action on climate change. They would be shocked to see the Greens voting with the Liberals and Nationals against a safeguard mechanism.

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