Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

In a way, Senator McMahon's contribution highlights again the failure of all of us, really, to work out a way forward on how we deal with the issues that are raised in the IPCC report. It is with some sadness and despair, actually, that I have to give a speech today trying to argue about the need for change and the need to address climate change. This is the sixth report based on the science that clearly makes the case for the urgent need for change. Yet here we are in this place—leaders. All of us here were elected to do a job, and we still can't agree on the way forward. That has been the problem that has plagued this parliament for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the science keeps coming in and the evidence keeps coming in. Every summer, we see the bushfires get worse. Every winter, we watch the fires in the Northern Hemisphere get worse. We see the floods and the natural disasters that come and hit our shores. We see the plight of people in the Pacific. It's commonly understood. Even the ACT resident climate-change denier today—now with ministerial responsibility—kind of acknowledges that.

This is the world that our children are growing up in, including my children, who had to remain inside because the smoke was so thick in the ACT. We had the worst air pollution anywhere in the world, about two years ago, from the fires that were all around our borders. This is the world that my children are growing up in. They get it. The overwhelming majority of young people get it, because they see it and they've got a stake in what happens. Yet, here we are, the leaders of the country in a political sense, and we're still working out what to do, whether to convince each other and pointing the finger. It's just devastating.

I used to believe in good policy being made in chambers like this. That's why I got into politics: to make a difference, to be part of the debate. I used to believe that governments could bring people together, that they could show leadership and could, when they reach across the aisle and bring stakeholders together, make good policy in the national interest. Yet, for the past eight years, I've watched the politics of climate change get kicked around, weaponised.

There now seems to be, from the government's point of view, a moratorium on good policy. They're not even interested, because it's about power; it's not about policy. It's not about the future. It's not about making sure the decisions we make today give us a fighting chance of making sure that our kids and our grandkids don't inherit a dying planet. It's not about that anymore; it's about power. It's about dealing with division and disagreement from within the government.

Every time Labor has said, 'We will support you on this policy,' on one of the many different policies you've tried to get up—let's pick the one that you used before you necked Malcom Turnbull—when we reach across the chamber, even when it's not what we would have done, but it's a step in the right direction, what's the response? You get rid of the Prime Minister and completely walk away from it, and another two or three years is lost.

Meanwhile, we get these reports that tell us we've got to act and if we don't act it's going to be a disaster. Then the government just trots out its three dot points that it's been using for the past few years: one, our emissions have gone down; two, Australia beat its 2020 targets—I think the language is 'meet and beat'—and three, we're committed to Paris and we have a flimsy commitment to 2050 as soon as possible or preferable. That's the only answer we've got. Surely we're better than this.

We have to convince people from here. I get that not everybody across Australia agrees with where the Greens are. A lot of people don't; the majority don't. So lecturing from that side doesn't work. There has to be somewhere in the centre where people from your side and our side and their side can find some common place to deal with the disaster that this report clearly shows will happen if we don't do more. That's what the community expects from us: to engage with those who don't believe, to understand their worries. I get that there are people worried about their economic future and what it means for them, for their job, for their kid's job, for their livelihood.

Change is hard; leading change is hard. Being in government is hard. I get all that. But someone has to lead, and people expect the elected government of the day to lead, not to point the finger at everybody else and use slogans like 'technology not taxes' and keep saying it and saying it and hoping that this is the message that gets through but to go deeper, convince people, talk to people, tell them what it's going to be like in their region when climate change, as outlined in this report, lands on their doorstep.

But the people in power now don't care. They'll be gone. It won't be Scott Morrison answering to people as fires and flood and drought change the way we live. It won't be him answering to that. It will be some other person, probably not in the parliament yet, who'll be faced with explaining why there was a decade of lost opportunity from this government. It will be up to that person to explain to generations why the changes that are brought in then are going to be harder, their lives are going to be harder and livelihoods are going to be harder because we didn't take the message seriously.

I don't want to have to listen to another government member saying: 'We take this seriously. We are acting.' It's a load of rubbish. It's absolute rubbish. They're working out how to stay in power. That is a disgrace, when this is one of the biggest issues facing this country. You can pretend all you like that it's not coming, but the history books will show we were warned and we should have done something more. It won't reflect well on this government, not that I think that will matter to them. I don't think it does. It probably won't matter to Senator Roberts either, who is smiling through this presentation. But it matters to people who want good policy in this country, who want to make sure that future generations have jobs, livelihoods, that can compete in a global world. That matters. It matters to me that my kids and their kids think that this generation tried to do something, or more than tried and actually did something. That's what motivates people to actually call for serious action on climate.

This report is damning. It is scary. I know people will try to pass it off and say, 'It's just another report. It's not true.' I'm sure we'll have a presentation like that from Senator Roberts soon. But the reports have been right so far. Anyone who has watched the floods, fires and other natural disasters criss-crossing between the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere knows it's true. We should be better. We should be able to do something. We should be able to work together to do it. It might not be exactly what we want, but we should do something more. It should move beyond slogans of power and into actually doing the job that we've been elected to do, which is to look after not only people now but also generations in the future. That's the big failure of this government today.