Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of document No. 1, the Climate Change Authority's Sector pathways review 2024. The report considers the emissions pathways for six sectors, including electricity and energy, and what is required for Australia's transition to net zero emissions. As this review states, every sector of the economy must play its part in the transition to net zero emissions.

As part of the transition to net zero, we must not forget the workers and the communities that have powered the country. We owe coal workers a debt of thanks for powering our country. We don't need to choose between taking urgent climate action and supporting coal communities. We can do both. Where I live in Central Queensland, coal and gas workers tell me that they know their jobs are on the way out and that they're sick of governments pretending it isn't happening. They want honesty and they want a plan. There is so much opportunity in the coal regions, but we really need to get on with it.

Unions, workers and communities have been campaigning for this for a long time, and it's long overdue to have a plan in place for these workers, who are going to be hit hard. The Greens went to the last election as the only party pushing for a statutory authority to support coal and gas workers. The Liberals kept their head in the sand, and the Labor Party were too timid to include it in their Powering Australia plan. During discussions with the government on the climate change bill, the Greens pushed for an independent statutory authority to look after coal and gas communities as the world transitions. The Net Zero Economy Authority Bill, which passed this place recently, explicitly relates to employees of coal- and gas-fired power stations and coalmines. However, the legislation does not make mention of gas and oil extraction, reflecting the federal government's broader reluctance to constrain an active policy support for the expansion of Australian LNG exports.

There is a trend with this government of announcing a piecemeal, underwhelming legislative or policy effort with regard to climate change or the environment and immediately following it up with plans for further expansion of the gas industry. Labor's Future Gas Strategy locks us into gas past 2050. It shows that they are a party fundamentally unserious about reducing emissions, fundamentally unserious about acting on climate change and fundamentally comfortable with condemning Australia to even more bushfires, droughts, floods and killer heatwaves.

Australia's industrial history is littered with moments in time when communities faced rapid and unprecedented changes, a moment of deindustrialisation or of boom and bust. Many of these moments demonstrate how poorly the transition has gone for workers and the communities that they live in. There is immense opportunity for the government to engage in community building. Governments don't make communities, but assistance schemes can provide the basis for stability, longevity and ultimately self-determination and freedom.

It's hard to overstate the importance of getting this right for communities like mine in Gladstone. Industry transition in the face of global and national trends toward a net zero economy has incredibly visceral local impacts—impacts on neighbours; on families; on children; and on the supporting community of people and professions that make up our cities and towns, essential workers like teachers, nurses and aged-care workers. The shape and feel of our communities are affected. The global trade winds that blow into town and bring with them jobs and localised employment just as quickly drift away and take the promised prosperity with them. This has been the history of industrialisation, and for so long we have struggled to find a better way, not because we didn't have ideas of how to do better. Communities and workers have called for just and fair transitions for decades. No, they have been callous actions by governments and industry that have left workers behind and decimated communities. This is the fear that communities like mine face. It's why we must get organised and fight for a fair and just transition—because no coal worker should suffer the anxiety and financial insecurity that comes from losing their job suddenly.