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

Minister, I think Senator Hanson-Young has hit on one of the core concerns with the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. We had a discussion on Monday or Tuesday about who took carriage of this bill when. It was under drafting under the previous government, and there was some sort of crossover between Minister Bowen and Minister Plibersek. It ultimately was given to Minister Plibersek to take carriage of. That was my understanding. Maybe it was Minister Plibersek the whole time. I'll correct the record: it was Minister Plibersek the whole time. But there's been some involvement from Minister Bowen's office, I assume, given advisers from his office are here.

But we're hearing again and again stories of the resources minister's involvement in this bill. If this bill was about the things that you told us for five days that it was about—the London protocol and all sorts of regulatory certainty—and was not about expanding the gas industry, why is the resources minister the one being lobbied and lobbying the shadow minister on this bill? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't line up with what we heard from you for a week—that it was about regulatory certainty and it wasn't about Santos. I think Senator Whish-Wilson probably asked a dozen times about the link with legislation that Minister Bowen has been talking about in various forums—legislation that would come forward to help the gas industry—and you wouldn't even say: 'Yep, that's it. This is what we're debating here today. We've talked about it and now we're delivering it.' You wouldn't say that, but it's very clear, after what Minister Wong told us on Friday, that this is it. We're going to have the safeguard mechanism, which on face value will bring down emissions, but we're going to introduce an 'opening the loopholes bill', the sea dumping bill, to create some loopholes under the safeguard mechanism to allow the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.

It's no wonder Australians are concerned. We've had a back-and-forth about political donations. The Labor Party decided that tobacco was creating many issues for people in our communities and it wasn't worth taking big tobacco donations anymore. Climate change is affecting more people and having more of an impact than tobacco ever could have, yet you're still taking political donations from, among many others, the three companies that Minister Wong named here. Santos, Woodside and INPEX. So of course Australians, in the absence of answers to questions or provision of letters that are directly relevant to this bill, are going to ask questions and say: 'Hang on. What is going on here? How can you make donations, and not even that big a donation—60 grand? You'd think the government was worth more than that. But what's happening here?'

Today we learn that the NT Chief Minister, Natasha Fyles, allegedly holds shares in an oil and gas giant backing the proposed Middle Arm development. This is the Labor Chief Minister who's been pushing fracking in the NT and pushing for the development of something that is not in line with the NT being habitable. We know from the latest IPCC report that, if we continue down this road, large swathes of the NT will be uninhabitable. But she's pushing it, and today we learn that, allegedly, she actually has shares in one of these companies.

Australians are right to question this tangled web of fossil fuel companies, major parties and political donations, because the decisions we're seeing aren't in the interests of Australians. They're not in the interests of our family members and the communities that we represent. They're in the interests of Santos, INPEX, Woodside, Japan and Korea. Let's put Australians first. Let's put our communities first in this place.

Progress reported.