Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It feels a bit like some kind of sick joke, doesn't it, that in the same fortnight the Minister for Resources announced the future gas strategy the government put up this legislation, the Net Zero Economy Authority Bill 2024, on Australia's path to net zero? Let me be clear: these two things are mutually exclusive. Australia has no real path to net zero, not under this government. The future gas strategy destroys any path to net zero. This government wilfully embraces the gas cartels, announcing more gas exploration despite the looming climate catastrophe. The government says that gas is a transition fuel—but to where? Not to net zero. If they keep rolling out the red carpet for gas projects, the transition will be to climate disaster. Labor are climate con artists. They are literally gaslighting everyday Australians, completely greenwashing their legislative agenda and at the expense of a real transition for coal and gas workers.

The Greens are the only party pushing for a statutory authority to support all coal and gas workers through the transition to renewables. This is not that authority. At the crux of it, this legislation covers only 10 per cent of the workforce affected by any transition to net zero. It only relates to employees of coal and gas-fired power stations and coalmines supplying domestic power generation. There's nothing about gas and oil export workers. Labor says, 'Bad luck!' if you're one of the 90 per cent of workers this bill just doesn't cover. It's because the Labor government has no desire to offer up a real transition plan. That's explicitly clear with the decision to exclude coal and gas export workers from this bill. This is a shameless reflection of Labor's plan to continue expanding coal and gas beyond 2050, such as the Barossa project, which, in the next 12 months, will emit more than 401 million tonnes of CO2 pollution. That's 80 per cent of the total pollution of Australia in just 2020 alone. What about the Scarborough offshore gas field? That's another devastating project, this one brought to us by another member of the gas cartel, Woodside. This project will produce emissions equivalent to six coal-fired power plants over its lifetime. The Scarborough-to-Pluto project will emit over 1.37 billion tonnes of pollution. That's the pollution impact—just to compare it—of 20,000 daily flights across the world for 25 years. It's the biggest oil and gas project in a decade.

It just doesn't make any sense. The planet's cooking. We need to stop any new coal and gas projects now. So what does this government do? It clears the way for Woodside to proceed with its biggest project in 10 years. What about Browse, another component of Woodside's Burrup Hub gas expansion? This expansion is the most polluting of all coal, gas or oil proposals in the Southern Hemisphere. It will have a lifetime of emissions of more than 13 times Australia's annual emissions. Labor is acting as the political arm of the fossil fuel industry. They've got massive amounts of taxpayer dollars for fossil fuel products, over $10 billion in subsidies and $1.5 billion in the budget for Middle Arm, which will be a gas export hub. That is public money—our taxpayer money—literally being handed to these highly-profitable gas companies that pay almost no tax. Unbelievable! Not only is the government letting Santos and Woodside virtually write their environmental policies but they're also giving them cash handouts—money that could be used to put dental cover into Medicare; to build public housing; or to ease the cost of living. But what do we get instead? We get huge gas projects that wreck our environment. With 2.5 or three degrees warming we will have heat waves that will kill thousands in our cities; floods and droughts that will cause massive crop failures; and cyclones and storms that will destroy entire communities. That's the future—that's what the scientists are saying the future is. That's the future for their own children and grandchildren that every Labor MP here is actually voting for.

We don't need new gas expansion. Gas is not a transition fuel, it's a fossil fuel. Australia has enough gas for our domestic supply for the next 100 years. Australia barely uses any of the gas we extract; we export 84 per cent of it. By the way: it's not households who use most of our domestic supply, it's actually the gas industry. You can't export natural gas in its raw form, it has to be turned into liquefied natural gas, LNG, a process that uses more gas than the entire manufacturing industry and double the amount that households use annually.

Surely, if we export all of this gas, Australians must be getting a good deal in tax revenue—right? Well, no. The industry pays almost no tax or royalties. Santos made $31 billion and paid no income tax; Chevron made $6.8 billion last year, and paid $30—$30!—in income tax. Yes, $30! Woodside made $57 billion profit, with only three per cent tax paid. Even Texas, the crude oil and gas capital of the USA, has a royalty rate of 25 per cent on fossil fuels. Queensland's rate doesn't even hit 10 per cent. Gas companies like Woodside get our free money, pay nothing in return and leave us with a climate bomb in the form of the Beetaloo basin project. It's a pretty poor return on Australian investment. And, at the end of the day, it's the workers of these gas companies that are being left behind by this bill, while their employers laugh all the way to the bank, paying almost no tax on their billions in profit and wrecking the planet in the process.

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