Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to congratulate Senator McAllister on the excellent job she did all of last week and continuing on today of pretending that something is not what it is. She has done an excellent job of acting and saying, 'No, this isn't about expanding fossil fuels; it's got something to do with obscure international obligations that we have to sign up to.' If we were going to do that, we could, but we could do it without expanding the gas industry.

After we last debated this on Friday, we had question time, when the foreign minister belled the cat and said the quiet bit out loud, said everything that Senator McAllister had been trying all week to avoid saying. While goading the opposition, the foreign minister said what the bill is about. The media over the weekend have emphasised that—the fact that, if this legislation doesn't go through, it will put at risk, in their terms, $30 billion of investment in gas expansion. That's a lot of investment in gas expansion. That's a lot of carbon dioxide. That's a lot of heating of a planet that is already overheated. It is the exact opposite of what legislation in this place needs to be.

Senator Wong said on Friday in question time that this bill was needed for Santos, Woodside and INPEX and that the Koreans and the Japanese want this bill to go ahead so that they can burn Australia's dirty gas. It's very clear. We have kept debating this bill all week because of that clarity. We know what bad legislation this is. This is legislation that is pouring petrol on the fire of the climate crisis. This is legislation that is going to make the climate crisis worse. For the people who voted for the Labor Party at the last election who are concerned about the climate—and a lot of them are, and they had hope that this government was going to be different—it is not legislation that they want to see passed. Anybody who is concerned about climate, anybody who has got any understanding of the climate crisis, knows that we need to be getting out of burning coal and gas and oil and that we need to stop new coal and gas. In Australia and across the world, from the ordinary person in the street who is concerned about the heat and the fires and the floods, to the United Nations, they are calling on us to stop new gas, oil and coal developments. And yet this legislation is designed to facilitate $30 billion of investment in gas projects, with the theory that it's going to be okay because a lot of that carbon is going to be buried under the ground, with unproven technology. The UN, again, has said, 'Do not proceed with carbon sequestration and storage technologies until they work,' essentially. 'You've got to make sure that they work first. Do not use the prospect of CCS to approve massive new gas and coal mines.' And yet we're going ahead with this legislation, which is to facilitate the development—by Santos, by Woodside—of new gas projects. It is so, so clear.

I want to finish up by going back to why this is so important. This year is the hottest year that the planet has experienced for 125,000 years. The last 12 months is the hottest 12 months on record. October was the hottest October on record, following the hottest June, July, August and September on record. We need to be stopping burning coal, gas and oil. We should be exporting renewable technology, turbocharging our exports of renewable technologies and renewable energy, not subsidising and facilitating expansion of coal and gas. And it matters to anyone that's concerned about fires, about floods, about sea level rise, about our ability to grow food, about First Nations justice and the loss of sovereignty of your land when you can no longer live in it. Under global heating, that is currently what we're on track for. Vast areas of inland Australia will become unlivable. First Nations peoples for whom those are their traditional lands will not be able to live on that country. There will be a massive impact across the board on our planet, on country, on the very things that make Australia the country that we love—on our wildlife, on our natural environments, on our forests, on our ability to grow food when our food-growing areas, our wheat-growing areas, start to have the climate of the central deserts, where you cannot grow food.

This is what is at stake, and Australia has a massive role to play, because if we told the world, 'Yes, we need to transition but, no, we are not approving new coal and gas projects,' that would send a massive signal to the world. We are one of the biggest exporters of coal and gas. If Australia signalled to the world that we are taking climate change seriously and that we not only are going to transition to renewable energy here in Australia but are phasing out exports of coal and gas and are not going ahead with any new coal and gas projects, that would be a huge contribution to tackling the climate catastrophe, the climate crisis that we are currently in. That is what anyone who's concerned about our future wants to see happen. This Friday we have the School Strike 4 Climate. We have young people who are striking because they know that their future is at stake. We had Senator Sterle in this place on Friday saying the grown-ups were in charge. Well, what the grown-ups are doing is putting the lives of those young people at risk. We need to be active, we need to be getting out of coal and gas, and we should not be passing legislation like this legislation through this parliament.