Their ancestral lands are now under threat of exploitation by the Adani coal company with willing support from both the Federal and Qld State governments, yet the traditional owners have made it clear that no land use agreements with Adani exist.

For the sake of a few jobs, both the Federal and Queensland state governments are prepared to approve the mining and export of coal from the Galilee Basin to India for use in their coal-fired power stations.

Australia would therefore be a major contributor (although indirectly) to increasing global CO2 emissions and therefore a significant contributor to climate change.

New scientific research conducted at Melbourne University’s ARC Centre of Excellence warns of a “sharp acceleration in global warming over the next decade when global temperatures could break through the 1.5 barrier by the year 2026”. The report adds, “If the world is to have any hope of meeting the Paris target, governments will need to pursue policies that not only reduce emissions but remove carbon from the atmosphere”.

Yet here we have both a Federal and State government prepared to further propel the planet towards a state of run-away global warming and in doing so rapidly degrade the Great Barrier Reef with the loss of thousands of existing jobs from fishing and tourism for the sake of a few unsustainable mining jobs.

In 1992 Paul Keating said, “We took their traditional lands ………we practised discrimination and exclusion…. it was our ignorance and prejudice”, yet we continue to ride roughshod over the traditional owners as we make hasty and political opportunistic land grabs.

May 2017 represents the 50th anniversary of the successful 1967 constitutional referendum yet sadly, discrimination, ignorance ,prejudice and exclusion obviously still remain at the forefront of our political system.

Monday, May 22, was the International Day for Biological Diversity, the day to celebrate the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

This has been ratified by almost all nations including Australia, and it's now 25 years since the world recognised the threats we pose to other species and the natural world.

But, despite this global recognition of the importance of biological diversity, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature the current loss of species is estimated to be 1000 to 10,000 times higher than the naturally occurring extinction rate.

The theme this year is Biodiversity and Tourism, and Australia has several wild places where tourists from around the world visit to marvel at our biodiversity. 

We now have one less place, after the Great Barrier Reef just experienced mass coral bleachings two years in a row. 

We need to urgently change the way we treat the natural world before we lose Kakadu and the Tasmanian Wilderness as well.

Already 10,000 hectares of mangrove forest has died along the west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and 20,000 hectares of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area has burnt for the first time. 

To quote Chief Seattle from 1855: "Humankind has not woven the web of life, we are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves."