Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to be in the chamber rising to speak in support of this climate change legislation. Finally, after a decade of inaction on climate change and energy policy, this chamber has an opportunity to start the work required to end the climate wars, to take serious and urgent action to address the crisis of climate change.

At the May election, the Australian people voted resoundingly in favour of action on climate change, and our government promised we would take it. We would do the work required to lower emissions while continuing to invest in communities, create jobs, improve energy security and make Australia a global leader on climate action instead of an embarrassment. Before us today is the bill that gets this work under way. After a decade of denials, delays and chaos on renewables and energy, our bill, this bill before us, this Labor bill, finally gives business, industry, energy investors and our wider community the certainty it so desperately needs.

Through its 2030 target of 43 per cent, this bill puts Australia on track to meet net zero by 2050. But let's be clear: this is a minimum aspiration, not a cap on our aspiration. Together we can deliver better across our economy. Without this certainty we will continue to miss the opportunities and economic benefits of the energy transformation before us. This bill is simple yet powerful, and I am proud of it. After serving for three years in this place, watching those on the other side squib and squander the opportunities of renewable energies before us and duck their heads as the climate catastrophe unfolding around us, we have this opportunity to act now.

It has been clear and indisputable that climate change poses an existential threat to Australia and the world. We have been in a climate crisis. With each passing year we see its dramatic impacts unfolding before our eyes. The CSIRO reports that consistent increases of temperatures in Australia, exacerbated by climate change, will lead to regular extreme heat events and increasingly severe drought conditions. We know climate change also exacerbates extreme weather events in Australia, causing more frequent and severe natural disasters, with the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements finding that the bushfires and flooding which have decimated our country over recent years will increase in frequency and intensity as conditions worsen.

The people in my home state of South Australia know the dangers of these worsening disasters all too well. In the summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020, we watched parts of our state burn. We saw the loss of lives, the loss of livelihoods, the loss of wildlife—lives lost in those fires, not just in our state but right across the country. We saw the unprecedented loss of wildlife at a scale which was just heartbreaking for everyone in our country. We know for our river, the lifeblood of my state, climate change places conditions under further stress and threatens the water supply which is so vital to our future. We are living through a climate emergency and we must act. This bill is an opportunity to do so.

In my first speech to the Senate I spoke about the importance of placing intergenerational fairness at the heart of the decisions we take in this place to leave our children a better world than the one we inherited. I spoke about how, for the first time in modern history, we weren't set to deliver that. This is one of the ways we do. Our parliament's failure to act consistently and effectively on climate change is a key way in which we are failing out younger Australians, because although Australians are already feeling the impact of climate change, we know it is young Australians who are set to feel it disproportionately and to pay higher costs for longer. If we don't act, we leave them with a disaster. We leave our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren with a catastrophe environmentally, socially and economically.

If we do not seize the opportunities which come from acting on climate change—the economic opportunities which will lead to better and greater jobs—we will betray these young South Australians, these young Australians, these generations to come. How can we in good conscience stand in this place and decide to ignore their future? We know this future is competing at a global scale; other countries are acting, other countries are skilling their workforces and preparing their economies to deal with this challenge, to reap the rewards of the opportunities presented in these new industries. If we don't do that, that is a huge betrayal of our young people.

Of course, we cannot ignore the vulnerable populations across our globe who also feel this pain, this hardship, gravely and disproportionately to other places in the world. It's about being globally responsible. It's about being good global citizens in a world which is ever connected.

This is good environmental policy. It's good social policy. It's brilliant economic policy. And thank God it is a policy, after a decade of nothing. It has been a decade of wasted time, of wasted opportunities, of failing to provide that leadership and that indicator to the market of where to invest, of failing to do the things—the bare minimum things—we know we need to do to address this crisis and this catastrophe. These bills, the Climate Change Bill 2022 and Climate Change (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2022, give us, this parliament, an opportunity to end these stupid climate wars, to come out and be part of a global community that is taking action and to take the action which our business community expects of us, which our community expects of us and which our young people expect of us.

We are committed to ending these wars, and the other side of this chamber has an opportunity today to do so too. It has an opportunity to accept the mandate, to put that rubbish of the past decade behind us, to come together as a chamber, to act like grown-ups, to be responsible to the young people in our community and to be responsible to our environment and to our economy. It has that opportunity in this moment to give industry, businesses and our communities the security and the policy certainty that they are crying out for. That's what this legislation does. It provides some leadership from the federal government, which has been so lacking over the last decade and the lack of which is costing us environmentally, economically and socially.

After a decade of failing our nation on climate, supporting this legislation is the least that they could do. So I urge everyone in this chamber to take this moment, put the embarrassment of the years that came before behind us and show the Australian community that we're grown-ups, that we get the catastrophe that's before us, that we will take action together and that we heard the mandate that they gave us at the election. It is what they have been calling for, because they're smart. They see what's before us. They see the risks of inaction.

This is our opportunity as a chamber to do better by them, and it's our opportunity to correct one of the fundamental ways in which we are denying the next generation of Australians a better and fairer future. I absolutely commend these bills to the chamber.