STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (13:33): Today, I'm reading out a speech written by Parmida, a 13-year-old who has submitted to Raise Our Voice with an incredibly powerful speech titled 'I don't have a licence, but I have a future—the climate clock is ticking'. Parmida writes: Greta Thunberg. Anjali Sharma.

Vanessa Nakate. David Soriano. What do these people have in common?

They are all teenagers. But they are all also climate activists. I shouldn't be writing this speech to tell you to fix this broken world.

I should be outside, playing with my friends, not learning about "catastrophic flooding" and "heatwaves" before I've even finished Year 8. Yet here I am writing about climate change, about the world heating to a boil. Here I am, writing about a world where bushfires eat homes, floods drown playgrounds, and heatwaves send kids to hospitals, where summer feels like a warning, not a holiday.

In 1992, Australia signed the first global promise to stop climate change. That was over 30 years ago. And still, the planet is heating to a boil.

That wasn't a promise—it was a performance. And we're done clapping for a show that hasn't even started. If the truth makes you uncomfortable, maybe it's time we changed something.

We caused this—it's time to fix it, not leave it to future generations. There's no Earth 2.0, and as much as NASA has looked, there's no other planet livable for us, and we need to accept that. So, we might as well save this one while we can.

When Jeff Bezos has built a doomsday clock, as our generation says it, we're kinda cooked. So what should the government do? Stop approving coal and gas projects.

Teach climate science in schools. Listen to us—we're the ones who'll live with these choices. I'm 13.

I don't have a driver's license, but I do have a future—and I'd like to keep it.