Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Opposite we have got Senator Ian Macdonald, the former coalition minister for forests, laughing. He thinks that is funny. There are massive tonnages of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, where they will stay for decades, if not centuries, and it is not accounted for—and what I get is laughter from the coalition benches. It shows the appalling ignorance of people who should know better regarding the real tragedy of the failure of human communities to deal with catastrophic climate change, which scientists now warn is coming to us in this century. We are already seeing the initial symptoms of that with the melting of the Antarctic ice, the loss of our own ski fields and the record heat that is being experienced around Australia right now. It is a laughing matter for the opposition, but it should be a serious matter for this government to redress.