Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's such a shame that a senator who I like so much, Senator Kitching, has been given such a lousy job by those opposite. They have given her the department of cleaning out the grubby jobs. Whether that's sending her into estimates to nitpick over the catering bills for bipartisan type functions, scrounging around how much people are spending on aeroplanes or trying to manufacture scandals where there are just none to see, my friend and respected colleague Senator Kitching just gets the grubby jobs over and over again. It's a shame, because she's a top person. I reckon those opposite undervalue you, Senator Kitching. You're capable of so much more than what they get you to do. I want to work with you on the big policy challenges of our time, and I want to see you elevated out of the department of taking out the trash. I'm happy to give you a reference, but I'm not sure that it's going to help you an awful lot. I get the feeling that references from me won't take you very far.

There's a reason that those opposite want to talk about every grubby little thing they can try and manufacture from the grease trap of this building. It's because they don't want to be talking about how their cupboard is bare. They came out earlier this week with what they made out to be a visionary zero-net-emissions target for this country by the year 2050. They made out this means they're serious about climate action. I just think that's really quite funny, because my dear friend, Senator Kitching, is a paid-up member of the Otis group, who I know has views much more like mine that say we need balance in these things. Anyway, they sent her out to take out the trash on that one on Monday, too. It's really quite unfair.

The cupboard is bare when it comes to their climate policies. We're talking about 2050 because they are so internally torn about what their climate policy should be. They're so torn between their desire to virtue-signal to the hipsters of Melbourne against the need to fight for jobs in Central Queensland and elsewhere. They're so torn and so divided that they thought, 'We'll just dodge 2030. The government's working towards this really concrete, meaningful stuff—accountable, measurable, deliverable by 2030—but it's all too hard for us, so what we're going to do is just make the date a whole lot later. It will give us an extra 20 or so years to work out what we stand for.' But the fact is that they don't know what they stand for, and their net-zero-emissions target for 2050 is one that they have no plan to achieve.

The government is happy to say that, like normal, sensible, non-extremist Australians, we want to balance the need to be responsible with our environment and to be as clean as we can possibly be with the need to continue to develop our economy and make sure there are great jobs for Australians from all walks of life, no matter where they come from and no matter what their ambitions are. We understand the value of both of those things. But those opposite only really know they want the twitterati to praise them for being supergreen. You're not supergreen when you can't deliver. You're not supergreen when you've got no plan on how to get there. You're not supergreen when your policies just mean that we send Australians' money overseas to buy carbon credits. They're not supergreen policies when they shut down the transport industry that brings goods to market, help make sure that we've got fresh fruit and vegies in our supermarkets and items to buy for a reasonable price when we go to the shops. It's not good for Australians when they can't even have an agriculture industry in which to work, no place in which their food can be manufactured—