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

I want to talk tonight about the impacts of global warming. I watched in horror recently as senior government ministers handed around a lump coal in the House of Representatives and laughed, joked and cheered as if coal was some kind of climate saviour rather than one of the major causes of global warming that it actually is.

I have listened in disbelief recently as Prime Minister Turnbull, with no evidence whatsoever, blamed renewable energy for problems in South Australia caused by transmission lines being impacted by extreme weather. Today, I fumed in this place during question time as a minister in this place—Minister Simon Birmingham—mocked my friend Senator Peter Whish-Wilson. The context of that mocking was that Senator Whish-Wilson had read out a tweet from Professor Terry Hughes, who is the head of the ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. I want to put that tweet on the record again tonight:

I showed the results of aerial surveys of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef to my students and then we wept.

That is the tweet, the quote from Prof Hughes, that Senator Whish-Wilson read out in question time today. As part of the response—and I will not dignify it by calling it an answer because it was not an answer from Minister Birmingham. It was a response to Senator Whish-Wilson's question, and as part of that response Minister Birmingham suggested that Senator Whish-Wilson might need a hanky. Of course that met with the typical fake laughs and fake cheers from government senators in this place that we have become all too familiar with.

It would not surprise me to learn that Senator Whish-Wilson did need a hanky every now and again when he thinks about climate change, because I know how seriously he takes this issue. I know how much it means to him as a human being and as a senator that we get on top of global warming. And do you know what I say to Senator Birmingham? He can bring me a hanky while he is at it because I do not mind admitting that I have shed a few tears about climate change myself, especially when I have to sit down with kids at my place and apologise to them for the bloody lack of effort and intensity with which this government is treating the issue and for how they want to dig up more coal to create higher levels of carbon in our atmosphere and cause more climate change.

I do not mind admitting that I have needed a hanky every now and again too, and you can bring a few hankies for Professor Hughes and his students too who told us that they wept when they saw the results of the aerial surveys on the Great Barrier Reef. Good on them for weeping. I am glad they care so much. I wish other people in Australia and particularly in the Senate and in the House of Representatives cared half as much as Professor Hughes about global warming. But do you know who are really going to need hankies? It is our children and their children. They are the ones who are going to really need the hankies because they are the ones who will be weeping at the loss of opportunity, the loss of life and the massive extra challenges that they will face in their lives as a result of the greed and stupidity that we are showing as a generation and our collective blind refusal to act on what is absolutely staring us in the face.

Let's be up-front about what is going on here. The Great Barrier Reef, one of the most magnificent natural icons in the world, is dying before our eyes. What we are getting is lumps of coal being waved around and jokes about hankies. But of course it is not just the Great Barrier Reef. In my state of Tasmania we have recently seen unprecedented wilderness fires. Areas and ecosystems have burned that have never burnt before—to our knowledge—that are not fire adapted and that will most likely never recover from the burning of the fires that we saw in Tasmania last summer. And I will tell everyone that, if you want to go and see our great kelp forests in Tasmania in their prime, I am sorry but you have missed them. They are nearly gone thanks to ocean warming. The east coast of Tasmania is one of the top three ocean warming hotspots on the planet. They are gone. If you want to dive on those forests, you have actually left it too late.

So what can we do? Well, of course, we can take strong action. But I will tell you what I am not going to do: I am not going to debate climate science with fools. I am not going to debate climate science with idiots who claim that it is not real or fools who claim it is not being caused by human action. I am not going to waste a minute of my time debating those matters with those people. I am saying that we need to collectively focus on how we are going to meet the challenges, because, colleagues, the feedback loops are kicking in here. We have a major crisis on our hands. We are all in terrible trouble. We need to focus on adaptation and how we are going to deal with sea-level rise. It is going to displace billions of people around the world this century, and, above all else, it is going to massively impact on the most vulnerable people. How are we going to deal with increases in temperature or localised decreases in temperature caused by changes in local climates? How are we going to deal with an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like Cyclone Debbie, which right now is pounding Queensland? How are we going to deal with those things? Those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves, and that is where the debate needs to be headed now—not to debating whether or not humans are causing climate change, when so clearly our actions have contributed so much to the disaster that our planet, this ecosphere and the people on it are facing.

I know one thing: the Australian Greens will keep fighting on this issue. We will be ceaseless in harrying this government and others in this place who think a mine like the Adani mine is still a good idea. We will be harrying them and harassing them ceaselessly, those fans of coal, those stupid people who are going to cost future generations so much. We will give it everything we have got, but I will tell you now my biggest fear. My biggest fear is that when my time in the Senate is done all I will have left to do is stand up, in my last contribution in this place, and apologise to future generations for our collective failure to take the action we needed to give them even half a sniff at the opportunities we have enjoyed in our lives.