2023-03-28
I rise today to support this bill, the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill, but I am doing so with a heavy heart because of the missed opportunities this bill represents. Trying to get strong action on climate from the Labor government is akin to trying to draw blood from a stone. In a progressive parliament, where we could pass the strongest policies to protect the planet, which is what the people have put us here to do, the best Labor can offer is a pragmatic compromise. My heart is heavy because, once again, science loses to big business, and there is so much at stake.
My love affair with nature started early in my life in Pakistan. My favourite two weeks of school summer holidays were spent in the Kaghan Valley, in the foothills of the majestic Himalayas. From the valley, we could see the tall, snow-covered peaks of Chogori, K2 and Nanga Parbat. It was here I walked on glaciers, drank sweet water from ice-cold rivers fed by melting snow and saw the sky reflected from lakes so glassy that you couldn't tell where the sky ended and the lake began. I climbed mountain slopes dense with tall pine trees, a carpet of pine needles under my feet, and breathed in the crisp air laden with their scent. The scenery and smells have become part of my DNA.
Scientists tell us that, even if we limit global warning to 1.5 degrees Celsius, more than 30 per cent of glaciers along the Himalayan mountain range, including in my beloved Kaghan Valley, will disappear by the end of this century. Once the snow vanishes, so will the rivers and the millions of people in Pakistan, India and other countries who rely on them for farming and food. Mighty nature won't disappear with a whimper, though. When the snow melts, it will cause havoc by flooding rivers and lakes bursting their banks. It will consume the habitat of the endangered barfani cheetah, the snow leopard, who has survived these harsh rugged mountains over millennia but may not live through the human destruction of nature. Lives are already being lost. Villagers have disappeared. People who've lived, worked and played in the shadows of these mountains are being uprooted and forced to start again in new places, their connection to land and water severed forever.
In June last year, I saw this country I grew up in under water by a climate-charged super flood. The place where I spent my childhood, the place with so many happy memories, the place so many of my family and loved ones still call home, became the scene of an apocalyptic horror movie. A third of Pakistan, the world's fifth-most populous country, was submerged. Up to 50 million people, double the population of Australia, were dispossessed. It is hard even to comprehend. Millions of homes were destroyed, thousands of acres of agricultural land were flooded, schools and hospitals were wiped out, and thousands of people died.
Women and girls were hardest hit. Nearly 700,000 pregnant women in Pakistan were deprived of maternal health care during the floods. Climate change is an issue of gender equity. Women are on the front line of climate disasters. As Fatima Bhutto was recently wrote:
There is no greater feminist cause today than saving the planet and each other.
As a feminist, as an environmentalist, the climate crisis deeply personal for me.
What happened in Pakistan was predictable and preventable. What happened in Pakistan will keep happening. The climate emergency has been here for some time now, and the sirens are blaring louder than ever. For those of us from the global South, there is a sad and infuriating sense of injustice when it comes to the climate crisis, because this is a crisis caused by wealthy colonial countries of the global North, who have known now for decades that their greed and exploitation of nature is destroying the planet but have refused to listen to the science and put humanity and the planet first. The Western world wilfully ignores the fact that climate change, while affecting black and brown people disproportionately, also exacerbates existing injustices for these people who have been screwed over for centuries by globalism, patriarchy and capitalism. Those who have contributed least to this terrifying climate emergency are experiencing the first and the worst of it. They are on the front lines of a war waged by Western fossil fuel interests against the planet, a war they didn't start and cannot win.
Climate justice is a very personal struggle for me, as a woman of colour who grew up in Pakistan. Here in Australia, I have seen the relentless fossil fuel monster destroying country, whether it be gold mines at Boggabri gobbling up state forests, or at Narrabri, where Santos's coal seam gas wells will rip through the Pilbara and then the pipeline through the Liverpool Plains. The environment, regional communities and animals are bearing the brunt. The devastating 2019-2020 bushfires killed three billion animals. It was one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history. The bushfires took the lives of 34 people. I knew one of them, a friend from Johns River, whose home their dad built with his own hands was consumed along with her. So, yes, the climate crisis is deeply personal for me. We are in the fight for, and of, our lives.
Australia is one of the largest dealers of the fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis. We are the third-largest fossil fuel exporter. It does not matter where these fossil fuels are burned, Australian fossil fuels drive climate disasters everywhere. Australian fossil fuel exporters, and the governments who are in their deep pockets, have blood on their hands. That is the stark reality. It is unacceptable that the government is happy to take the revenue but not the responsibility for fossil fuel emissions.
Pacific Islanders are already paying the price of Australia's inaction. Communities face rising sea levels, tropical storms, the loss of arable land and drinking water, and the enormous challenges of displacement due to the climate crisis. They are sick of Australia's inaction. Leaders from Vanuatu, Tonga, Fiji, Nui, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu told it like it is earlier this month. They said the Pacific would no longer accept the fossil fuel lie. We have the power and responsibility to lead and we will. Pacific leaders call for the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C and have demanded an end to the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, starting with new coalmines. Last week, the IPCC released a final warning on the climate crisis, a survival guide for humanity. The world's top scientists pulled out a report that said the fossil fuel industry will end the planet unless we end it first, and still Labor keeps on defending this planet-killing industry. The world's leading climate scientists again called for an end to new coal and gas. We've been saying this until we are blue in the face.
But that is not what Labor's Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2023 does. In its original form, Labor's bill merely touched up, tweaked and ultimately tinkered around the edges of Tony Abbott's safeguard mechanism. The government blew its own horn and talked up its reforms like they were huge, transformative policy that matched the scale of the crisis. The government claimed that, after a decade of denial, Australia was finally getting strong action from a government that recognised the severity of the climate crisis, but the reality is the government policy was all smoke and mirrors. It was a plan for accounting tricks, not real cuts to pollution. It was a plan to hide emissions, not cut them. The Labor Party is no less captured by the fossil fuel interests than the coalition; it's just smarter about acknowledging that there is a climate crisis and that we need to fix it—without fixing it. But Labor, like the coalition, ignores the science of climate when it comes to actual action.
Labor's original safeguard bill was a hollow, empty package which allowed unlimited dodgy offsetting, a free-for-all for fossil fuel companies. Under Labor's initial climate plan, pollution would have gone up. Under Labour's plan to address climate change, the climate crisis would have gotten worse. The policy was practically written by the fossil fuel industry. The Greens may as well have been negotiating with Santos and Woodside. Labor's motivation throughout this process has been to safeguard the interests of the fossil fuel industry, and those interests are in direct conflict with the survival of our planet.
Given Labor's determination to protect the fossil fuel industry, it's quite an achievement that the Greens could use our balance of power to push reforms, most importantly a cap on emissions that requires real, not net, emissions cuts. Amongst many other amendments, the Greens have also secured improvements to the integrity of offsets, which have been a dodgy con job for far too long. But the fight is far from over. The safeguards mechanism has been improved, but these changes are not nearly enough. The science couldn't be clearer, and the urgency could not be greater. We need an end to new coal and gas. That is the bare minimum needed for the survival of life on our planet as we know it. The only obstacle to ending new coal and gas, the only obstacle to getting us off this dangerous trajectory of expanding fossil fuels and climate catastrophe is the Labor Party and the fossil fuel companies, who fill their coffers and hold the cards and whose bidding Labor does.
I've not been shy about my view that the No. 1 priority for the Greens in this negotiation was new coal and gas projects, but cowardly Labor took that off the table, making it clear that they were more interested in politics than science. While insufficient, this package will reduce pollution. We are in a situation where every fraction of a degree of warming must be avoided, so it is important that the improvements we have made are enacted. Labor should be under no illusions though; there should be no back-slapping or self-congratulation. Parliament today has not done the job of facing the climate crisis.
The challenges are quite clear. One, we are in deep sheet—shit on climate. Two, Labor's dogged allegiance to fossil fuel companies and their donations is the roadblock to climate action. Three, how do we shift power so we can stop new coal and gas? Well, green billionaires ain't going to save us, so let's not buy into that myth. Billionaires are driven by profit; they are not here to save the world. And the big environmental NGOs must develop a backbone and actually influence the government, not the other way around. They must also decolonise to centre the voices of the most marginalised by the climate crisis: First Nations people and people of colour. From the Tiwi Islands to Narrabri, First Nations people are at the forefront in the struggle against fossil fuels, yet they are made invisible.
I have always believed that the power lies with the people. The most powerful campaigns are those born around kitchen tables or at a local pub or on a chat on the phone or at a yarn under a tree, and I'm ready to build an even bigger grassroots climate movement in the streets to not only force Labor to act strongly. But, if they don't, then let's get ready to wrest power from them at the next election. We need to get bolder and bolshier because in 2023 there is only one test that matters when it comes to stopping the climate breakdown: an end to new coal and gas. And I'm ready for that fight. We can't rest or celebrate until we have achieved that.