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

I also rise to take note of the ACNC report that Senator Canavan was just speaking to. There we have it. One of the biggest shills for the fossil fuel companies that this parliament has ever seen has just laid his cards firmly on the table. He's been very clear. He's going to back in the big planet-cooking fossil fuel corporations, the big destroyers of nature, over and above ordinary Australians who, in ever-increasing numbers, are taking matters into their own hands and bravely standing up for genuine climate action and to protect nature from those very companies that Senator Canavan is in here to represent.

I salute the activists around this country that the government is taking on and trying to quash. I thank them because they are bravely putting their bodies and, in many cases, their liberty on the line not for themselves but for their children, for their grandchildren and for the large numbers of people—mostly in the global south, overwhelmingly, black- or brown-skinned and, overwhelmingly, poor—who are going to pay the highest price as our climate breaks down around us. So, whether they be activists around the country or activists around the world, I stand here—and I know I do that on behalf of my colleagues in the Greens—and say thank you for your bravery, your passion, your commitment and your foresight.

I can't mention those words without reflecting on a feisty and optimistic little NGO from my home state of Tasmania: the Bob Brown Foundation. Again, we see activists—people who work with, and are associated with, the Bob Brown Foundation, including the board of that foundation, and Bob himself, a former senator and former Leader of the Australian Greens—who optimistically and in the most feisty and passionate of ways are defending nature in Tasmania and, in particular, that glorious, beautiful place, takayna/Tarkine, which is rich in Aboriginal cultural heritage and rich in biodiversity and which is scenic, spectacular and diverse. They are defending that beautiful part of Tasmania against the ravages of the mining and the logging industries. What are they facing when they do that? They are facing state and Commonwealth governments who are attacking them at an organisation level by trying to change their tax deductibility status and who are also—in cahoots, I might add, with the corporations whose profits they are trying to defend—attacking the very activists by writing legislation that puts in place mandatory sentencing laws and other draconian provisions that are designed to curtail people's right to speak out in what is supposedly a liberal democracy.

This, of course, is what happens when political parties like the LNP and the ALP are in the pockets of the big corporations—those corporations that invest what is, for them, a pittance but which is, in fact, many millions of dollars a year in political donations to each of those parties. And boy—ka-ching!—does it pay off. It's the big jackpot! They get approvals for their coalmines. They get public subsidies for extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels. They get public subsidies—for example, like in my home state of Tasmania and Senator Rice's home state of Victoria—for strip mining our native forests and destroying hundreds and thousands and, at times, millions of creatures in the process, not to mention the massive carbon emissions that they're delivering into our atmosphere as a result of those processes.

I warn colleagues that the social compact is beginning to fracture, not just in this country but around the world. Governments, Labor and Liberal, can sit down with the big corporations and draft all the draconian laws that they like but they will find that over time the jails just are not big enough to hold all the brave activists who, in ever-increasing numbers, will undoubtedly put themselves at risk in order to try to stop the devastation of nature and the breakdown of our climate. I thank all of them.