Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank you for that reminding, Madam Deputy President. I cannot think of a more profound dereliction of duty in this moment of national crisis than to seek actively to make a problem worse. That is what this legislation does. We know that coal is at the core of the climate crisis. We know that these national events are not normal, that we are right now living in the midst of a climate emergency, yet this government brings in legislation that seeks to keep the culprit in business, that seeks to bend the powers of the Australian government to that shameful—shameful!—purpose.

We in this place cannot quite grasp what it is like to be on one of these fire fronts today, what it is like to live in the knowledge that tomorrow your home might not be there. Thousands of members of our community are right now engaged in that fight to defend home and environment against these fires. They are heroes for participating in that practice, but they are being let down this morning by this government and this legislation. It's not enough that fire chiefs couldn't get a meeting with the relevant minister. It's not enough that our Prime Minister has turned down international assistance and ruled it out. It's not enough that he and this government continue to prospect even greater sources of carbon to open up, like those in the Beetaloo Basin, pursuing environmental vandalism with a zeal that borders on perversion. But, on the very day when we are in the grips of this, you bring this legislation in, you propose to make the problem even worse by stopping, you know, not necessarily the most community-minded organisations—I mean, these are privately run power entities; they're hardly going to make the Christmas list of the most charitable organisations, the warmest and cuddliest, but even they know they want to get out of the business of this dying industry.

You've been confronted with the facts and you're trying to get away from them. You're trying to use the powers of the government to bend reality to fit your distortion that you have crafted because of decades of taking corporate donation, corporate donation, corporate donation again and again and again until you can't see the world past the green blindfold you've put on.

Beyond the issue of whether or not it is right, proper or consistent for a Liberal government to be—I mean, really, we do see in this piece of legislation the absolute fallacy of the idea of the hand of the free market and how quickly the Liberal Party is willing to abandon those notions whenever it doesn't fit the narrative. It really is an absolute joke, the amount of times you people come in here and preach the benefit of the free market—ridiculous an idea though it is—and yet here we have a circumstance in which certain markets are clearly trying to transition and you are putting the powers of your Liberal administration in the way. I would laugh, but that type of hypocrisy is par for the course in this place.

The feverish attempts that this government has made in the last two days to escape the reality of climate and the emergency that it has created is a national disgrace. You have written off the legitimate concerns of communities on the fire front, the lived experience that what is happening in these communities is not normal. You have disregarded it as merely—what were the words the Deputy Prime Minister used the other day, the 'woke thinkings of inner city latte-sipping hippies'? What an absolutely disgraceful contribution. What an absolutely petty, small statement to make on a day like that. The man might as well go outside and proclaim the sky is purple as declare that there is no link between climate and fire.

You have been told that this would happen, that this link existed. The major parties in this country have been told since 2006 that their continued addiction to fossil fuel donations, that their continued advocacy for these industries, would lead to exactly the natural disaster that we are now in the grips of. You have been told again and again and again and again, and you have utterly failed to act.