STATEMENTS

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (10:37): I express my deepest condolences and solidarity with the people of Nepal and Tibet. To every person who has lost a child, a parent, a grandparent, a partner, a sibling or a friend; to those whose homes and communities have been swallowed up by mud and debris; and to the families here in Australia living through the unbearable agony of knowing that their loved ones may not come home, my heart is with you.

The immense grief so many are feeling right now cannot be an excuse for silence about why catastrophes like this are becoming more frequent, more extreme and more devastating. This was not some random, unforeseeable tragedy. Nepal hardly contributes to global warming, yet they are now paying the price of the insatiable appetite of others to extract and burn fossil fuels.

For decades, climate scientists have warned us: keep digging up and burning coal, oil and gas. The planet will cook, glaciers will melt, and fires, floods and droughts will become more frequent and more extreme. Those who contributed the least to and benefited the least from the destruction of our planet are suffering the most.

While billionaires drink cocktails on superyachts, build luxury bunkers in New Zealand and sit in boardrooms with Labor, the Liberals and One Nation—plotting how to squeeze more money from more data centres and more coal and gas that will suck the earth dry—ordinary people, mostly in the Global South, are paying with their lives. With the glacier collapse in Nepal and Tibet, more than a thousand people have been swept away and buried, while thousands are still missing.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, millions are choking on toxic smoke from enormous wildfires. In Sudan, a country already devastated by war, drought is destroying crops and deepening the threat of extreme famine. This is climate breakdown.

This is colonialism in action. The empire never really died. This is capitalism turbocharged.

Climate breakdown looms large on the landscape of global inequality, whether it is gender inequality or economic inequality; such disasters are magnified for women and girls and for those living in poverty. And, where colonialism is involved, racism is lurking right there, and it is writ large in the impacts of climate change. While those on billionaire lists—dominated by white men—get richer and richer and protect themselves from the worst consequences of climate breakdown, black and brown communities across the Global South are being flooded, burned, displaced, starved and buried, and the world looks away.

We see racism even in how this tragedy is being mourned. Look at the response to Nepal. Australians are still unaccounted for.

Australian families are living through unimaginable grief. But many of those Australians have brown faces, so there has been a deluge of racist comments across social media, parroting far-right white supremacist lines about who does and doesn't get to be Australian. Climate racism is not only about who is hit hardest by floods, fires and famine; it is about whose suffering the wealthy world notices.

Australia is one of the world's biggest fossil fuel exporters. We cannot send condolences with one hand while feeding the climate crisis with the other hand. The Prime Minister doesn't want to talk about climate change at the exact time that it needs to be talked about, but the Labor government is fine, at this time, to approve coal and gas project after coal and gas project—at a time when the world is facing these climate disasters.

The people of Nepal and Tibet did not create this crisis. The corporations that made billions burning our planet did, and the political parties right here, who have been bought by these very corporations, are complicit. You've sold your soul to coal and gas corporations, and you enable every climate catastrophe that happens around the world.

It is way past time to act to end fossil fuels and to end profit fuelled by extraction. Otherwise, the apocalyptic scenes that we have been seeing over the last couple of weeks are only going to get worse, and it will be on you. (Time expired)