Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What an extraordinary debate this afternoon! I barely know where to begin. But I do know that the last few weeks in the House—this week and before we came back to Canberra—my observation of this government is that it has been kind of reminiscent of watching the season finale of Dallas. It's like the worst US soap opera imaginable that revolves around this kind of affluent, feuding family that makes itself wealthy from oil and cattle industries, but they're at each other and undermining the bejeezus out of one another all the time. Well, that's the coalition party room. It is like one loop of Dallas, after Dallas, after Dallas.

We have had eight years of this now—eight years of this ramshackle government, trying to get its act together on climate change, on energy or, frankly, any other number of important key policy issues for this nation. But finding its way to net zero emissions has been the most painful birth of all, and they still haven't got there; they are still in labour. They should actually let the real Labor take over and make sure that this country gets to net zero emissions by 2050. This has been the longest soap opera ever. Of course, we have had a few funny twists and turns on the way. They sent that senator, the old accountant from Queensland, down to the Hunter Valley to spread a bit of coal on his face to pretend he is at one with the people down there. As if any of our coalminers would take that bloke seriously! The government must not have understood just how disrespectful that looked to all of the hardworking men and women in that sector.

We in Newcastle know a thing or two about when big companies and global capitals start making decisions, because we had a thing called a steelworks that operated in Newcastle. My dad was a rigger at BHP. I grew up with BHP pumping jobs, energy and steel out of that factory my whole life. Like every kid, I loved the tapping of the blast furnace and seeing those flames go everywhere. But you know what? BHP made an economic decision to leave us—to leave us hanging out to dry, quite frankly. But we didn't, because the people of Newcastle are a very resilient bunch. There was a shocking effort by the then Howard Liberal government to cobble together a restructure package, but Newcastle has gone on to diversify its economic base. We are now smart manufacturers of so many things, and we're turning ourselves to the opportunities of new energy sources.

We want to be sitting at the table when those decisions get made, because we have a lot of skin in the game. We have a lot of people tied up in jobs that have a finite future. We know that when global capital make a big decision, they don't bother turning around and asking all the workers how they're going to get on. You have to be ready. You have to have some plans on the table. That is why I have pleaded with this government, for eight years now, to get their climate change policy sorted out and to stop the arguing. Seriously; there are still people there arguing about the basic science of climate change.

You have to have a plan on the table that is going to take advantage of green hydrogen and that's going to take advantage of offshore wind. Finally, this week, we've seen a piece of legislation in this parliament. It has taken this government eight years to figure out that it needs some legislation to enable offshore wind to actually occur in this country.

We want to take advantage of the opportunities for high-end manufacturing. I don't want us just to have offshore wind farms; I want us to be manufacturing the towers and the blades that we currently have to buy from overseas. They are good, real, permanent jobs that we need. We've got to diversify our economic base; otherwise you leave carbon-intensive regions like mine hanging out to dry.

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