Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The science and experts are clear. If we want to stop devastating and catastrophic climate change, we cannot open any new coal and gas projects. It is what the International Energy Agency says, it is what IPCC climate scientists say and it is what experts around the world say. It is devastating and genuinely difficult to understand how members in this place can get up and pretend like this government is taking climate change seriously when this government has approved in this term of government—and wait for this—28 new coal and gas projects.

Australia is the second-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world behind only Russia and ahead of the United States. That alone should be deeply shameful for a country that will face devastating consequences as a result of climate inaction—devastating. We have already experienced them. In my hometown of Brisbane, in the space of just over a decade, we have faced two one-in-100-year floods. I remember going into people's devastated homes, their lives destroyed, and one of the things I thought about is that here in parliament we have two political parties—Labor and the Liberals—who have been utterly captured by the interests of coal and gas corporations. They wield enormous power over our political system.

It is not just the millions of dollars in donations that coal and gas corporations make to the two major parties. It is not just that Labor and Liberal resource ministers in the past have gone on to work for the coal, oil and gas industries—before and after their jobs, by the way. It is not just that this government time and time again sings the tune of corporations like Santos and Woodside. But even though Australia is a massive exporter of coal and gas, this country gets a fraction of that revenue in tax—a fraction. It is remarkable that corporations like Santos and Woodside sometimes pay less tax than a nurse. When you look around the world at countries like Norway that get about 60 per cent of taxation revenue from their oil industry and then you look at Australia and it is somewhere closer to nine per cent. Nurses pay a higher tax rate than coal and gas corporations in Australia. That alone should be deeply shameful when we are in a cost-of-living crisis.

But let's think about the consequences for a second, such as the devastating floods and heatwaves that disproportionately affect the elderly and vulnerable. In the future their lives will be lost as a result of climate-driven natural disasters, which are hardly natural because they are driven by financial interests in coal, oil and gas corporations that wield enormous power over our political system.

It is hard because we speak—

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