Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Trade and Tourism (Senator Farrell) to a question without notice I asked today relating to gas and oil exploration.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see the government patting themselves on the back for doing less than the bare minimum. In fact, we got no answer to the actual question during question time. In this instance, I agree with Senator Chandler. It should be called 'answer time' instead of 'question time', because it's all smoke and mirrors, and that's what we're getting at the moment.

Legislating 43 per cent is not enough, and opening up an expansion of new fossil fuel projects is inconsistent not only with the government's own target but also its commitments under the Paris Agreement, and that is what we heard. The science is pretty clear. A safe climate means no more fossil fuels, and they must go. If we are formally legislating the target, it should actually be 75 per cent by 2030, and we need to start phasing out fossil fuels. This includes methane. The Global Methane Pledge was at the heart of the supplementary question that I asked. We need to start doing that not tomorrow, not in the future and not in six months—we need to start doing it today. The Climate Change Bill 2022 was introduced earlier today. Therefore, we need that commitment.

Over 100 countries signed up to the Global Methane Pledge at COP26—everyone except Australia. That's because Australia skipped along to COP26 in Scotland hand-in-hand with Santos and talked about carbon capture and storage, which is technology that is completely unproven to work. Addressing methane emissions is paramount if we are to reduce our emissions. We need a robust plan. We cannot afford to have a minister sitting across in the other house doing policy on the run. We need sufficient investment to make sure that this occurs. We can't go dumping carbon—I won't call it colonial carbon capitalism—in the Timor Sea for the Timorese people to deal with after we've gone on a botched plan, thinking carbon capture and storage is about offsets in this country.

We need to make sure that we are making this government accountable for being good on climate, because they are not. You can't have fossil fuel donors and play both sides of the fence and then be good for the climate by expanding their projects. We need a robust plan to look at how we invest in the economy. The UK have done it. They've reduced their emissions by 40 per cent since 1990 and they have tripled the size of their economy.