Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I urge the House to support these Senate amendments secured by the Greens, because it will stop public money going to coal, gas or logging our native forests. The Greens support manufacturing. The Greens support public investment in manufacturing. In fact, I wish the government had actually gone a bit further, because what we need to see in this country is more publicly owned manufacturing. Imagine how much better a position we would have been in to deal with the pandemic if we had a publicly owned vaccine manufacturer here in this country.

I hope that, as part of this new board's mandate, they look at the options that are available to them and ensure that, when the Australian public invests in manufacturing, which we support, the Australian public also gets a decent return from that, including, where appropriate, the Australian public having a seat at the table on the decisions that get made. Some of the biggest advances in manufacturing in this country have come when there's publicly owned and invested control over manufacturing and when it's done for the public good rather than for private profit. During the course of the pandemic we have seen how absolutely critical that is. The significant investment in manufacturing that this bill will deliver, especially with the Greens amendment, is something we support, which is why we support the bill and also urge the House to accept these amendments.

We know from bitter experience in the past that we need to write legislation not just for this government and its intentions but for future governments as well—future governments who may have a different view. We know that when we established the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, with the Greens, Labor and Independents working together to establish that success story, we had to put guardrails in it to ensure that money could not be spent from that fund on dirty energy. You would have thought, with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the name being in the title, that might have been clear enough. But we know we needed those guardrails in that and also in the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, because what we saw in the last term of the coalition government was them trying to use public funds that were meant for clean energy for gas and even coal, to try and redefine gas and coal as clean energy. That is why it is so critical that, if this authority and entity is going to stand the test of time and be there to support manufacturing and not be used as a slush fund by a future minister to bankroll coal and gas projects—like the previous government sought to do through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Renewable Energy Agency—we need to put the protections in law.

I want to thank the minister and his office for their engagement on this to ensure that we futureproof this piece of important legislation to ensure that public money does not go to coal, to gas or to logging our native forests. In a time of climate crisis, public money should be going to renewables, public money should be going to public schools and public money should be going to public hospitals, but it should not be going to coal or gas or logging our native forest. What you will find through these amendments is that we've stopped public funding, through this entity, going to coal or gas or logging native forests. We've seen the Greens secure changes with respect to other public funds. We're going to work through all of these funds one by one to ensure that, in a time of climate crisis, public money is not going to make the climate crisis worse. I commend the amendments to the House.

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