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

Thanks for that explanation, Minister. The original bills tabled by Minister Watt did not deserve to pass through this parliament. They were an abject failure to respond with the speed, the urgency and the strength that the current climate and biodiversity collapses demand of us. We are living in a planetary emergency. It is likely that billions of people will die in this century—and if they don't die, it is almost certain that billions of people will be displaced from their homes, facing drought, facing famine and facing wars over basic necessities of life like water. Yet the Labor Party, a party with a demonstrated hostility towards protecting the environment and a demonstrated aversion to strong climate action, brought a piece of legislation to this parliament which would have fast-tracked coal and gas projects and which did nothing to address the impacts of native forest logging and land clearing on our forest and non-forest ecological communities.

These bills, even with the significant amendments secured by the Greens, still do not meet even the bare minimum necessary to respond to the biodiversity collapse and breakdown of our planet's climate that we are living through right now. But I genuinely believe the agreement we struck with the government is the best we could have done. Remember, this is a government that was prepared to derail any prospect of climate action in the previous term unless it could continue to approve new coal and gas projects in the middle of a climate crisis. This is a government that has cheered on the environmental destruction wrought by the native forest logging industry and by the land clearers, for many decades, in this country. It's a government that has a demonstrated track record of being hostile to nature and of not giving a flying fig about environmental protection. I think we've done the best we could.

I want to say something very clearly to people in the environment movement and in particular to climate activists and forest activists who, right now, in places like Tasmania, are out in the bush, on the blockades, on the front lines, defending forests and defending nature. The Greens understand that the job is not yet done. We understand that this package of reforms, while significantly improved by the negotiations conducted by the Greens, still does not do the job of adequately protecting nature in this country. It does not. It falls far, far short. I say to the activists that we will see you on the streets, and we will be with you on the streets. We will see you out in the forest, and we will be with you on the barricades out in the forest, because the planetary emergency, the climate crisis, the biodiversity emergency, that we are living through demands action of us all. It demands commitment, it demands courage, and it demands the bravery to stand up to the psychopaths and the sociopaths that run fossil fuel corporations in this country. They are prepared to place their own greedy, avaricious wants over and above the welfare of billions of people on this planet. Of course, the people who are going to face the impacts of the collapse of our climate systems are overwhelmingly poor people, and they are overwhelmingly in the Global South—black- and brown-skinned people. They are going to pay the price for the avarice and the greed of the people who are running our fossil fuel corporations and the people who come into places like this and do their bidding in this place.