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

I rise to speak on the coalition's failure to provide the economic leadership that our nation needs. Certainly there is no greater proof of that than the last two years. On behalf of the Greens, may I say that we are thrilled to see the back of the former Prime Minister. I am personally thrilled to see the back of the nastiness, the small-mindedness, and the lack of vision and long-term planning. The new leadership is an opportunity for the coalition to reset. I hope that we will see some policy change. Australia is crying out for policy change. It would be incredibly depressing if we saw no policy change but just a different talking head. This is a real test for the government and for the new leader.

If there is to be genuine economic progress, clearly the biggest challenge, which the entire globe is facing, is how we tackle climate change. Of course it is an enormous environmental issue. Of course it is an enormous social and justice issue; but it is also an economic issue. It is the biggest economic issue of our time. There were some encouraging words said by the now Prime Minister yesterday. But then, when he was pressed on whether there would be any policy changes on climate change, I was very disheartened to hear the now Prime Minister say that he endorsed the climate policies of the former Abbott regime. Not only that, his deputy then chimed in and said they endorsed the targets that have been announced to take to Paris.

What a missed opportunity! I urge the government to reconsider. There is a genuine opportunity to create prosperity while we tackle this enormous threat to our very way of life, not to mention the life-support systems and the things that we hold dear. This is an enormous opportunity. The job creation potential in clean energy is so exciting. We saw that under the Renewable Energy Target Scheme, if it had not been slashed—sadly, both the parties ganged up to do that—there would have been $14½ billion of investment in large-scale renewables by 2020. How absolutely exciting. That is the future, and it could have been ours. Instead, we saw the target slashed from 41,000 to 33,000 gigawatt hours. That represented a loss of 6,000 future jobs.

It is very interesting to hear the focus on economic prosperity, because we know that until last night we have heard the lies, frankly, of big fossil fuel companies trotted out in this place like gospel—particularly in Queensland, where I am from. The initial promise by Adani, the Indian coal company, was that they would generate 10,000 jobs from their Carmichael coalmine. Under scrutiny they back-pedalled enormously and said, 'Actually, it is only 1,464—sorry, we got carried away there.' Yet we have still seen members of the frontbench in this place trot out that discredited and incorrect jobs figure.

Opening up coalmines in the Galilee Basin, including that Adani mine, is absolutely the wrong way to go. We should not be tipping $5 billion into a slush fund for fossil fuel infrastructure, which Adani is now seeking to access. We should not be going down that path. If we do not tackle global warming, then we see a real threat to the Great Barrier Reef and to our agricultural sectors. While we are in this economics frame, those two are enormous employers and enormous generators of prosperity. The reef employs more than 60,000 people and brings in more than $6 billion every year to our bottom line. If we look after that beautiful place, which is an absolute paradise and truly magical, we can bring that prosperity and those jobs in every year. That could be a sustainable prospect for us in Queensland and for the nation.

Likewise, if we safeguard our agricultural sector, help them transition to more sustainable farming methods, as they already wish to do and some are already doing, and genuinely tackle the impact that global warming will have on food production, rather than pockmarking farms with coal seam gas wells or turning them into enormous open-cut coalmines, we can safeguard those jobs as well.

We really need to start getting some long-term perspective onto these questions of where our future economic prosperity lies. We know it is not in last-century thinking. It is not in the big mines and the big old infrastructure items. It is in the exciting new areas of clean energy, innovation, science, and research and development of technology, and in our services sector and ecotourism. These are the green and prosperous economies of the future, which we know will provide employment and sustained income to our bottom line.

I hope we see moves in that direction. I think the Australian community is desperate to see a move in that direction. That is why it was very disappointing to hear the Prime Minister last night already ruling out changing the climate change policies of the Abbott government. He has no doubt had to bring an awful lot of climate sceptics along with him in order to ascend to the leadership, but I urge the Prime Minister to seriously base his policies on science. I urge all members in this place to restore the centrality of science to decision making, particularly as it pertains to climate change—which is intricately linked to our economic prosperity—and to realise that the momentum is on globally.

The transition towards a low-carbon economy is not some fringe, crazy notion as the leader of government business in the Senate would have us believe every time he howls us down when the Greens ask a question about climate change. It is actually fringe to not be making that transition. Look at the rest of the world. That transition is on; it is happening. And every day Australia is getting further and further behind—when we have some of the best clean energy resources in the world. We have some of the world's best sunshine, yet we have a government that is hamstringing the CEFC from investing in rooftop solar—or in wind, for that matter, because a bunch of people are awfully concerned about the health impacts of wind, of which there are none, and forget about the health impacts of coalmining, which are well known and actually documented by real scientists. I hope we see a diminution of the influence of the fossil fuels sector on both of the big parties. I am an eternal optimist. It remains to be seen whether anything will change. It needs to change. We cannot just have the same old, tired, failed policies with a slightly better salesperson at the helm.