MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (15:52): I move: That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency: The need for the Labor government to stop approving coal and gas projects in the middle of a climate crisis, with their 37th coal and gas project approved as a climate disaster unfolds in Nepal and Tibet. The world watched in horror as a wall of ice, rock and water tore through the Himalayas—more than a thousand people confirmed dead, thousands more still missing, whole villages erased.
A glacier collapsed because the planet is heating, and the planet is heating because of the burning of coal and gas. Nepal's foreign minister put it plainly this week—Nepal's share of global emissions is less than a tenth of one per cent. Then he asked the question that every wealthy, polluting country now has to answer: 'How fair is it for the Nepali people and people of the Himalayas to bear the burden of climate change, where we've had very little contribution to it?' How fair is it?
It's not fair. It's obscene, and Australia, one of the biggest fossil fuel exporters on the planet, is helping to cause it. When the Prime Minister was asked about climate change and this disaster, what did he say?
He said, 'Now is not the time for that debate.' Well, tell that to the families digging through the mud to find their children. If not now, when? After the next glacier?
After the next town is swept away? This is what 30 years of kicking the can down the road looks like. The harm is now impossible to ignore, and still the polluters keep profiting and shovelling the risk onto ordinary people, and this Labor government is a willing accomplice.
While the Prime Minister was in the Pacific, talking up Australia's climate credentials, his minister for resources was cutting the ribbon on the Beetaloo basin gas fracking project, and, days later, they waved through yet another coal mining expansion in Queensland—the 37th new fossil fuel project approved by Labor. Pacific leaders have called out that hypocrisy to our faces.
Every one of those approvals is a choice: fossil fuel profits over the survival of those nations. And it's coming for us too. The United Nations warned last week that the coming El Nino is expected to be the strongest since records began.
We are six days out of winter, and, in my home state of Queensland, there are fires burning in the Lockyer Valley and you wake up to bushfire warnings on the morning radio. Flying into Canberra last night I watched the smoke and the red glow of bushfires from the plane—six days out of winter. The UN's climate agency says the world is in a danger zone of extreme weather and that we are on track to blow through 1½ degrees.
For Australia, that means more bushfires, more floods, more cyclones, more heatwaves, more homes lost, more lives lost, and more wildlife, more reef and more country gone for good. The climate crisis is not coming. It is here.
It is destroying nature now. It is killing people now. And it is driven by pollution from coal and gas.
Every new approval this government signs has a body count. It looks like floodwaters raging through the Himalayas. It looks like Black Saturday.
It looks like 35,000 heat deaths across Europe. This is not some impossible problem. Keep the goddamn coal and gas in the ground.
Stop letting your donors—Woodside, Tamboran, Adani—buy you off with donations and jobs for when you leave parliament. Stop working for their corporate interests while you're in here. People are dying.
The planet is on fire, and this government keeps pouring fuel on it. The government could stop it now, so do it. Stop approving coal and gas.