Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me moving a motion to give precedence to a motion relating to climate change.

What we've seen today is the total and complete capitulation by Malcolm Turnbull to the hard right of his party and to his big coal donors—a total, complete and utter capitulation by a cowardly and spineless Prime Minister, who doesn't have the ticker to stand up to the pro-coal lobbying side of his own party and stand up to the likes of the Nationals, who are more interested in doing the bidding of Gina Rinehart and the mining lobby than they are in standing up for their rural constituents. We've got the Nationals over there who are basically in this place doing a three-year long job interview so they can nick off and do the bidding of the coal and gas industry. Let's see who is part of the coal and gas industry in this country? It's a who's who of the National Party and the Liberal Party: Mark Vaile, John Anderson and Ian Macfarlane. Of course, Labor's not immune. They've got Martin Ferguson on the other side.

Do you know what today is, Mr President? It is payday for those fossil fuel companies who have given millions of dollars in donations to all sides of politics for one reason: to get an energy policy in this country that serves no-one other than the big fossil fuel companies. This plan that the government has announced today will result in the death of the Great Barrier Reef. It will kill the Murray-Darling Basin. It will kill the jobs that rely on them. It will drive up pollution and it will drive up power prices.

The evidence is very clear. The energy regulator made it abundantly clear what would happen if the government had the courage to take on those big network companies: we would actually make some progress in bringing down power prices. The experts have made that abundantly clear. Yesterday, the ACCC said that power prices are so high because of market concentration. What we have got is a handful of energy generators who are milking Australian consumers dry and we have a government who says: 'We want you to have more of it. We want you to keep shafting consumers in the way that we've just shafted the Chief Scientist Alan Finkel.'

Imagine what Alan Finkel would be thinking right now? There he was bending over backwards to write a plan, with riding instructions from this government so that all he could come up with was a plan so narrow that it would have meant more coal in the system by 2050 than business as usual—but at least there was some incentive for clean energy. But Malcolm Turnbull has turned around to the Chief Scientist and said, 'Well, stuff you. We don't want a bar of what you are presenting us. We don't believe in science. We don't believe in what is absolutely crystal clear and what the business community is telling us and what the general community wants. What we want to do is keep propping up the business model for our coal and gas mates'. That's what this plan is.

This is a plan written by the coal and gas industry that shafts the people that the Nationals over here say they stand for—people living in regional areas, farmers, regional communities. So, instead, what do the Nationals want to do? They want to open up more farmland for coal seam gas. They want to see more of their constituents having to fight those big gas companies who want to frack land, contaminate their water and, ultimately, turn Australian farmland into an industrial-scale wasteland. Why do they do it? It's because they're in the pocket of the coal and gas industry., and they get those big cheques coming in. That's why you see Barnaby Joyce taking international flights with Gina Rinehart rather than—