Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I reflected today, prior to this, on my first speech in parliament, nearly five years ago. One of the key reasons I wanted to go into the parliament and become a Greens senator was to protect the ocean, focus on marine conservation and clean up the ocean. I refuse to accept that one of the biggest living organisms on this planet, the Great Barrier Reef, is going to be destroyed on our watch. I appreciate that politics, this chamber and global politics, has suffered from a severe outbreak of mass moronity, but I will not accept—for my children's sake and for future generations—that we are just going to roll over and let the coal industry and those too stuck in their ideology not take action on this problem in the Great Barrier Reef.

In the last months I have been chairing a Senate inquiry into warming oceans and the impact that climate change is having on the oceans and our fisheries. Let us state very clearly: it is irrefutable that increasing emissions are driving higher water temperatures and it is irrefutable that higher water temperatures are destroying and impacting our marine ecosystems. My committee, the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee, has heard that Tasmania has only recently lost its 10,000-year-old giant kelp ecosystems that used to stretch from Eddystone lighthouse at Eddystone Point at the top of north-east Tasmania all the way down to southern Tasmania. I was contacted by Mick, from the Eaglehawk Dive Centre, last year and he said to me, 'Senator, if you are going to come diving on these giant kelp forests, you had better come soon' Well, unfortunately, I missed the boat. He appeared as a witness at our inquiry only a couple of months ago and he said, 'They are gone. The giant kelp forests are gone.'

Let me tell you about the similarity between giant kelp forests in the south of our country, in the southern oceans, and the Great Barrier Reef. They are not just reefs and seaweed kelp forest; they are cities underwater for marine creatures, for biodiversity. That is where our productivity for our fisheries come from—for rock lobsters, for abalone, for fin-fish. If the reefs die, our fisheries industry goes with them. Let us be really clear about this: it is not just tourism jobs that we are debating here today in this motion. We have been going into scientific evidence about the impact that warming waters are having on our fisheries around the country. The committee still has other states to go to, including to Far North Queensland. A scientist who spoke to the committee at One Tree Island in Queensland has been there for 25 years monitoring ocean temperatures, and the committee was told that we are in unchartered territories, that no-one could have possibly predicted that we would have back-to-back bleaching events. No-one could have predicted that.

And it is not just the bleaching events. It looks bad because the corals look like they have died. It takes a long time for these corals to bounce back. They are severely weakened by their condition. So, when we get a dump of nutrients into the water and we get physical degradation from cyclones and other systems, it makes it a lot harder for the coral to recover—and that is exactly the situation we are facing now. I watched Professor Terry Hughes on 60 Minutes last night. I generally have a policy of not responding to the idiocy of Malcom Roberts, but I will say to Malcolm Roberts that it was actually—