Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, I hosted a forum on climate change with Labor's shadow minister assisting for climate change. I was surprised by the number of people who turned out on a Friday morning to hear what we had to say about meaningful action on climate change. It was a diverse group and very representative of the Moreton electorate: mums with toddlers who played in the foyer of my office, grandparents, university professors, former migrants, anti-Adani people, business owners, young people, middle aged people, and even a climate-change sceptic. You get the picture. What united just about every person in the room was the absolute despair that people have over the coalition's inaction on climate change. What united people is this government's utter neglect to address climate change at all now that they're into their seventh year of government. What united people was their frustration over the coalition's inability to implement any real policy that will bring our emissions down.

Over the last year, people in my electorate were glued to their screens. They were horrified by what they saw. They saw fires starting in winter; rainforests burning; people losing their properties; people losing friends and family; cities shrouded in thick, choking smoke; and holiday towns evacuated by our Navy. The horror of those fires and how they have burnt our country will be etched in our collective memories for decades. Like many in this country, the people who came to our forum had seen the fake news about hazard reduction, the fake news about greenies and the fake news about arsonists, and they've had enough. They wrote to me, email after email and letter after letter. There was phone call after phone call. They wrote of their despair and their frustration of living in a country led by one of the few conservative governments in the world still divided on the science of climate change.

I'm proud to belong to a party of government that is the only party that has brought meaningful policy on climate to this parliament. I was here when the CPRS scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, was passed in the House of Representatives, and I watched the coalition and the Greens combine to vote down the CPRS. I also witnessed the coalition hug and cheer when they demolished this nation's emissions trading scheme. People in my electorate are tired of coalition politicians who say the science is settled but do nothing meaningful to actually combat climate change. They're demanding stronger action when it comes to climate change. As the shadow minister for climate change and energy said in parliament last week, what we've experienced over the last summer is not necessarily the new normal. He said that, if average temperatures continue to climb, the new normal will be significantly worse than what we have seen in the course of this summer.

This government must act now. We owe it to the children who played in the foyer of my office. We owe it to every single child of an Australian and to all adult Australians. We know that we have to act further. We know that we need to actually get the balance right. We know that we can get a just transition when we look after jobs and ensure we look after all Australians but lower our emissions. Jobs will come from those renewable technologies and the like. I look forward to them.