Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last year the climate fuelled bushfires burned across Australia. Last month the International Energy Agency said that, to get to net zero, the very first thing that every country has to do is commit to not approving any new oil and gas fields, new coalmines or mine extensions, new coal plants, or any fossil fuel boilers. Just days ago the G7 committed to more than halving their pollution in this critical decade, ending fossil fuel subsidies and the financing of coal. And what was the Morrison government's first policy response to these historic global shifts? To release 80,000 square kilometres of our ocean to exploit new oil and gas fields. Nothing is safe from this government, which is working as one with the coal and gas corporations. Even the Twelve Apostles in Victoria are now under threat from the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Chevron, Santos, Origin and ExxonMobil. We've had a year and a half of megafires, cities covered in smoke, dust storms, hailstorms and floods, and the Australian government is still trying to give more money, more land and more of our ocean to the corporate horsemen who are causing all this devastation. The government is trying to see how far it can drag the country for the profiteering of this evil industry, whether it's a quarter of a billion dollars of our money for gas corporations to frack the Beetaloo Basin, $600 million of our money to build a gas plant or several million dollars for a new coal-fired power station.

We need to call time on this giant scam that's going to make our lives and those of the generations to follow unimaginably bad, because time is running out. The banks are abandoning this industry. The world can see the writing on the wall. The firefighters get it, the army gets it, the private equity corporations get it and the schoolkids get it, which is why we need to stop the grift, stop the scam, end the handouts, and dry up our addiction to these terrible fuels and limit the damage they're causing.

We have to fight to release a government and a so-called opposition that are captured by coal, oil and gas corporations. How do we know that they're captured? Because they keep voting to humiliate themselves, to abandon their responsibilities and to wreck both the country they claim to represent and their kids' futures. And for what? For the profits of some of the greediest, most shameless and most dangerous corporations in the world—corporations which by and large don't pay much tax, are labelled by the tax office as systemic nonpayers of tax, will poison your river, will give workers black lung and will undermine a union agreement to bring in labour hire workers. They care about only one thing: their profits. If they didn't, they would pay their fair share of tax, they would clean up after themselves, they wouldn't spend in political donations and lobbying strategies, and they might even have invested in their own carbon capture and storage by now. But they don't.

They're not just digging wherever they like in some of our most iconic places or wrecking the cultural sites of First Nations people; they're making us pay for it. Every time you go to work, buy a house or buy something at the shops you pay tax. And where does that tax go? It goes to fund gas fields, to fund fossil fuel exploration, to fund their fuel costs and to fund their profits. Santos and Peabody Energy didn't pay any tax, yet we the public are paying them and giving them handouts. We're also the ones who have to clean up their mess, to rebuild our homes and our lives, and to mentally prepare ourselves for the next fire season, flood or heatwave. Those running the fossil fuel corporations, who refuse to pay tax, who have their hands in our pockets, who have corrupted our politics to destroy our environment, our jobs and our future—what they are doing is criminal. The law might be on their side but morality is not. Things are changing; the government will change, and one day soon we will get tough on the climate criminals causing the climate crisis. We will fight for our future.