Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection and I again would invite the Prime Minister to perhaps meet with those scientists who are in the building today. In fact, any scientist will do, frankly. It would, I hope, change the Prime Minister's mind. They would, however, have to get through the door, which is currently packed with donors from the coal industry, who have inordinate influence over this government and, I might add, also over the opposition. They need to make sure that it is not the fossil fuel companies but actually the scientists that are dictating Australia's climate policy.

The reason for that is that coal is in fact not good for humanity. We have already seen in the last 18 months that coal mines have sacked 32 per cent of their workforce. The transition is on, folks. Where is your plan to help those workers? Where is your plan to ensure that those folks in mostly regional and rural communities actually have long-term, sustainable employment? There isn't one, yet the transition is on globally.

I welcome that transition. It is exactly what we need to safeguard our planet and to safeguard the industries that we have that are dependent on a healthy climate—like the Great Barrier Reef, which is an employer of 63,000 people in my state of Queensland and brings in a good $6 billion a year to our economy and which could actually provide those sustainable jobs into the foreseeable future rather than the short-term coal industry, which has sacked one-third of its workforce in the last 18 months. But no; the Prime Minister has well and truly belled the cat when he says that his climate policy is the only way to protect the coal industry.

I have talked about the need for a transition plan. Australia has such wonderful potential. The global trend is on. The coal price has tanked, the workers are being sacked and there is no plan from this government to help provide them jobs. The options are there. We could be creating the prosperity, the employment and the economic growth in clean energy production, in manufacturing for clean energy, in public transport, in high-speed rail, in protecting those other industries that need a livable climate like ecotourism and agriculture—the new economy based on innovation and based on our brains, rather than just a dig-it-up-and-ship-it-out, quarry mentality.

Instead, we heard Senator Birmingham say, 'The Greens will never be happy with anything we say.' I have to agree with Senator Birmingham. Until the government bases their policies on science, we will continue to criticise them for ignoring science and being in the pocket of the coal industry.

As I said, I met with those IPCC authors today, and one of them said something very significant that I thought worthwhile sharing with the chamber. They said, 'Climate change is not an issue for the future; it's an issue for now.' The decisions that we are making now, that this government is making now will shape how we all live. They are shaping the fact that we already have a prevalence of increased extreme weather events. They are dooming us to more frequent and more severe extreme weather events, and I want to illustrate that because I get the sense that the government members are just chatting amongst themselves rather than engaging with the debate.

Perhaps I will give them a few concrete examples. In the Murray-Darling, which they profess to occasionally be concerned about, there was a proposed reduction in average flow by 40 per cent—40 per cent less flow in the Murray on a normal year. That is under climate scenarios that already exist.

We know that there will be an increase in category 3 to category 5 cyclones, we know that heatwaves will get more extreme and we know of course that global coral reefs, being incredibly susceptible to climate change—in fact susceptible to even as low as 1½-degree increase, which sadly we are on track to exceed—will collapse. Now that is an absolute tragedy when we can take the actions to do our best to avert that absolute environmental meltdown. Yet we have the jokers on this side who think it is hilarious and who refuse to engage in the actual science and refuse to perhaps cognate the importance of the decisions that we are making here today. Instead they say that they want to try and help the world's poor by trying to flog off Australia's coal. Well, the World Bank disagrees with them. It says that coal is no solution to energy poverty. Since when did this government care about poverty anyway? They slashed our foreign aid budget for heaven's sake. In rural India, they do not have an electricity grid and our coal will be too expensive for them.

What Australia can provide to the world and to ourselves is clean, affordable, renewable energy that will help us meet this global challenge, do our bit and safeguard our economy. I thought those opposite were meant to care about that, but, no, they just care about the old economy, just the donors, not about the potential for jobs in clean-energy industries. That is where the future lies and that is what we will keep fighting for.