Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] There is some talk of an early election. If you want to give the Australian people an indication of what governing under the Morrison-Joyce government is like you only need to look at the last 10 days. What a shambles it has been—what a ridiculous display of inertia, of dithering, of dysfunction and of absolute chaos between the Liberals and The Nationals. I say: if you are going to bring on an early election, Prime Minister, the Australian people are fortunate that they won't have to put up with this sort of rubbish that we are seeing from The Nationals and the Liberals right now. What a pathetic display of childish behaviour when we need leadership on the most difficult and important economic and environmental challenge of our time!

The states and territories, the international community and the business community are moving way ahead of this government. The debate has moved on. No-one is arguing whether or not we should have net zero by 2050. Of course, we should. That's the baseline. That's the very bear minimum that we need to give ourselves a chance of keeping global temperatures below a 1.5 degree increase. It's the absolute minimum. And this government is at war with itself over whether or not it can even agree to that. The second-weakest leader in this country is the Deputy Prime Minister, who can't even get his own party room to agree to the baseline level that we need to commit to as a country as part of the global community. The weakest leader in the country is the guy who holds the top job, because he's being held to ransom by a bunch of crazies in the National Party.

The people who hold the power in the coalition party room are not the modern Liberals—not the member for Mackellar, not the member for Goldstein, not the member for Wentworth, not the member for Reid and not the member for Higgins. They are irrelevant in the power distribution in the coalition. The people who have the power in the coalition are people like the member for Dawson and Senator Rennick and the other climate change deniers, like the Minister for Resources, who this morning he was asked, 'Do you even accept the science?' and he couldn't give a straight answer. He just said, 'The science is changing as it always has.' How pathetic! We need leadership right now and we need certainty. We need it because it is going to cost Australians jobs. It is going to cost our country economic development and opportunity, because of the dithering and the embarrassment that we have seen on display over the last week by the Liberals and Nationals, who are at war with each other.

Instead of this ridiculous city-verse-country regional divide that the Liberals and Nationals are trying to manifest, why not put forward some sort of a credible policy that is able to incentivise the economic development that we can realise in this country? Look at projects like Sun Cable in the Northern Territory, where we are talking about potentially exporting a third of Singapore's energy via solar power. How exciting! We are talking about thousands and thousands of jobs. Look at the offshore wind project off the coast of Gippsland in Victoria, which is potentially going to replace all of the energy from some of our major coal-fired power stations. It's brilliant and also so labour intensive. These are jobs that we need to secure for our country, not ignore and just let roll along while the Liberals and Nationals are at war with each other.

The Business Council of Australia are calling for a 2030 target of 50 per cent. They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The Business Council of Australia, as much as people might like to believe, are not a bunch of bleeding-heart lefties—like many on the government side like to call us on the Labor side. They are doing this because it's in Australia's economic interests. They are doing it because tackling climate change is the single-most important thing that we can do for the Australian economy, to set it up for the next 20 or 30 years. If we want to secure a future for our children—not just a future a planet that they can live on but a future economy that they can thrive in—we need to take this problem seriously. We need to turn up on the global stage with a credible plan. We need to put the climate wars behind us. Most importantly, we need to kick the dithering, dangerous, dysfunctional Liberals and Nationals out of office and install an Albanese Labor government to take it seriously.

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