Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Families and Social Services (Senator Ruston) to a question without notice asked by Senator Whish-Wilson today relating to climate change.

While I was waiting for my chance to take note of answers, I was looking at Senator Birmingham and I just remembered a question I asked in the Senate of Senator Birmingham five years ago where I read a tweet from Professor Terry Hughes, one of the world's global coral experts. He'd just got back from surveying the Great Barrier Reef. He said that his students looked at the survey results and they wept. Of course, Professor Hughes has been a very outspoken advocate for action on climate change because of his connection to the oceans and the Great Barrier Reef.

I won't go into Senator Birmingham's response, but I did want to frame it in the sense that we had one coalition senator in here today quoting John Maynard Keynes: 'When the facts change, I change my mind.' I say to coalition senators: surely the facts before us are very obvious—devastating, indeed—when you look at the information that's coming through on the changes we've seen in our oceans in just the last five years. Yet their approach to climate change and tackling the greatest challenge of our time hasn't changed at all—no action except distraction, and any excuse for not taking action, while we've had three mass coral bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef that have led to 50 per cent loss of coral cover on this greatest, most international global wonder, a wonder you can see from space; while the majority of the world's coral reefs have suffered even more significant damage from warming oceans; while Tasmania's giant kelp forests have vanished in the last five years, as have many seagrass beds over the country; and while over 1,000 kilometres of mangroves in the Northern Territory and Northern Queensland have been lost from warming oceans, in an environment that's already adapted to warm oceans. These are the extreme facts we need to face. So why aren't we changing our minds? Why is it that our resources minister and Prime Minister have just given 80,000 square kilometres of our oceans to the oil and gas industry, including some of the world's biggest polluters, to carve up and blast the hell out of with seismic surveys, risking these oceans and their values and habitats with oil and gas drilling and by establishing industrial production at our coastlines?

I asked the minister today whether she accepted the simple, established scientific fact that burning fossil fuels leads to more greenhouse emissions and that more greenhouse gas emissions are directly correlated with and causative of warming oceans. And what did we get out of the minister? All she could say is, 'I'm not a climate denier.' That's just not good enough. She could easily be a climate sceptic. I know there are senators in this chamber, such as Senator Abetz, who don't call themselves climate deniers but like to call themselves climate sceptics. Why didn't the minister just come out and say, 'Yes, Senator, that is exactly right: burning more fossil fuels leads to warming oceans, and warming oceans have led to these catastrophic impacts'?

It doesn't matter if we get our emissions under control this week; we've still got 20 years of ocean warming to come from what we've already burnt. That's how dire it is. I just want to repeat that for senators. Even if we take radical action, as David Attenborough tells us we have to do and as the Greens have been saying for decades, we still have warming locked into our system. Our oceans absorb 80 per cent of this planet's heat, and they have already absorbed a substantial amount of heat. That means more changes and more impacts. Yet the minister couldn't answer the concerns of communities—ocean lovers, surfers, fishers and divers. She couldn't come in here and explain why she is continuing with this insanity of issuing fossil fuel permits for the exact same product that, when it's burnt, is actually killing our oceans. It's the time in history to stop this madness.

Question agreed to.