Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today over 50 million people are enslaved—men, women and children. It's more than at any other time in human history. This servitude and exploitation of human labour and denial of human freedoms is a $150 billion industry and, shamefully, it is growing day by day. Profits are growing off the forced labour of millions who are trapped in slavery throughout the supply chain for critical minerals and metals and also in the production of clean energy technologies. Yes, these commodities are crucial to the energy transition. However, they are only as clean and as ethical as the energy and the components used in their production. Colleagues, this is not a secret. We cannot go green on the back of slave labour. We cannot go green on the backs of millions and millions of men, women and children and on the backs of those forced to mine the minerals and the rare earths and to fabricate the components of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. We must find ways to deal with both net zero and forced labour and slavery.

Australians have fought many wars to preserve our democratic freedoms and individual liberties in conjunction with our many friends and allies. Despite this, we are failing to fight for the freedom of these enslaved human beings: the children mining cobalt and rare earths; the millions of Uighurs interned in forced labour camps in Xinjiang; Tibetans who are forced into Chinese boarding schools and then shipped to China as labour; and North Koreans who are indentured to China as forced labour. They're used to process quartz for solar panel photovoltaic cells. They process lithium. They produce cathodes, anodes and lithium-ion battery cells. They process manganese for electric vehicle batteries. They smelt aluminium and copper. They process uranium, nickel and zinc. They manufacture the electric vehicles in Xinjiang that we drive here. The list of the commodities that they produce goes on and on.

This reliance on slave labour also distorts the markets for critical minerals and rare earths in favour of Chinese products. It provides an extraordinary competitive advantage for China. It also provides a clear security threat for us, for our friends and for our allies, as we simply cannot compete in the production of these goods that are made with slave labour. We are vulnerable to the strategic denial of all of these goods that use forced labour and slavery throughout their supply chains. We can and we must deal simultaneously with the energy transition and security and slavery issues. One cannot and must not come at the cost of the other. But it takes political will and leadership, not only here in Australia but with our friends and allies, to call this out and to take measures to stop human trafficking and strip out slavery from everybody's supply chains.

If we have the political will to work together, we can start by calling out slavery. We can do this by working with our friends and our allies to create alternative supply chains for mineral extraction, processing and manufacturing that are slavery free and do not provide a competitive advantage through enslavement, including in the production of wind turbines. It is not enough to preserve democracy and individual liberties in our own nations. We have to work together to preserve individual freedoms not only for our own children but for everyone's children. It is time to call out this silent acceptance by those net zero zealots who seem absolutely happy to say that the environment is a greater good. Well, it's not. People matter. We have to deal with both. The global transition to carbon net zero cannot come at the cost of human servitude. Together, we can call it out. It is time that we did.