Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to respond to the issue that having to wait for the Electric Vehicles Accountability Bill 2021 to pass would delay payments to oil refineries. As we've already seen, there has been a date—1 July—put on this, but the government is already getting money out the door. You have already approved payments of up to $83.5 million by regulation. If this was delayed beyond 1 July, it would be completely within the power of the government to extend getting money out the door through regulation. This is not holding it up. This is just allowing us to have a sensible debate. It's allowing us to consider the issue of giving $2 billion to a fossil fuel company, given the fact that we are in a climate crisis and given the context of the absolute necessity to address our carbon pollution by shifting to zero carbon transport.

I'm here today wearing a scarf, which I was given yesterday morning by a Christian organisation called Common Grace. This scarf represents how global temperatures have risen over the last 100 years from dark blue here, in 1919. You can see the Black Summer of 2019 here. This is the crisis that we are facing shown here. We are facing a climate crisis. There is no time to continue on. This government does not have even half-hearted measures, not even an electric vehicles strategy or a future fuels strategy, but it actively undermines action on climate change. It's actually going against what the rest of the world is doing. The G7 acknowledged that we need to at least halve our carbon pollution by 2030 and stop giving subsidies to fossil fuel companies. This government is just completely out of step. You are being climate criminals by continuing this sort of action and these subsidies, continuing the pollution that is the destroying our future. We are told that we can't even send a bill off to a Senate inquiry. We can't even have the opportunity to have debate. We can't link it with issues that would do something constructive by shifting a lot of the transport that currently needs petrol and diesel to much cleaner alternatives.

The CHAIR: The question is that amendments (1) to (3) on sheet 1295, as moved together, by leave, by Senator Rice, be agreed to.