Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] by leave—The Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy was tasked with inquiring into the climate change bills that I presented in November last year. The committee received over 6½ thousand submissions and had three public hearing days, where some 49 witnesses appeared. Witnesses and submissions were over 99.9 per cent in support of the approach proposed in the bills.

As part of the process, the committee reports on the inquiry to the Australian parliament. This is really important, because we desperately need to have a sensible discussion around climate change policy and emissions reduction away from electioneering, where it becomes a pointscoring exercise between both major parties. I must at least start by thanking the committee members for their hopefully open minds to hearing the evidence and hearing from so many across Australian civic society who want better policy on this. I thank the secretariat, who I know worked incredibly hard dealing with the vast amount of submissions, and especially all those who participated in the inquiry and who made submissions, both individuals and organisations. It was vitally important for so many organisations to be on the record for how global warming and climate impacts and all the risks associated are going to impact their sector, and for what they need to see from the government and the opposition by way of good policy.

It was unfortunately not possible to reach bipartisan agreement on the chair's final report and the recommendations flowing from the inquiry. Sadly, whilst this kind of inquiry should be capable of bipartisanship and coming together on such an important policy issue, we still saw a divide along political party lines. Despite the evidence received being overwhelmingly in support of the bills, all government members of the committee refused to incorporate the full extent of the support in the main report, even from a point of view of referencing the evidence, in relation to recommendations that were put forward to not only progress the bills but also progress the development of Australian climate policy.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has, on a number of occasions, stated that Australia will not be told by the international community what Australia's climate policy should be, and the member for Fairfax again reiterated the need for liberalism and policy and that this should be left to the Australian people. But here was the opportunity to listen to a really broad section of the Australian public—the Australian civic society, environmental and business groups, industries, unions, health professionals—on what is needed by the government to address the policy issues of climate change, and still the government members on the committee were not willing to acknowledge that better policy is needed in Australia. It was still a question of maintaining the line that we are going to meet and exceed the targets and that we are doing enough. They were deaf to the cries of so many, the pleas of so many, that this policy area needs to shift. It needs to move away from being a political football to an area of consensus, like we have consensus on major health issues, like we have consensus on issues of defence.

It is disappointing, and it was disappointing for so many, that political partisanship could not be set aside for a moment to progress this policy area. I believe members of the coalition, in particular the member for North Sydney, are, in fact, embarrassed by the position of the government and its failure to act on climate change. Through the whole committee process, members, like the member for North Sydney, were looking for excuses not to support the approach proposed in the bills. They were looking for reasons to go against the recommendations. The member for Fairfax, in presenting the report just now, talked about a major reason being that we can't hand it to unelected experts to advise government on what good policy should look like. It is strange, when it comes to climate change, to take issue with unelected experts advising government when, for the last 18 months, the government has followed the advice of unelected chief medical officers in its response to COVID and it has had no qualms in imposing restrictions and following the expert advice and establishing an unelected COVID committee for the coordination—

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