Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Climate Trigger) Bill 2022, and I thank my colleague Senator Hanson-Young for bringing this bill forward. This bill is an important and vital step towards climate justice, a long-overdue reform that recognises the climate crisis as the most significant threat to our natural environments and begins the work of aligning our environmental laws with the science and the lived reality of communities right across this country.

The 48th Parliament convenes at a critical time. We are not on the precipice of the climate crisis; we are already in it. Across Australia and across the world, the canary in the coalmine is no longer singing; it is screaming. Floods, droughts, cyclones, toxic algal blooms—the climate impacts scientists have long warned us about are no longer future risks; they are happening now, and the waves are literally lapping at our doors. So the question for the parliament is simple: will the Labor government finally act to protect people and planet, or will it continue to serve the dirty interests of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our future?

The record so far is deeply concerning. In the last term of parliament, Labor approved over 30 new coal and gas projects. In only its first month post-election, cynically, the government gave approval for the North West Shelf Project Extension, a massive carbon bomb that locks Australia into pollution until 2070. My seven-year-old will be in his 50s and this climate bomb will still be being mined and burnt. That decision commits future generations to decades of carbon emissions, even as communities are facing escalating climate crises.

And this pattern continues. Right now, multiple new coal and gas projects are under assessment through the EPBC Act, yet there is still no requirement for the government to consider the climate change that these projects will cause over their life spans. How many more dolphins, rays and sharks need to wash up on South Australia's beaches? How many more homes must become uninsurable because of flood or cyclone risk? How many more communities must lose their livelihoods to bushfires before this government stops pretending climate change is an abstract problem that it can tackle with words and goodwill alone? Time and time again the Labor government pats itself on the back for lofty climate promises and headline targets without meaningful policy action to back them up. You cannot solve the climate crisis through press releases or through a bid for COP. While communities are hit by fires, floods and food insecurity, Labor continues to approve new coal and gas that drives the crisis they claim to be addressing.

This bill is a vital intervention. It would require the minister to take climate impacts of projects considered under environmental law into account, and it would prevent the approval of major polluting projects that undermine our national and global climate targets and responsibilities. That is the very least we owe to our communities, the very least we owe to our children.

This isn't a hypothetical. The damage is already being felt right here in communities, including those close to my own home. Across western Victoria and South Australia, farmers and regional communities are in the grip of a devastating drought. For the past 15 months rainfall has been at record lows, with western and south-western Victoria seeing the lowest average rainfall in 126 years. Feed for livestock has all but disappeared. Water sources are drying up and families are struggling with soaring costs just to stay on the land they have worked for generations and to keep producing the food that we all rely on. My heart breaks for these communities. As a fifth generation farmer from central Victoria, I know the toll that drought takes. It's not just the financial pressure; it's the emotional strain. It wears down livelihoods, mental health, families and entire communities. While parts of Victoria saw increased rain in June, for many the future remains deeply uncertain because we are in the midst of a climate crisis where our planet is getting hotter, droughts are more frequent and intense, and farmers and their communities are finding it harder than ever to stay on their land.

Let's make no mistake, this is a crisis that is driven by greed—the greed of coal and gas corporations who continue to wreck our climate and environment just to boost their bottom line, and the greed of the major parties who continue to line their pockets with donations from fossil fuel corporations while refusing to take any meaningful action that our communities so desperately need. I cannot believe in 2025 we are still allowed to receive corporate donations from the very people wrecking this planet. The mind boggles.

We have seen exactly what it looks like in practice, with approval of new coal and gas projects with no sign of slowing down or changing course. I will just say that communities in Victoria were dumbfounded that Labor could go and approve the North West Shelf Project straight after the election. What an insult to those people who put their trust in that party. Farmers, regional communities and the whole of Australia deserve better. We deserve a government that represents the interests of people and the environment, not corporations. I don't know how many times we need to keep saying that. From the farms of western Victoria to the low-lying islands of the Torres Strait, communities, livelihoods and their way of life is under threat—a direct result of the climate crisis and decades of government inaction.

I want to express my deepest solidarity with Uncle Paul and Uncle Pabai. They are bringing the fight for climate justice to our courts. Despite the disappointing Federal Court ruling, the judge acknowledged the devastating impact of climate change on the Torres Strait Islands, from shoreline erosion to coral reef damage and the loss of traditional food sources and culture. Communities like Saibai and Boigu are already living the crisis. Sea levels in the Torres Strait are rising six to eight millimetres every year, more than double the global average, and have risen about six centimetres in the past decade. If temperatures rise above 1.5, as they are predicted to do, many islands will become uninhabitable. Without deep emission cuts, sea levels could rise more than a metre by the end of the century, flooding irreplaceable sacred sites, including burial grounds. What the court could not do in law, parliament must do in action. Customary ways of life and millennia of cultural heritage stand to disappear if we fail to slash emissions now. In court the elders said:

If Boigu was gone, or I had to leave it, because it was underwater, I will be nothing … I will become nobody.

Farther from home, within the next 24 hours, the International Court of Justice is expected to deliver its advisory opinion on states' legal obligations regarding climate change, a landmark case brought by Vanuatu and supported by over 100 countries. Young people across the Pacific islands are taking the world's biggest issue, climate change, to the world's highest court. The Greens stand with them in solidarity and are incredibly disappointed by the evidence that the Australian government put forward to that case, basically saying that Australia doesn't have a responsibility under global obligations to drive down emissions. Shame on this government! This moment could reshape how international law holds major polluters accountable and strengthen the case for loss-and-damage funding for vulnerable nations. It reaffirms that this is a pivotal time for governments to reflect on and act on their obligations to deliver climate justice, something the Albanese government is still failing to do.

How did we get here? The fossil-fuel lobby's grip on government is deep, systemic and corrosive. From revolving doors to secret meetings, fossil-fuel interests shape our politics and our policies, not the communities facing rising seas. Woodside itself was invited to the Treasurer's economic roundtable last week, even as it pushes ahead with gas expansion that will plague us for generations. Come on! Meanwhile, the government continues to approve new gas fields, even though 80 per cent of Australia's gas is exported offshore, delivering minimal public return. I hear the Nats say, 'One mine's not going to make a difference,' but, if we all think like that, of course it's not. We are in this place to lead—to show leadership—not to follow. This is not transparency or democracy; it's a state captured by corporate greed. Political access is clearly for sale, and lobbyists are literally writing the rules in this place.

This influence is blocking action. It's why the government fast-tracked the North West Shelf extension, a 70-year carbon bomb, and why coal and gas projects continue to be signed off on with no signs of slowing down. We've heard the lies that gas is a strategic necessity and that we need new exports to keep the economy going. We're seeing the results—vulnerable communities stranded, ecosystems collapsing and corporations profiting off of the pollution and destruction. If we are serious about climate justice, we need to also remove fossil fuels from politics. Without that, there is no path, legal or moral, to protect cultures, communities or country. It's time to stand with our farmers, with our elders, like Uncle Paul and Uncle Pabai, with the climate movement and with every community on the front line of the crisis. It's time to reform our environmental laws and act on climate right now.

That's why this bill matters. If we are serious about protecting nature, our forests, our farmland, our coasts and our communities, then we cannot keep pretending that climate change is separate to the environment. From the shorelines of South Australia, where my family and I spend our summers swimming with the eagle rays—we return there and see the devastation, the marine graveyards washing up on the beaches—to the low-lying islands of the Torres Strait, where culture is literally being swallowed by the sea, the climate crisis is already reshaping our environment in irreversible ways. And yet our environmental laws are still silent on climate. That is a failure of leadership if ever there were one. This bill would change that. It would force the minister to consider the climate impacts of every single new project. It would stop the biggest polluters—the mega coal and gas corporations, which have no place in a climate-safe future—from ever getting approvals, and it would bring our outdated environmental laws into the 21st century.

So the question for Labor and my colleagues across the bench is this: what kind of legacy do you want to leave? You can keep choosing to do the bidding of Woodside and Santos, rubber-stamping pollution and locking in climate collapse, or you can work with the Greens to fix our broken laws, to protect our environment and to give our kids a fighting chance at a liveable future. This place could be where we turn the tide on climate change. If Labor has the courage to break free from the fossil-fuel lobby and stand with communities instead of corporations, together we can legislate a climate trigger and finally put the environment and the people who depend on it first. Thank you again to my colleague Senator Hanson-Young for bringing this critical bill to the parliament.