David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Again, thank you, Senator Scarr, for your contribution. My concern is that, if you zoom out a little bit in this debate about the contribution of the fossil fuel industry in Australia, it's hard to go past the fact that, for all of our fossil fuel exports and for our mining booms over the years, we're not sitting on a $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund. We've got a huge debt. We can talk about a couple of billion here, four billion there or 10 billion there, but I think the crossbench—from Pauline Hanson's One Nation party to the Greens—are saying: 'Those are our resources. You only get to exploit them once, and once they're gone, they're gone. So let's get something from them.'

I'm very wary of falling into the tactics that the fossil fuel industry use about simply moving elsewhere. To come back to Norway, which I think is a really great example—and then we'll come to WA—when Norway was setting up their oil industry, they were faced with the question of what the right thing to do is when you have an enormous oil reserve but it's ultimately finite. They stared the oil companies down and said: 'Yes, come and take our oil. You can make a profit—that's fine—but we're going to tax you, because that is our oil.' We heard the exact same thing from Senator Scarr today. They said, 'Well, there's oil elsewhere; we're going to go elsewhere.' At the time I think it was the Norwegian Labour Party government who said: 'Sure. Go elsewhere.' The oil industry then went to the conservative opposition party to try and drive a wedge and use this to divide Norwegians' political parties, and, to their credit, the Conservative Party said: 'Do you know what? We agree. That's our oil. You can come and exploit it, and you can make a profit, but we are going to tax you.' They taxed the companies at such a rate that, decades later, they have almost $2 trillion sitting in a sovereign wealth fund. We saw a similar version of events in Western Australia when they went to implement a reservation policy, and the gas companies said: 'Well, that'll be the end of it. We'll go find gas elsewhere.' And the government stared them down. I think it took 24 hours for the gas companies to come back to the table and say, 'Well, actually, we'll continue to invest here,' and they have.

Fundamentally, when we talk about fossil fuel companies not paying their fair share, let's not get taken by the billions of dollars that they do pay; let's look at the whole system, where we have a resource that belongs to all Australians. We're currently facing a lot of challenges, one of them being climate change, which we know fossil fuels have contributed to and continue to contribute to. We should be looking at ways to get a better return during the transition, so we can put money into things like cost-of-living relief and put money into things like electrification and programs at the demand side of the energy equation that help households. We can design policies in a way that ensures that no households are left behind and that low-income households and Australians who live in social housing benefit from solar panels and benefit from getting off cooking with gas and having induction stovetops so that they can avoid contributing to the asthma of their kids. These options should be available to Australians. We're one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but for many years we've chosen not to have a system that says to fossil fuel companies: 'Yes, you can come and exploit this resource, but we're going to tax you. We're going to get a return for Australians, and we're going to decide how we use that as a country.'

On behalf of the people I represent here in the ACT, I would like to put on the record that this bill goes against the mandate that the Labor government got at the last election when it comes to climate. It goes against the wishes of Australians, who in record numbers voted for Independents and minor parties. After the bushfires and the harrowing images of the loss of human and non-human life, the loss of property, millions of hectares of forest burnt and parts of Namadgi up in flames, Australians want better, and they voted for better. Yet we're doing them a great disservice by having this bill come through the Senate.

We've got to start thinking about the people that we represent. We've got to start thinking about the young people whose lives will be affected by the actions we take today in passing or not passing this bill. It will be no good to say to them: 'Well, kids, Santos, INPEX and Woodside really wanted that legislation so that they could continue to expand the fossil fuel industry against the advice of climate scientists, against the advice of the International Energy Agency and against the advice of most Australians who want bolder climate action. They really wanted it, and so did Korea and Japan. Sorry, kids; you're just going to have to make do.' It doesn't cut it. We need better and we can have better. We can have more courage from the Labor government. We can have them using some of their political capital for things that matter, like the transition to renewables and leaving new fossil fuels in the ground.

In 2023, for elected representatives to be voting for legislation that will expand the fossil fuel industry is deeply troubling—and, I would argue, negligent—because we've been warned time and time again. We've got to do better than this so we can go back to the people that we're here serving and working for, the people that voted for us, and say, 'Yes, things are bad, but we're doing absolutely everything we can to turn this around,' and this legislation doesn't do that. This legislation is creating a loophole to get around the safeguard mechanism and say, 'We're going to exploit the Barossa, the dirtiest gas ever exploited in Australia, and we're just going to pipe that CO2 to another country so it's not our problem.' It doesn't cut it. I would urge Labor to do better when it comes to truly embracing a transition, which means not just building up renewables but stopping the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.