Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Of course the Greens are interjecting. You will remember this, Madam Acting Deputy President Polley: the Greens wanted to stop hydro dams in the early 1980s. Do you know what their alternate energy supply was going to be? A coal-fired power station in the Fingal Valley, so said Bob Brown, the former Leader of the Australian Greens. It was on the front page of the Mercury sometime in October. Sure, Senator Whish-Wilson finds that an inconvenient truth, but that is the reality. If you keep on believing the nonsense of the Australian Greens, such as that which is incorporated in this motion, you come to the situation where you deny good, reliable base-load renewable energy such as hydro and, in desperation, you grasp at anything and you suggest a coal-fired power station. Thank goodness they did not build a coal-fired power station, because Bob Brown and the Greens would have been betwixt and between. Could they be demonstrating against the coal-fired power station that they had actually wanted and argued for publicly?

So I say to the Australian Greens and to my fellow Australians who might be listening in to this debate is that what we need is good, sound, considered policy. Here we have a government that is investing in my home state of Tasmania with Battery of the Nation, investing in an enhanced Snowy Mountains scheme and seeking to enhance our capacity to harness gas, which is a very important transition fuel as we seek to reduce our CO2 emissions.

We have heard this idea that we are in climate collapse for decade after decade after decade, and every prediction after every prediction has failed. That does not mean that we should not be good stewards of our environment, and we as a government are. I remind people in this place that the first minister for the environment was in fact a Liberal minister. We are committed to the environment and we continue to be committed to the environment but we are also committed to our fellow Australians—their jobs, their livelihoods—and the capacity of our nation through our manufacturing and economic base to be able to provide the moneys needed for NDIS, for health, for education, and for law and order. You have to have a complete policy suite and that is exactly what the Morrison government is delivering.