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

Action on climate change is great for the environment, it's great for the economy and it's good for communities. And I can tell you that science isn't a cult; it's a fact of life. If you want to go back to high school and learn some basic scientific principles, I encourage you to do that. I'd also say that conservative governments across the world are accepting the science. Science is not political. It's not a religion. It's just a fact. You can be religious and accept science—I am one of those people. This government is acting on climate change, and we want to do this. We want to unite communities and give businesses what they've been asking for for so long—that is, certainty. They want certainty so they can invest in markets and make good investment decisions, and that's not something we've seen over the last 10 years.

One of the first things that we did when we went into government was legislate to reduce our emissions by 43 per cent by 2030. We didn't need to legislate that, but one of the reasons we did that was because we wanted to send investment signals to the community, saying, 'We accept the science, and we want to decarbonise.' And the thing we saw after that was investments flowing through, which was amazing to see. The truth is that we need to continue to do more.

One of the things that we've seen, particularly on the east coast, is an increase in energy prices. One of the reasons for that is the ratio of fossil fuels in the electricity mix. It also relates to reserves for our energy use. One of the things we have in WA is reserves of our gas for domestic electricity use, and we haven't seen that on the east coast. We've also seen an increase in renewable energy in the ACT territory grid. When you look at increases in electricity costs, when you have more renewable energy, your prices don't increase as much, and the reason why is you don't have—the sun and the wind don't care if there's some dictator in an overseas country who is basically saying: 'Hey! We want to invade this country, and this is going to have a shock ripple effect on energy and commodity prices across the country.' Sorry, I went on a rant on climate change.

The other thing that I'd talk about is the aged-care royal commission. One of the things that we said during the federal election is that we wanted to restore dignity to our oldest and most experienced citizens across this country, and we have not seen that. We had the aged-care royal commission, and some of the stories that we heard were incredibly shocking. What we wanted to see is dignity and respect but also good health outcomes, so a part of that related to the nutrition of residents in aged care and making sure that they have access to quality food. A part of that was making sure that residents have more minutes with care workers to make sure that they're getting quality care with people. A part of that related to 24-hour nursing. We wanted to put the nurses back into nursing homes, something that was really important.

Essentially, what we're doing is going through a process of cleaning up the decade that was wasted under the previous coalition government, and I'm really proud of the Albanese Labor government. This government has some of the most experienced and talented cabinet members we've seen in this place for such a long time. But I'd say that we've still got more work to do, and I'm looking forward to implementing some really great policies.

Debate adjourned.

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