Page 3403 - Week 11 - Thursday, 11 November 2021
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have made significant inroads, but we cannot rest on our laurels. Every day that I come to work, with the portfolio responsibilities I have, I am thinking about what I can do today to keep us moving forward to continue to reduce our emissions.
As we reflect on the meeting in Glasgow, those challenges become ever clearer to us. There are new ideas coming from Glasgow. There is new pressure. There are new commitments. I have some optimism that we are starting to turn the corner, but there is much work left to be done, and all of us need to play our part in that.
MR BRADDOCK (Yerrabi) (5.44): There is an interesting psychology of anxiety, when the more you are exposed to something that causes that anxiety, the less anxious you actually feel about it. This is a really tricky thing because this is a climate emergency. It is tricky because the more we say it—this is a climate emergency—the more we get desensitised to it. We become used to the words. But the planet does not care about that.
We now have a situation where delay is the new denial. People pretend to be wise and throw up reasons why we cannot slash emissions as fast as the science is telling us we need to. People try to throw up questions, trying to delay in any way possible us doing what we need to do.
It is incredibly frustrating to hear so many people in positions of influence and power say that this is a great threat, but their actions do not match their words. I challenge everyone here: do your actions match your words? There is not the appropriate level of panic that we need to be able to address this situation. This is not a threat that we can saunter vaguely towards. We need to be doing everything we can to reduce our emissions, because delay is the new denial.
This frustration is growing in our young people, who are having to strike to draw attention to the issue. This was magnified when we lived through the Black Summer and lived through the reality of a warmer climate. It is much harder to be desensitised to climate change when you are literally choking on inescapable smoke.
I have two family members who are particularly sensitive to smoke. They have asthma. We live in Gungahlin, partly because when we lived in Belconnen it got too bad for my wife’s asthma during the winter, due to wood fires. We did not want to have to go to hospital six times a year just because someone wanted to use a wood fire. How will my family and I go in the future if there are more fires and more smoke?
We have to get off fossil fuels. We have to do it now. We cannot keep going with business as usual. Delay is the new denial, and we need to do this now.
MS CLAY (Ginninderra) (5.47), in reply: I am really pleased about this debate today. I am tired. I do not want to fight about climate change anymore; I want to fight climate change, and I am so pleased to hear that this tripartisan motion is not opposed. This is a motion that calls on tripartisan leadership at the federal level to match the action and the leadership we are seeing at every other level in Australia. It reflects the yearning that everybody is feeling all around Australia. We need to come together on this. I feel that yearning to come together too. That is why I took this motion to
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