Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

A windfall profit tax should not be controversial. Even the Conservative UK government has introduced a windfall tax to fund cost-of-living relief, so what's stopping our allegedly progressive Labor government from doing what Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has called a no-brainer? It is a no-brainer.

This government, like the last one, is beholden to fossil fuel and energy companies. It should be the other way around. Privatisation of our electricity and energy grid has been disastrous not just for affordability but for the pace of the clean-energy transition. We must bring our resources and energy assets back into public hands. Essential services, whether they be education, health or energy, should never be run for profit, and private companies should never have the power to hold us to ransom like they have.

Coal and gas corporations exist for one thing: making profit from environmental exploitation and destruction. Their greed and appetite for resources is insatiable. They are killing the planet. The solution isn't treating these corporations as good-faith players who deserve compensation; the solution is recognising that they have long ago forfeited their social licence to exist at all. So, yes, the Greens will leave no stone unturned to end coal and gas so that our planet and all who live on it actually can have a future.