In another episode of 'We will do anything but tackle climate change', a bunch of Liberal and National MPs are jumping up and down and wanting more school chaplains so they can knock the very real fear of looming climate catastrophe out of the minds of young people. The problem isn't the kids' activism and recognition of climate emergencies. It is your inaction on the climate crisis that is the real problem. Schoolkids don't need religious chaplains. They need a government that embraces science and takes responsibility to protect their future.

We are in a critical time for climate action, and the Liberals are busy giving handouts to their political donors, for gas giants to frack the Beetaloo basin and plunge us further into a climate emergency. Labor's capitulation on this dodgy, climate-destroying project is yet another terrible decision from the so-called opposition. The Beetaloo slush fund stinks of corruption. It will be deadly for our climate.

It's a 'code red for humanity'. That's what the United Nations has called the IPCC's latest warning on climate. The world is heating faster. We're closer than ever to catastrophic change, and, once we hit the tipping point, the climate dominoes will fall, threatening our very existence. The new IPCC report is our starkest warning yet, but the Prime Minister's lack of action on the climate emergency heralds a death sentence for our lands, our forests, our rivers, our oceans and our animals. There is literally not a second left to waste. It's not too late.

I rise to speak on the matter of urgency. The contrast is becoming so clear. As the world moves away from digging up fossil fuels, it is Australia's absolute shame that the Liberals are propping up oil and gas by funnelling endless taxpayer dollars to this dying industry. No amount of actual science or the climate disasters that we have been witnessing in our own back yard—the fires, the floods and the heatwaves—seems to convince this government that digging up fossil fuels is dangerous in the extreme. It is killing us. It is destroying our livelihoods, our communities and our planet.

The Australian Greens have said the disastrous flooding in NSW was a grim look at the future of extreme weather in a climate crisis, warning that more action must be taken to prevent the situation from rapidly worsening.

The Greens say that parliament must urgently declare a climate emergency, then start a rapid transition away from coal, oil and gas, the primary causes of global heating.

Lines from Adam Bandt MP, Leader of the Australian Greens:

This morning the people's climate rally came to the lawns of Parliament House. They came to the people's house today to make sure that politicians are confronted with the reality of the climate crisis at the start of the parliamentary year, because they know that two centuries of colonisation have undone the millennia of management and care of country by First Nations people.

The Hunter Valley needs a new coal-fired power station like it needs a hole in the head. I have spent a lot of time in the Hunter Valley, and the people there know that coal has no future. They know how damaging coal is for the climate. They know how harmful coaldust is for them, their families and their children. They know that there is no future in coal, that it is a collapsing industry. The irrational exuberance of Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the coalition to keep pushing coal is criminal.

I move:

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

   (i) the Government's climate-wrecking 'gas-led recovery' plan includes coal seam gas drilling in Narrabri and a gas-fired power plant in the Hunter region of New South Wales (NSW),

   (ii) on 30 September 2020, the NSW planning commission approved the Santos Narrabri coal seam gas project despite more than 20,000 submissions opposing it,

   (iii) greenhouse gas emissions from the Narrabri gas project are estimated to be 128 million tonnes over the life of the project,

Instead of investing in Australia's future, the Morrison government is choosing inequality and climate collapse in its federal budget. The federal budget to be handed down tonight is many things. I'll start by saying that it's a real contradiction. After last year's big proclamation that we were back in the black, after years of highly misleading and incorrect assertions that surpluses are all the evidence we need of good economic management, we are staring down the barrel of an enormous deficit.