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

On the evening of Thursday 17 July, just a couple of weeks ago, I attended a peace vigil for Gaza in my home town of Launceston at our beautiful Launceston Town Hall. I was disappointed to learn on the night that the Launceston city council executive had made a last-minute reversal of a decision to allow a light display with the colours of the Palestinian flag on the town hall. It was explained to me by vigil organisers that the executive made this decision on the basis that such a light show would not encourage positive community outcomes or promote community unity. I wrote to both the Launceston city council general manager and the mayor on Friday 18 July and again on Monday 28 July, this week, to seek an explanation of how this decision was arrived at and to request a meeting with them to discuss this. So far, crickets.

The Palestinian flag is a powerful and hopeful symbol for a pathway forward for peace. Palestinians have a right to self-determination; they have a right to a sovereign state. Whether it's through a self-determination process that leads to a single free Palestinian state or a two-state solution, either way, it's the most viable pathway forward to end the horrific genocide in Gaza and for long-term peace and stability in the region for both Israelis and Palestinians. Our current government supports a two-state solution, as do many nations around the world, so how can a light show projecting a Palestinian flag that promotes peace and a pathway forward to peace be controversial, not be in the community's interest or not promote community unity? I'm still stumped. I know there are a lot of good councillors on the Launceston city council. I haven't had the opportunity to discuss this with them personally—or, unfortunately, with the general manager or the mayor either. I ask them to make their voices heard on this issue, if they haven't already.

Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and numerous other global humanitarian organisations, including prominent Israeli human rights organisations, have publicly stated that the Israeli government's actions in Gaza amount to genocide. Thousands of innocent Palestinian children are being starved, bombed and cut down in cold blood while they queue for food. These kids are not Hamas fighters. Israel is acting with impunity. If leaders at a local government level, at a state government level and here in federal parliament don't stand up for these innocent Palestinians and for a long-term pathway for peace, then I don't know who will. It is our moral duty to highlight the need for a pathway to peace and challenge the perpetuators of injustice and those breaking international law. I will leave it at that, in the hope that the Launceston council will get back to me and that I will get to meet with them on this.

I want to highlight another issue that is also near and dear to my heart. I was very fortunate, actually, in the last week of the election campaign to go to Lord Howe Island for two days to join the scientific team at Adrift Lab. My friend Dr Jen Lavers; her partner at Adrift Lab, Alex; and their team of scientific volunteers from around the world come to Lord Howe every year to study the shearwaters, which, sadly, pick up a lot of plastic from the ocean. In fact, while I was there, tragically, we had a shearwater that broke a record that had stood for nearly 16 or 17 years of studying these birds—it had more than 800 pieces of plastic in its stomach. It's hard to fathom that a little bird can actually have that much plastic in its stomach. When they come out of their burrows to take their first flight—and they've got a two-week window to do that—of course, they can barely move, let alone fly. Tragically, I got to witness that.

Jen recently wrote to me and some of my colleagues to point out something else to us that I think is really important to talk about in the Senate chamber today. Just for the record, Jen is a marine scientist specialising in anthropogenic impacts, using seabirds as sentinels or bioindicators of ocean health. Now, while her team at Adrift Lab do not undertake research on algal blooms, such as we have seen recently—and it's very concerning that we've had a number of algal blooms off Tasmania's coast, which is an increasing worry for the future—they do study marine heatwaves and their impacts on seabirds.

One thing that struck Jen while she was reading the reporting on South Australia's algal bloom, which, I'm pleased to say, has been reported on by reporters across the country, including by those in the press gallery here—and a shout-out to Phil Coorey for taking such a strong stance on it in the Fin Reviewwas my quote, where I said, 'If sea life was washing up on the beaches of Sydney, there'd be a national outcry.' She said to me: 'Sadly, Peter, this is not the case.' During the summer of 2023-24, Australia's east coast experienced one of the worst marine heatwaves ever recorded, with the Tasman Sea temperature anomaly exceeding two degrees Celsius. The peak of the marine heatwave coincided with the arrival of seabirds into Australia, after they'd migrated over 10,000 kilometres from their overwintering grounds, and peaked again when the adult birds were attempting to feed their chicks. As a result of the rapid and significant rising water temperature in the Tasman Sea, Jen said that he birds' prey, which is fish and squid, shifted lower in the water column or relocated elsewhere. Either way, they suddenly became unavailable, and the birds died of starvation.

Australia does not have a national beach bird monitoring program, so Jen—like she's done on Lord Howe—on the smell of an oily rag, has set up such a program, using volunteers right across the country. In fact, over 300 observers, volunteers and citizen scientists submitted photos and data to Adrift Lab, and, based on this, over 5,000 seabirds, mostly shearwaters and mutton birds, were recorded dead on beaches from Brisbane to Hobart. Numerous reports were also sent from beaches around Sydney, with dozens of shearwaters reported dead on Bondi Beach, Narrabeen Beach and Manly Beach. In a single day an incredible 99 seabirds were reported washed up, dead, on Dee Why Beach. Despite Adrift Lab's substantial efforts to share this news with the community, local politicians and media, there has been no reporting on it; hence, I'm raising this in the Australian parliament today. This has been very disappointing for Jen and her team, who, as I said earlier, have been spending mostly their own time to monitor this terrible situation and bring it to our attention. Anyway, they, along with their volunteers, have recorded data from over 2½ thousand kilometres of Australia's coastline. Dr Jen Lavers' team note that the proportion of birds observed on beaches represents a tiny fraction of the total number that have died on the Australian coastline.

You might be wondering, Deputy President, how many seabirds the Adrift Lab team have told us have died on Australia's coastline from marine heatwaves—the same thing that's causing the toxic algal bloom on South Australia's coast, with the thousands of dead marine creatures washing up and the terrible impact that's having on biodiversity and on local communities and businesses. I know Senator Farrell, as a South Australian, would be very interested in this. The answer to the seabird question is horrifying. From November 2023 to May 2024, more than 612,000 seabirds died on our Australian beaches along the east coast of Australia from marine heatwaves, in Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart and everywhere in between.

Why does no-one know about this catastrophic loss of life? It's nearly the same number of wildlife deaths as were attributed to the 2019 Black Summer bushfires. Why does nobody know about this? Well, it's because only a few people have the resources and the motivation to study this. When I look at how much of our last federal budget was spent on the environment, the WWF estimated that 0.01 per cent of our federal budget is spent on the environment. Surely we can do better than that at a time of national crisis. We know we need to monitor what's going on. We need to fund the scientists and the community organisations that are doing this, and we need much better solutions.

Lastly, whether it's the devastating loss of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef or on the Ningaloo Reef on the west coast or the toxic algal bloom in South Australia in an area on the Great Southern Reef that was previously considered a refuge from many of the changes we've seen during climate change—whatever it is that you're focusing on in the sad decline in our natural world that's happening right before our eyes—we come back to the fact that we need to reduce emissions. We need to stop all new fossil fuel projects and transition as rapidly as possible to a clean-energy renewable future.