Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In May 2022 communities across Australia, including my own in North Sydney, set a clear message to this place of national government: climate inaction and prevarication needs to end. And we, sent here by our communities, must do everything we can to ensure faster, tangible action to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is not to say we should act irresponsibly, but rather we must embrace all of the skills and thinking present in this place, and across our wider community, to develop smart ways we cannot only take stock of where we are but also can enact a transition plan which will ultimately transform not only our economy, but more broadly our place in the world.

As I stand today to speak on the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022, the weight of my community's faith that I will speak their truth in this place is something that I am honoured to carry. I need to be clear: in its current form the safeguard mechanism bill does not meet my community's expectations. It is not bold enough. It is not ambitious enough. And, ultimately, it is much less than this government could do given that, more than any other government in the past 100 years, this government has been given a clear mandate to move our country forward in a nature-positive fashion.

While this legislation is not perfect, it does provide us with the scaffolding for a more effective framework to drive productive change at an industrial level. The question then that I believe we must answer as we debate this legislation is: are we brave enough to make decisions today, the ramifications of which will be long felt into the future in a positive fashion?

This legislative amendment should not be looked at as simply a short-term solution to deliver on a political promise made at the last election. Rather, it should be seen for what it really is, which is one of the most important first steps in fundamentally transitioning and transforming our future economy so that both our nation and our planet can thrive. In this context, I am committed to working with the government to ensure petty party politics does not ultimately impede what can be a very important and significant step for our nation.

Just this past week, the latest Australian Productivity Commission report specifically called out the hodgepodge of narrow and sometimes inconsistent federal, state and territory abatement measures that impose unnecessarily high costs on the community while delivering ineffective abatement. From my perspective, the Productivity Commission report adequately described the limitation of a framework that is arguably the result of a series of decisions made within the context of successive election cycles, rather than from a true leadership mindset. Describing the decarbonisation of the economy in the next three decades as a huge transformation, the commission warned that the difference between doing it efficiently and doing it poorly will be a major determinant of the living standards of all Australians. Indeed, the report said the economic costs of this approach are increasingly apparent, laying bare the reality that decisions to avoid technology-neutral, economy-wide abatement mechanisms— (Time expired)

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