Thursday, 23 March 2023

Climate change

Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (09:56): It has been a big week. We have covered a lot of ground. We have heard about TikTok. We have heard about Minties. We have seen parties come together to call out hate where it resides and tackle it head-on – all things I would be keen to hear raised in this place a little more often.

But as a young person in this building it would be remiss of me to not draw attention to some other news that we have seen this week, and that is the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report notes that our children will never experience childhoods as cool as ours, and my childhood was not that cool to begin with. I say this because the report had this graphic that shows how the average global temperature has changed across generations. Pair this with a world where it is more expensive, more difficult to simply get a roof over your head and more expensive to get an education, where your wage does not keep up with rising inflation. Young people are expected to plan for a future which is increasingly unstable and increasingly uncertain – it is cooked.

But what the IPPC report notes overall to give us some hope is that the degree of warmth and the subsequent health of the environment, wildlife and ourselves can still be altered depending on the policies and actions taken today. The window to act is almost closed. On behalf of some of my very keen young constituents, for example on TikTok, I urge us all to act as if our lives depended on it – because they do.