Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Boswell calls the coal industry a primary industry. You see, the problem is that the National Party has lost its way. Once upon a time it was the agricultural industries that were primary industries—the food producers and the fibre producers, the people on the land who provided the food, sustenance and shelter for the people in the cities. That is the view the Greens still take. It is a view that is undermined by this persistent and full-on support of the coal industry and its subsidies, come what may.

Let me explain a little bit more about that to the chamber. Firstly, about 75 per cent of the coal industry’s profits flow overseas, because it is largely overseas owned. Some National Party—to be putting that up against the rural producers in this country. The second thing, as I said earlier, is that it employs some 28,000 people, but the rural industries employ hundreds of thousands of people. If you look at the Garnaut report, just on the Murray-Darling Basin, and the impact of climate change coming down the line, 128,000 jobs are at risk there. A report just a week ago pointed to the Great Barrier Reef, where there are 63,000 jobs at risk, and the potential, if we do not act on climate change, of some $38 billion being taken out of the wellbeing of the Queensland economic base. The National Party will put the coalmining industry—foreign owned, with its profits flowing out of this country, massively subsidised—in front of the industries based on the Great Barrier Reef and the rural industries. Here is the problem: you cannot have it both ways. I for one am not going to allow that double-handedness of a National Party that has lost its way trying to have it both ways. Senator Boswell has said, ‘Well, you will have to subsidise this renewable energy industry.’ The question is: what about the fossil fuel industry?