These people line up right across the political spectrum. There are social or economic conservatives who love the environment just as do "progressives". It’s just that the ones further away from the progressive end of the spectrum on other issues haven’t necessarily seen the major parties as being much different from each other on the environment, and it hasn’t shifted their vote.

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But this election feels different. The issue is more prominent. The voters are more up for grabs. And I am starting to see signs that even the political insiders are finally hearing the chorus of alarm and dismay from middle Australia.

Last week we had Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten each conducting stand-alone press conferences on environmental commitments. I was taken aback watching the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, stand on the bank of the Yarra talking in the heat of an election campaign about how much he loved platypuses and koalas.

Those press conferences happened before the UN extinction report was released. That report changes everything. It warns that a million species of plants and animals are art threat of extinction. It shifts the debate from something you’d see in a David Attenborough documentary to an existential threat to humanity.

It’s a clear-eyed summary of the state of the planet and how we are changing it for the worst – how all of the pressures such as deforestation, pollution, over-fishing and invasive species are interacting with climate change to cause our natural support systems to falter. This is a report about us. And what we are doing to ourselves.

It covers how the populations of once-common species have massively declined, how we’ve heavily impacted 75 per cent of the planet and how the changes are getting faster and faster. It goes on to explain how only transformational policies will reverse it.

We can’t throw around phrases like "sleepwalking to extinction" and not have this change everything. This moment can’t pass us by.

In an interview with the Herald's David Crowe, Scott Morrison attacked Labor’s plans for a new Environment Act and an independent Environment Protection Authority as nothing more than "green tape".  But this so-called green tape is what everyday Australians would call protecting the environment.

This is the environment and climate election – the first in a generation. Extinction is a choice we should not make.