Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

To have any chance of getting the climate crisis under control and meeting even this government's weak emissions target, there can be no new coal and gas projects—not one. The inquiry into Labor's safeguard mechanism heard from expert scientists and economists. The conclusion was clear: under the safeguard mechanism, as it is currently proposed, actual pollution from coal and gas goes up. We're not talking about incremental progress that the Greens just don't think goes far enough; we are talking about a flawed scheme that will actually make the climate crisis worse. Surely, the measure of a good climate policy is whether it makes pollution go down. On that measure alone, the safeguard mechanism fails to deliver.

Throughout the inquiry, the government was asked repeatedly to show evidence that the safeguard mechanism would bring down pollution from coal and gas. They made no such commitment. The department offered no evidence. Their own projections confirm that emissions from gas will increase. The emissions from the first five years of the Scarborough gas project alone will wipe out the entire claimed benefit of the safeguard mechanism. It is difficult to have any confidence that the scheme will do anything to curb business-as-usual behaviour from coal and gas companies. It's no wonder that it has the support of Woodside, of Shell, of Rio Tinto and of Origin.

The safeguard mechanism targets only scope 1 emissions, and only 4.9 per cent of coal and gas entities covered by the scheme will face a price signal. Any cost impacts imposed on this fraction of a fraction of overall emissions can be completely offset, with facilities able to buy their way out of the scheme at a very low price for a very long time. Already contracted ACCUs—Australian carbon credit units—account for nearly 70 per cent of the total abatement goal. So, not only can coal and gas pollution continue to rise as long as enough offsets are bought but also more than two-thirds of the modest ambitions of this scheme will have been achieved without a single dollar of new investment. Lax exit arrangement for government contracts will see 84 million land based offsets from the Mr Angus Taylor era flooding the private market, to be scooped up by coal and gas companies that are planning new projects. This could push out exposed industries that actually need assistance to abate their emissions.

The Greens want genuine Australian industry and manufacturing to thrive. Aluminium, steel, bricks, fertilisers, glass and cement all have a future in the clean economy, but coal and gas don't. We should be supporting genuine Australian industry to transition, not asking them to make room in a finite carbon budget for more coal and gas. We must limit the use of offsets and ensure that offsets have integrity. The scheme allows entities to keep going on, as long as they buy enough dodgy offsets. It's a clever accounting trick, but it won't fool the planet.

The Greens have made an offer to support the safeguard bill if the government commits to no new coal and gas. But we've also said that we're open to other ways of achieving that end, including through a climate trigger. This nation has squandered the last critical decade for climate action under a climate-denying government. We need this government to design a scheme that makes pollution from coal and gas go down, not up.