Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I stand today to express the Greens' serious concerns about the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Amendment (Support for Infrastructure Financing) Bill 2019 and to say categorically that the Greens will be voting against this bill. I urge all other senators to also vote against this bill today. This bill will greatly expand the power of the Australian export credit agency and increase its access to callable capital from approximately $200 million to $1.2 billion. I want to state that this is public money. This is taxpayer money.

The government hasn't consulted the public, who own these funds, on this bill and is rushing this through parliament without any time for adequate consultation—coincidently, probably a couple of days before an election is called. I was concerned to see, as were many stakeholders around this country, that the recent report released by the Senate Economics Committee, of which I am part, ignored many of the important issues raised by civil society groups across this country. Efic has, unfortunately, had a long history of funding fossil fuel projects that have been found to be detrimental to women's rights, communities and low-income countries as a whole. Senator Hanson-Young has already given an example of how previous investments have disregarded the environmental impact in those countries. This is not a body that we should be trusting with an extra billion dollars of public funds.

One example alluded to already was Efic's investment in the PNG LNG project which Efic funded in 2014. Research by Jubilee Australia showed a range of negative impacts from this project for local communities, including an increase in violence and harm to the PNG economy overall. Of course, this doesn't include the climate impact of opening up new fossil fuel projects around the world, which, at this point in history, is nothing short of sheer madness. So, given Efic's history of lending to projects associated with significant threats to human rights and the environment in our region, the Greens do not feel that the work has been done and that the community has enough faith in this bill. Senator Hanson-Young pointed out that this will just be a trojan horse for exporting more climate change, coal and fossil fuels to overseas countries to the benefit of a few large companies.

I want to talk a little bit about another form of export that Efic has been involved in which concerns me almost as much as the pork-barrelling we might see around new fossil fuel projects that can't stand on their own two feet—that is, the export of weapons and arms we see facilitated through Efic. You may be aware that $3.8 billion was set aside by this government two years ago for what they called the Defence Export Facility, administered by Efic, the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation. I will read to you from Efic's website:

A $3.8 billion Defence Export Facility administered by Efic, Australia's export credit agency—

was set up—

This will help Australian companies get the finance they need to underpin the sales of their equipment overseas. It will provide confidence to Australian Defence industry to identify and pursue new export opportunities knowing Efic's support is available when there is a market gap for defence finance.

Why is there a market gap for defence finance? Why is there a clear market failure in the provision and export of defence industry technology, hardware and munitions to overseas countries? I've asked this question of Minister Payne several times during estimates. I've put questions on notice. There has been almost no detail around why this $3.8 billion was necessary.

Reverend Costello, the day this was announced, came out and said that this was blood money. Why are we setting up a taxpayer funded export facility to subsidise weapons manufacturers to sell weapons to countries overseas? 'Who are they selling them to?' you may ask. The government has set up a catalogue. If you're in the market for a new high-powered machine gun, perhaps, or a turret that might carry a machine gun on an armoured personnel carrier, or some drone technology, go onto the catalogue and have a look; it's all there.

The only export sale we've seen announced from this so far was to Saudi Arabia, a country that was involved in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who was cut up with a bone saw in a foreign embassy, which we've talked about in this chamber recently. This government said that all options would be on the table in relation to Saudi Arabia, yet a couple of months later we find that the option on the table is to sell it weapons. This country is a known human rights abuser. It has been involved in the civil war in Yemen, which the United Nations has said is the biggest humanitarian catastrophe this century, yet we are selling, through Efic, a government sponsored agency, more weapons and arms to serial human rights abusers overseas. That's the level of trust we are putting in this organisation today, to which we are planning to give an extra billion dollars.

In a time of climate change, a time of climate emergency, a time of climate crisis, why would we be giving money to an organisation that has a track record of funding fossil fuel developments and has openly talked about facilitating the infrastructure for Adani, one of the world's biggest coalmines, where, once again, Australia exporting is climate change to the world? Twenty-four hours after Mr Malcolm Turnbull called a double dissolution, I remember going down to Cape Grim in the north-west of Tasmania—where you're from, Mr Acting Deputy President Duniam—and standing on the beach with a placard that said '400 parts per million' because the Cape Grim weather station, one of two monitoring stations in the world, had just measured 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere. Our global challenge, if we're going to act on runaway climate change, is to get emissions below 350 parts per million. It's accepted that 450 parts per million is the white flag for give-it-up, runaway climate change.

That was three years ago. When I stood on that beach with that sign and nearly got blown away—because, as you know, Cape Grim has very severe weather—even though it was an ominous sign that the world had passed 400 parts per million, I would never have imagined that in the last three years in Australia we would have seen back-to-back bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, something that our climate scientists predicted wouldn't have been possible until 2050 on our existing emissions trajectories. I would never have predicted that we would have seen the loss of Tasmania's giant kelp forests, an ancient ecosystem that stretched from north-eastern Tasmania all the way to south-west Tasmania. An ecosystem central to not just the water biodiversity of Tasmanian waters but our fisheries has gone in the last three years. I would never have predicted that we would have seen three fires in the last five summers in World Heritage areas that have never seen fire for thousands of years. I wouldn't have predicted that every weather record in this country would have been broken in the last three years since we passed 400 parts per million.

What is it now? What is Cape Grim reading now? I'm finding it very hard to find out. The last reading I could find was 412 parts per million. The Hawaiian station is reading 415. Our trajectory over the last three years means that within 10 years we will pass 450 parts per million—runaway climate change. And what do we get? What do we get from this government? We get a bill, coming before the parliament in the dying days of the 45th Parliament, to give $1 billion of public money to Efic, an organisation that has funded fossil fuel projects overseas, that has talked about funding foreign-owned fossil fuel projects like the Adani mine in Australia and that has helped facilitate a clearly political strategy to build a defence industry, to be a global top-10 arms exporter, using public money. Why would we trust and give more public money to this agency, especially under the tutelage and guidance of this LNP government, a government full of climate deniers that have taken no action on climate change? In fact, they're quite the opposite. Since they came to government in 2013 they have ripped up the world's leading gold-standard package on climate. They've cynically reduced it to nothing for their own big backers in the fossil fuel industry. No way will we support this bill to give this government and Efic another billion dollars of taxpayers' money.

Let's talk about facilitating an offshore oilfield and LNG terminal in Papua New Guinea. We know an oil company wrote to the committee about it and said: 'Let's support this. Let's get behind this. This is perfect for this kind of project.' This is a time in history for us to be saying no more—no more greenfields exploration in offshore oil and gas; no more seismic testing offshore. It's a time in history to be transitioning to renewable energy. It's time to listen to the NRMA, who came out yesterday and said: 'No more sales. The government should ban the sale of diesel and petrol cars by 2025.' That's only six years away. The peak motoring body has come out and suggested that this is the kind of thing we need to do to cut our emissions to meet the targets we need to meet, to reduce that 412 parts per million back to 350, where we need it to be to secure the future for our grandchildren.

Why is it that we are vacillating? Why is it that there's paralysis in this place to take action on climate change? The answer is simple. Big political parties, big money, are in bed together. Big donations mean zero action. That's the root cause of the problem. We need to fix a rigged political system where the Liberal Party and the Labor Party take donations from big oil and gas and we need to make sure we put in place the policies the Australian people want to transition to 100 per cent renewables, to get zero net emissions by 2030. If we don't, we haven't got time. In 10 years, we will pass 450 parts per million, and there is no turning back. There is no turning back from runaway climate change—