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

When Anthony Albanese was elected Leader of the Labor Party, he said he was interested in fighting Tories. Well, he's given up on fighting Tories; he's now fighting the Greens. We've got the Liberals, a climate-denying, climate sceptic party that's in bed with the coal, oil and gas industries, and what are the Labor Party doing? Turning their attention to the Greens. We had half the country on fire last week. We have had the east coast burning. We have had people losing their homes. We have had horrific loss of life. Do you know what the response was from the Labor Party? Again, they joined the Liberal Party: 'Now's not the time to talk about climate change.' Well, the first time since those fires that the Labor Party has decided to talk about climate change is not to attack the government; it's to attack the Greens.

Melinda and Dean have a property that was destroyed. They've got leftover items from their northern New South Wales home. They've got a piece of burnt corrugated iron out the front. Do you know what it says? It says, 'Mr Morrison, your climate crisis destroyed my home'. What's the response of the Labor Party? 'It's the Greens' fault.' Well, how about, rather than looking to the past, you look to the present and actually decide what you want to do now? The Australian people don't give two hoots about a fight that happened 10 years ago. Why don't you go back to the Dismissal, for God's sake? Let's go back to the ALP-DLP split! Things would have been different if the ALP and DLP hadn't split! People care about what happens now. What they want to know is what you stand for.

If you are so desperate to have a carbon price introduced, let's get together and work on one. Let me remind you that we were the only party that took a carbon price to the last election. You are so desperate to talk about a policy that would have put a price on carbon. Well, let's work together and put one in. Let's do what the Australian people want us to do: let's price carbon so we can phase out coal and get on track to addressing the climate crisis that faces us. But, no, you're not interested in doing this; you're interested in a distraction. You're interested in whitewashing the legacy of Australia's first female Prime Minister. In 2010, after we defeated a terrible piece of public policy, we got what was described by the International Energy Agency as 'template legislation'. We got a price on carbon, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the establishment of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. We got all of those things in place working constructively with Australia's first female Prime Minister and working constructively with the crossbench. We introduced legislation that, for the first time, brought down pollution. We had pollution come down, we had investment and we had model climate policy. And you want to talk about the past? Well, if the Labor Party hadn't torn itself apart with the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd fiasco, maybe Tony Abbott wouldn't have been effective in turning down that carbon price. Maybe we would still have a carbon price if you had your shit together and you actually worked cooperatively—