Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

They just make it up! The member for Griffith is right. They make it up by claiming nearly another hundred million tonnes of abatement from the technology road map. I've read the technology road map and it is as useful in this debate as a restaurant menu. It just says, 'We have all these wonderful technologies. We have carbon capture and storage, we have solar and we have hydrogen.' It says, 'We have all these great technologies,' but it doesn't deliver a single policy that drives them. It doesn't deliver a single policy to drive those technologies, which are suddenly going to provide abatement through technology.

The truth is that this government has no policies to cut pollution. All they can do is claim credit for Labor's policies from when we were in government, claim credit for state policies driving record renewable energy investment, claim credit for recessions—they can claim credit for the COVID recession—and claim credit for electric vehicles coming up. This is the truth of this government. They're all spin and no substance when it comes to emissions policy.

As the member for McMahon pointed out in his contribution, they're sacrificing huge economic opportunities for this country—huge economic opportunities—to grow jobs in things like battery manufacturing and lithium mining. We should be using our great mining resources to supply the new industries of the future. That is what's being sacrificed and that's what has been betrayed by this government. They're betraying regions like mine, which could be the centre of new power as well as continuing to be a centre of other technologies, including export coalmining. That's what the future is under wise government, but that's not what this government is doing. This government is pursuing an ideological obsession in the Nationals party room of putting nuclear power around the country.

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