Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's probably appropriate that the person speaking after the member for Canning is an engineer who started her career in steel capped boots and has worked in climate change action. The mining industry has been at the forefront of climate change action, and the truth is that we know that climate change action is good for people, it's good for the community and it's good for jobs. I am really proud of what the mining industry is doing and the leadership that we've seen in the west. I can't wait to see what happens with this policy.

My community of Swan is asking for action on climate change. My team and I knocked on a lot of doors—45,000 doors out of a total of about 70,000 doors. The issues varied, but at their heart was a concern about the future. There is one particular day I remember when I was knocking on some doors in Shepperton Road in Victoria Park, which is just down the road from where I live. I remember conversation after conversation where people in their own words explained how they wanted a more sustainable future and they wanted action on climate change. On the third door in a row I squealed with delight and shed a tear of happiness. It was the same message over and over again. I knew indeed that this was the climate change election. I asked that neighbour: 'Did you know that all of your neighbours want exactly the same thing that you want?' The thing, though, is that the Liberals—the opposition today—didn't get the memo that the people of Australia want action on climate change.

For the past 12 years I've been working with some of Australia's largest companies to help reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The work of corporate Australia has become more sophisticated with time. Twelve years ago, when I started working in this space, I was helping companies with counting their greenhouse gas emissions. This, of course, was because of great policy that Prime Minister John Howard introduced, the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act. He knew that in the future we would need to manage our greenhouse gas emissions and that we needed action on climate change. He introduced this act because he knew that we needed a framework to work out how we were going to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Thank you for the work that you did there, John. Following on from that, we've seen that companies want to decarbonise, they want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and they've become more sophisticated. But the truth is that we need all aspects of the economy to do their fair amount of work, and that's what this bill does.

I always knew that climate change was important, but for me it became personal when I got a phone call from my sister-in-law, who was in the Adelaide Hills. She gave me a call and said, 'Look, Zaneta, we're evacuating. It's bushfire season. We've got the stay-or-go call. I've got asthma. I am taking baby Willo. We're leaving.' My father-in-law, who's a Uniting Church minister, stayed in the community because he wanted to provide pastoral care to that community. I remember hanging up the phone call, and when I relayed the conversation to my husband I said to him, in tears, 'Your family are evacuating their town.' In those particular fires, people lost property and cattle. Luckily, no lives were lost, but that's not always what happens. The truth is that the thing that we know about climate change is that the intensity will increase and so will the frequency.

What is a SMART target? A target that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. That's exactly what this target does. They send a signal. To paraphrase my colleague the member for Wentworth, the coalition had 23 per cent women in the lower house in 1996, and after the last election it became 19 per cent. The Labor Party brought about affirmative-action targets in our rules in 1994. At the time, women represented 14 per cent of the federal caucus. The first target was set at 35 per cent, and it was raised to 40 per cent by 2002. At the 2015 ALP National Conference, it was lifted to 45 per cent by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2025. Today 49 per cent of my colleagues, both here and in the other place, are women. SMART targets are leadership. They send a signal to others. In the Labor Party, our target— (Time expired)

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