Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Over the last couple of weeks we have seen some pretty appalling behaviour by the Minister for Education and Training as he has comprehensively breached the convention in relation to commenting on royal commissions in this place. He really has gone a long way to reducing public confidence in the objectivity of the royal commission that we currently have into unions.

One of the things that is quite surprising about the royal commission is the degree of ancient history that it is wanting to explore. It is my intention to refer a matter of ancient history to the commission myself. Going back to 1994, which is a period which they are apparently looking at—some 20 years ago—there was the most appalling case of secret payments being made by the Court government in Western Australia to form a new industrial organisation, the WA Principals Federation. It was only with considerable detective work that we were able to extract the fact that the government of the day had been buying cars, renting houses and paying consultants fees—some in the order of nearly $150,000—to form this organisation to undermine the state school teachers union. It will be very interesting to see if their passion for ancient history continues in this regard.

Secondly, before we close this parliament, I want to use this opportunity to put on record my profound contempt for what the Abbott government is doing around our response to climate change, with their attempts to dismantle ARENA, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency; their continuing attempts to dismantle the Clean Energy Finance Corporation; and their actual demolition of the Climate Commission, which was a very important body providing us with information on the impact of climate change in Australia.

Meanwhile, what is happening on the international front? We are a joke. We are being mocked by countries around the world. Brazil noted that Australia's current five per cent reduction target of 2020 was a low-level of ambition. China also noted that this level of ambition is far below the requirement that Australia set up for advanced economies. They ask:

… please clarify the fairness of such requirements.

The US wanted to know what else we were doing other than the dodgy Emissions Reduction Fund. The European Union asked

Could Australia provide information on the anticipated mitigation potential of the ERF to meet the two conditional more ambitious emission reduction targets?

Even the Pope has recently weighed in recent weeks. The Pope has really reflect very negatively some countries:

Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change.

That is exactly what this government is doing. They are doing what the Pope is attaching. What the Pope is attacking is those people with political and economic resources who are paying lip-service and not taking substantial action. But it is not just the Pope. We have retired Admiral Chris Barrie, who this week said:

Most of the people I work with in Defence actually get this; they understand about climate change, and they're very enthusiastic to get to grips with it … The problem we've got is at the top level of politics in this country it seems to be a toxic term. … That's bad news and they know it's rubbish so let's get real about it and start having a decent conversation.

I know that there are decent members on the other side of the House, but you are allowing Tony Abbott to fail you, to fail your children, to fail your grandchildren and to fail our community by not doing something meaningful on climate change.