Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You cannot punish someone for not finding a job that was not there. The youth unemployment rate in this country is 13 per cent, and, when you factor in the number of young people who say they would like to work more hours than they currently have, it is 20 per cent. A couple of decades ago it was below 10 per cent. We have 20 per cent of young people in this country saying that they want to work more hours but they cannot find it, and we have youth unemployment at 13 per cent.

What is the government's response in this budget? Is it to say, 'We are going to make education more available to everyone so that you can get higher qualifications without putting itself into debt'? Is it to say, 'We are going to start using our purse strings to create the new industries of the 21st century that might provide jobs for people'? No. This government's response in its budget is to stand by and watch young people's wages get cut further as they lose their penalty rates, and then ask, 'If you happen to be someone in this country who is looking for a job and you have tried hard and you have not found it, what are we going to do? Are we going to give you a helping hand? No. Are we going to lift the level of Newstart for you? No. We are going to treat you like a suspected criminal and you have to subject yourself to random drug tests, because—somehow—it is your fault that the jobs aren't there.'

Youth unemployment is rising on this government's watch. Unemployment and under-employment are going up and up and up. At the same time, if you are a young person in this country then housing is even more out of reach than it ever has been. Back in the 1990s it used to be that an average house cost six times an average young person's income. Fast forward to this government, and it costs 12 times an average young person's income. So, the jobs are not there, the people who have jobs want to work more hours—if you are young—and they have not got it, housing is increasingly out of reach, and wages are being cut. The government's response is to say, 'Well, we are going to treat you like a suspected criminal.' And in this budget they say they are going to put you further into debt if you do go to university. 'We are going to increase the fees.' The universities are going to have less money—they get a cut as well. The education you get is going to be tougher for the university to deliver, because the government is going to cut them. 'And we are going to make you start paying your debt back earlier.' Imagine being a young person now, graduating and looking for a job. You cannot save up your house deposit because housing is out of reach, wages are low, growth is sluggish—in fact it is going backwards in real terms—and with what you do have the government is going to put its hand in your pocket and take more of it by putting you further into debt and making you repay it earlier.

This budget is a continuation of the government's war on the young. This government has declared war on the young and it is continuing. Increasingly, people are realising that this government is going to be the one that leaves the future for young people worse than when they inherited it. That is what people are experiencing every day. There are things we could be doing here in this parliament for people who come into this place after us, people who are leaving university now or are at school now, wondering what kind of life they are going to have. We could make life better for them. We could start by saying that we are not going to put you further into debt, which is what this government is doing. Secondly, we could say that housing is a human right and instead of spending billions of dollars a year, like this budget does, to help people who already have a house to buy their second, third, fourth or fifth house, giving them a generous tax break, we could say that we are going to take those billions and instead put it into building affordable housing that young people and key workers are able to access. What a sensible use of government money. What a sensible use of several billion dollars a year it would be to help people to get into their first home instead of helping people to get their third, fourth or fifth and push up prices and rents and put housing out of reach for so many people.

We could be saying that we have a wonderful opportunity in this country. Australia could be a renewable energy superpower. We could be the country that the rest of the world looks at going into the 21st century. We could be the country where there are over 100,000 jobs in renewable energy, as the Germans have. On proportionate terms—they are a bigger country—they have nearly 400,000 people working in the renewable energy industry. We could have that happening here. We could be saying, 'Isn't it amazing that people working in this country, at universities in this country—and thanks to CSIRO—have just worked out how to print solar cells, basically off a commercial printer, onto almost any substance so that you can just print out a free and infinite source of energy.' We could be saying: 'Isn't it wonderful that'—at one of the same universities—'at Newcastle they have worked out how to get microscopic solar cells into paint. If we proofed that up, you would just paint the wall of your house and it would become a solar panel. You wouldn't need to install a new solar panel, because it is one.' These are the kinds of inventions that we could be building here in Australia, and we could be owning the IP of those and we could be exporting them.

As we look around, we see we have another remarkable opportunity, which is that when our coal fleet is ageing, as it is in Australia at the moment, and when many coal-fired power stations are at the end of their usable life we need to switch them off and get onto renewable energy to meet the climate challenge. The best bit is that it is now cheaper to build new renewable energy than it is to build a new coal-fired power station. In fact, it is cheaper to build renewables than it is to build a peaking gas-fired power station. Even better, the cost of storage is coming down so quickly that we can build renewables with storage attached, so that we have power available when the wind is not blowing in a particular place or when the sun goes down at night, and they are cheaper to build than new fossil fuel power stations. What a remarkable job-creating, way-of-life-protecting program it would be for this country to dedicate itself to getting onto 100 per cent renewable energy—to putting the money behind it and creating real jobs for the young people who are wondering where jobs are going to come from in the 21st century.

It is not just the Greens saying this is what needs to be in the budget. At the other end of the spectrum, we now have AGL, the country's biggest polluter, operating the biggest coal-fired power station, saying: we want a plan to get off coal and onto renewables; just tell us what that plan is. A couple of weeks ago the CFO of AGL said that because of rising gas prices:

… the energy transition we have all been anticipating will skip "big baseload gas" as a major component of the NEM's base-load generation and instead largely be a case of moving from "big coal" to "big renewables".

This is what the people who are running our coal-fired power stations are saying at the moment. They are saying: give us a plan so that we can start building big renewable power.

We know, as we have just seen in Victoria, we are going to have to start switching off our coal-fired power stations because they are getting very old and they are very polluting. So what does this budget do? Does this budget lay out a vision for the country to get off coal and onto renewables? No. This budget backs in gas even when the likes of AGL are saying: it is too expensive now, it is not going to be the transition fuel, we are going to jump straight to renewables. It backs in coal and it backs in a billion dollars to multinational company Adani for a coalmine that is a ticking climate bomb.

If we burn the coal that is left in the ground then we are giving a death sentence to the Great Barrier Reef. It is as simple as that. It is not just the Greens who are saying that. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority have been saying that in recent days as well. They have been pointing out that whilst Adani claim in court that there are 1,400 jobs—I know the Prime Minister and the Premier of Queensland like to talk about tens of thousands of jobs, but when Adani are under oath they say there are 1,400 jobs—there are over 60,000 jobs that are dependent on a healthy reef. People are not going to fly from all around the world to Australia to visit a dead reef. There are 60,000 jobs in Queensland that are dependent on that, and for the sake of 1,400 jobs, because a multinational company has asked them to, the government is prepared to write a billion-dollar cheque and say: we do not mind if that means the Queensland economy goes to pot when the reef dies.

The budget says, 'We are going to have a look at Snowy hydro.' There is not money in this budget for construction; there is money for another feasibility study. Already, as we found out through estimates during the course of this week, the bill has gone up an extra couple of billion dollars. And, as we found out also through estimates this week, there were about two weeks between the plan coming across the government's desk and the government making the announcement. Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into it from the government's perspective.

Yes, it is worth looking at whether Snowy Hydro pump storage is viable. Of course it is. But that is years away and there is no money in the budget for it. What are we going to do in the meantime? The government in this budget has passed up the opportunity to make sure that the lights stay on as we switch from coal to renewables and that the prices come down. What we know is that under this government wholesale power prices have doubled. It loves to run around and say, 'It is all about state governments having renewable energy targets.' Well, wholesale prices have doubled since this government got rid of the Greens-Labor carbon tax, and do you know where the highest increases have been? They have been in New South Wales, where there have been Liberal governments at state and federal level overseeing the highest price increases.

What is absolutely criminal in this budget is that the government has turned its back on the people of the Latrobe Valley in Victoria and on coal-fired power station communities right around this country. I have been spending the last few months visiting coal-fired power station communities to talk about the need to transition from coal to renewables and making the point that as we do this, as the country makes this transition, because that is the way we are going to tackle climate change, we have to look after the workers in the communities that have kept the lights on and that still keep the lights on, right around this country. It is not their fault that coal is a toxic product that we need to move away from to get onto renewables. We owe them a debt. This government owes them a debt. I went to the Latrobe Valley to ask, 'What is the federal government doing to assist in the transition away from coal, given that that is going to mean some significant dislocation for you?' The answer was: 'Nothing.'

The state government has stepped in at the last minute with a transition authority, but it is too little too late. The federal government needs to come to the party. It is time that at a federal level we put aside the money we need to ensure that we can transition away from coal to renewables and to ensure that by the time we switch off the next coal-fired power station, which is probably going to be only a few years away, as many of these private operators know that the end of the line has come for their old coal-fired power stations, there will be secure jobs and strong industries for those people to move into. That requires a bit of planning now. It requires that the federal government use the power of the budget to say, 'Maybe we need tax breaks for industries that want to go and set up in the Latrobe Valley. Maybe we need some industry assistance so that there are secure jobs that are grown there. Maybe we need to look at the existing transmission infrastructure—the poles and wires that come into and out of the valley—and say, "What if we attached some pumped hydro or some other forms of generation attached to that? That way, we could make use of all those lines and transmission assets that are there." Maybe, it is saying that agriculture needs a boost in the Latrobe Valley in a way that has not been subject to serious focus before. Maybe food processing in the Latrobe Valley needs some support.'

All of these things need to be on the table, but the federal government has got to be serious. But in this budget, the federal government has turned its back on the people of Collie in Western Australia, where Muja has just closed down, and on the people of the Latrobe Valley, where Hazelwood has closed down, and it does not care. It is more interested in coming into the parliament and throwing around lumps of coal at the same time as the owners of the coal-fired power station companies are saying, 'We're closing. We're getting out of coal and we want the government to have a plan.' This budget is committing people in the Latrobe Valley to higher levels of unemployment. This is a budget that will ensure that young people's futures continue to be sold out. This is a budget that should be condemned. (Time expired)

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