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

Often in this place I feel the weight of our duty—our duty to our kids, our duty to young people in our community like those sitting up in the gallery, our duty to future generations. We're nearing the end of March and barrelling through 2023, and there are only a few sitting weeks between now and the end of the year. That's one year closer to 2030, one fewer year we have to dramatically reverse our fortunes and prevent 1.5 degrees of warming. Every minute, day and week that we waste in this place tightens the noose around our collective futures. Unfortunately, wasting time is exactly what Labor seems to be doing. The Labor Party have made their priorities clear: keep their heads down, don't rock the boat too much and try to small-target their way to another election win. Climate change, and the impending crisis, is not and never has been one of their priorities.

Labor is completely and hopelessly in the thrall of big business. They are addicted to the millions fossil fuel companies pour into their re-election campaigns, enamoured by the sweet six-figure jobs that they stroll in to after politics and terrified of getting on their bad side. No longer championing the Australian people, the Labor Party are now timid receptionists for the CEOs of Woodside and BHP, tasked with making sure that the real concerns and worries of the Australian people never make it past the bosses' doors. It is a pathetic state of affairs when a party that is in government federally and in every single mainland state and territory is still too scared to stick a toe out of line against their bosses at APPEA and the Minerals Council.

People say that the Greens negotiated with Labor on the safeguard mechanism, but that's not actually the case. We were negotiating with Santos and Woodside and Glencore and Chevron and every other corporate lobbyist with an all-access pass and ministers on speed dial. While the country burns and drowns, these corporations will bleed the Australian petrostate for every cent that they can. The truth is that the Labor government does not care about reducing emissions. It may care about appearing to care, but we shouldn't confuse virtue signalling with intent. How do we know they don't care about reducing emissions? Because, if they cared about reducing emissions, they would have introduced legislation that actually reduced emissions. Instead, we got a reheated and barely tweaked coalition policy that had literally been designed to fail. Think about that: in the face of looming climate collapse, when the fate of the human race hangs in the balance, Labor's keystone legislative response in the wake of the climate election was to regurgitate a bad plan from a terrible government.

We're out of time, yet Labor are acting like we have all the time in the world, that we can keep strolling along to their electoral time line, rather than scientific reality. They will obfuscate, prevaricate and vacillate until the Torres Strait Islands are underwater and our farming land is arid and the Great Barrier Reef is just a story we tell our grandkids. The politics of this situation are clear: Labor will not do what needs to be done to dramatically lower emissions unless we force them to, and I don't just mean the Greens. Our power in parliament is only as great as the movements that support us outside this building. While Labor has the entire fossil fuel industry and its vast infrastructure of wealth and influence behind it, the movement standing behind the Greens is built on people and mass organising—rallies, protests, strikes, civil disobedience. That's why we need to fundamentally change the power of the duopoly and break the stranglehold the fossil fuel industry has on parliament.

Our message is that the fight has only started. This isn't a climate war; it's the apocalypse. We have hope because we know that the people know this and they won't stop fighting, either. We promise we will keep fighting, tooth and nail, to drag this parliament into taking climate action. We dragged the safeguard into actual operation—with emissions likely to go down now, rather than up—by taking a guillotine to Labor's 116 new coal and gas projects in the pipeline. By hook or by crook, we will continue the fight for no new coal and gas. There is no alternative. We fight because we have to do. When I look into the eyes of my grandchildren, Billy and Esther, I know that is the only choice we have.