Senate debates

Tuesday, 8 February 2022

Matters of Urgency

Prime Minister

7:08 pm

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

To quote Russell Crowe from Gladiator, Senator Abetz, the time for honouring yourself and your government will soon be at an end. Sitting here listening to the achievements of this government, I find it no wonder that Australians are so exasperated, so frustrated and so despairing at the state of politics in this country. We have maybe five days in this parliament this year; that's it. With five sitting days before, almost certainly, an election that has to be held for this august chamber by 22 May, what do we have on the agenda?

We have a government fighting culture wars, bringing in a religious discrimination bill to discriminate against transgender individuals—citizens in this country who have rights. We see in the media, making up the bulk of news stories, exchanges of text messages between senior members of the LNP, Mr Peter Dutton in the other place and the Prime Minister, and we see Mr Barnaby Joyce calling the Prime Minister a psycho and a psychopath and who knows what else. This government is just a long series of dumpster fires. This parliament has been non-stop chaos, scandal and corruption. And, in just a few months time—in fact, in less than 100 days—Australians have a chance to go to the polls and take back the power from this government.

I and many other Australians are most despairing of the fact that this chaos is distracting from so many important things and so much reform we need in this place, and from the great challenges of our time. I accept that COVID has been a very difficult few years for all of us, for all Australians and, in fact, the whole international community, and we're not out of the woods yet. But we also are still seeing a relentless assault on our environment by big corporations hell-bent on propping up their balance sheets, hell-bent on growing their earnings per share so they can keep their share prices up, and going out and exploring 80,000 kilometres of new ocean acreage for oil and gas at a time when the International Energy Agency tells us that 2021 has to be the last year of oil and gas exploration on this planet if we're to stick to 1.5 degrees of warming.

I despair when I look at my home state of Tasmania where the Tarkine is still under assault. Mining company MMG, a company that cares only about money and its own profits, wants to go into some of the most precious Gondwana rainforest left on this planet—which, according to information recently released by the Bob Brown Foundation released information is a breeding ground for the rare and endangered masked owls—and build a toxic tailings dam on a beautiful river in the Tarkine and goldmine a forest. And in Blue Derby, where mountain biking has turned that town into a transition town, so-called Sustainable Timbers Tasmania want to log right up to the mountain bike tracks, even though the reason that this place has been so successful is because of its beauty, its rareness and its geology. It is on the international map, yet we still want to log it, even after tens of millions of dollars of federal and state money have gone into investing in a different future to forestry. But we just can't let go. And we see oil and gas companies, as usual, getting the run of the roost in this place.

It will be different in three months time. I have absolute faith and confidence that Australians have had enough of the chaos and enough of the corruption and they want change. I believe that, and I believe I will be vindicated on election night. We can take this country in a new direction.

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