Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks very much. On our side we've got party discipline, strength of purpose, a common commitment, and we've demonstrated that. We've one message, not 12 messages, unlike Mr Morrison, who says one thing in Glasgow and says something entirely different in Gladstone, or Senator Canavan, who says that we should put aside $250 billion of public money to directly fund projects that commercial lenders won't fund, or his mate, Mr Pitt, who supports this but doesn't say it anymore because he wants to protect the only job that he cares about—his own, in the cabinet.

Now, Senator Canavan, in a rare moment of clarity, said that he knows that that policy that he supports and that Mr Pitt supports will push up mortgage interest rates and increase the cost of borrowing for businesses. But that's okay, apparently. Home mortgage costs up by what? Fifty dollars a month? Eighty dollars a month? A couple of hundred dollars a month? This is a reverse scare campaign. It's Senator Canavan who's wandering around the country telling Australians and Australian businesses that his policy framework is going to push interest rates up, when wages are going down and have been year after year, in the longest sustained period of zero wage growth. When household incomes are going down, Senator Canavan wants to push mortgage interest rates up. He thinks ordinary Australians can find a couple of hundred dollars every month to fund his ideological frivolity.

I want to go from a former Trotskyite to the bunch of current Trots and faded university politicians over here. That cavalcade to Queensland symbolised everything that's wrong with the self-indulgent, self-defeating narcissism that defines the Greens political party today. What's their real target for 2022? It's 10 per cent. Their real target is 10 per cent. Ten per cent of Australian voters is the only thing that they care about. They don't care about the climate; they only care about themselves.

It's been a long time. Both Senator Canavan and the Greens need each other. Political polarisation suits them, because that's their business model. There's no progress with the Greens political party—I mean, save me! These people come in here talk about the 'old parties'. They've been here in Australian parliaments for 37 years—for 37 years the Greens have been turning up in Australian parliaments! Do you know how many national parks they have delivered? Zero. How much impact on species extinction has the Greens political party had? Zero. Not a kilogram of carbon has been emitted—or not emitted—or taken out of the atmosphere because of the activity of the Greens political party. It's just narcissism, noise and seats. That's all they're interested in.

They're pretend progressives who haven't learned and who haven't changed. It's the same stunts—the tired, boring and irrelevant stunts. Ten per cent of the primary vote is all they care about. They're not part of the solution; they are part of the problem if you care about climate change and if you care about real action on climate.