Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a difference a year makes, colleagues. When we came to government, renewable energy was sitting at 33 per cent. It is now at 40 per cent, as we accelerate to 82 per cent in a mere 75 or 76 months from now. That is an absolutely massive task. Yes, while some coal mines may have been approved under the environment minister, let us not forget that this is the same environment minister who is the first one in Commonwealth history to have disallowed a coal mine due to its impacts on the Great Barrier Reef. That is something the crossbench love to forget.

In addition to this, we are also the government that has 104—when I last checked; it might be higher now—renewable projects in the pipeline. This has more than doubled, and it is sitting on the environment minister's desk for her to sign off.

So we are well on the way when it comes to our energy transformation, and it can't happen a day too soon. Why? Because, when we came to government, we inherited a mess. Those opposite were not only economic vandals but also environmental vandals. We inherited an economy that had had its shock absorbers removed. We had a housing crisis. We'd seen a collapse of bulk-billing—Medicare—which I'd devoted my life to supporting.

We'd seen energy chaos, where those opposite had 22 energy policies. And what was their strike rate? Was it 50 per cent? Any takers? Perhaps it was 10 per cent? No. It was zero per cent. Zero. They couldn't land a single energy policy. It led to Australia being overexposed to fossil fuels. Of course, what then happened was the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, a black swan event, one none of us saw coming, which has left Australia a country with an unparalleled endowment of sunshine, wind and waves in an energy crisis. Australia, a fossil fuel giant, is facing an energy crisis. It's absurd. Why? Because those opposite, in their 10 years, failed to transition this country to renewable energy, something that we are now doing.

When it comes to the environment, we need to change our mental models. For too long, we have considered the environment as a resource to be pillaged and plundered. The problem is that, when you worship at the temple of GDP, nature always comes off second-best—always. I actually believe this is a completely false dichotomy. Economics is not privileged above biodiversity. In fact, the two are intertwined. Why? Because our economy depends on biodiversity. Where do you think our food comes from? Seventy per cent of our food production is reliant on nature's pollinators: the bees, the bats and the birds.

In addition to that, our economy is reliant on the stuff we dig up, for sure, including all those critical minerals that we will be needing for our net zero transition. But it's also reliant on tourism, like the Great Barrier Reef brings. What we have seen, however, is not just environmental degradation but environmental secrecy under those opposite. We inherited an environmental situation which was described in the State of the environment report 2021 as a 'poor and deteriorating state'. That was damning. That same report, which was released in 2021, was kept under wraps by those opposite because it was too damning to release. We have won the ignominious title of being the mammal extinction capital of the world.

See this speech in context