Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I would like to put on record the Greens have never received any donations from Woodside Petroleum or any other company in the fossil fuel industry that I know of. This debate is very important. It's significantly in the public interest. Senators aren't aware of the very important distinction between institutional corruption and personal corruption. Institutional corruption is an accepted definition; a significant amount of work has gone into looking at the issue of institutional corruption.

Our institutions become systemically corrupted over a period of time. I've repeatedly raised this issue of institutional corruption. Another term for it is 'crony capitalism', which I referred to earlier in my contribution this morning. 'Crony capitalism' is, quite simply, a term we use when governments are in bed with big business. We all know this nexus between the political donations and the large call parties is the root cause of the reason we are in a climate emergency, the reason why this government has done nothing in the nine years that it's been in power, nothing at all, to tackle climate change.

An amendment to a bill about cleaning up the mess of the fuel industry has been moved before us today, but each year our government hands out new acreage to these exact same companies so they can repeat this process—80,000 square kilometres of our oceans handed over to more fossil fuel exploration, more potential production, more burning of the exact same product that is killing our oceans. I make no apologies for coming into this place and representing nature and future generations of Australians. We've witnessed the loss of half the corals on the Barrier Reef because of the burning of fossil fuels by the exact same companies going out exploring for fossil fuels, the same companies that, I believe, are trying to deliberately use this process to reduce their future liabilities to them and their shareholders.

What we need to be doing at this point in history is transitioning to clean energy. We need a plan to totally ban all new offshore oil and gas exploration and listen to what the international energy agency said just this year—that is, this year is the year to end all offshore oil and gas exploration. That's coming from the world's premier energy agency. Why is it that, in this country, we're doing exactly the opposite? The debate we're having today on this amendment is crucial to this point. At this point in history, in a climate emergency, we don't want to make it any easier for the fossil fuel industry to be burning and exploring for more mores fuels. The more we let them off their liabilities, the more we allow the taxpayer to step in and carry the externalities that they so obviously create.

I'll just finish by saying that it's the government's job to solve externalities—to put a price on pollution and to do the other things that are required to solve environmental problems. Every environmental problem we look at, including climate change, which is the biggest problem, is first and foremost a political problem. It's a political problem because of the nexus between big corporate donations and big political parties. If you come into this place and you're annoyed and angry because you're part of that, well, I'm sorry, have a good look at yourself.