Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This motion—and the speakers from the government—shows just how desperate those opposite are. The campaign of misinformation they are trying to run is because the big promise they made voters back in 2013 has failed. We all remember what this government said when they were in opposition: 'We'll scrap the price on carbon and your power bills will go down.' Well, they were wrong. Since they have been in government we have seen power prices go up. They told every single household and every single business in Australia a big, fat furphy when they said that scrapping the price on carbon—what they call the 'carbon tax'—would mean power prices would go down.

What we are seeing now from this government is nothing but desperation to try and cover up the dirty, big, fat furphy they told right before the 2013 campaign. The policy of state Labor governments and the Labor opposition is 50-50 renewable energy. Guess what? That also means 50 per cent base load, a mix of coal and gas—a fact that this government and the Liberal-National MPs in the chamber choose to ignore. We are talking about a mix. We are talking about transitioning to a cleaner and greener economy. We are talking about it in the way of a just transition. That is something this government do not understand.

The previous speaker talked about the shutting down of Hazelwood. Let's just talk about Hazelwood. It is an old asset that was sold by the Liberal former premier Jeff Kennett, and, as acknowledged, it is owned by overseas companies—not Victorians; overseas owners. It was always going to close, yet, rather than being proactive and supporting the workers, rather than being proactive and working with the state of Victoria, this government chose to pick a fight. Maybe that is because of the fact that they have not put enough money into transition. The state Labor government in Victoria have put almost $300 million into a fund to help that community transition so those workers can have jobs, yet this government have put very little money in of their own—in fact, only $3 million compared to the $300 million that the Labor government put in.

It does not stop there. The government has little care or regard for coalmining workers. We heard from previous speakers on this side that you must talk about the workers in coalmines, particularly the workers in Queensland. I have mentioned before in this place that we have one of the mining companies that the government is quick to defend. Anglo American have made direct employees redundant and replaced them with labour-hire workers, subcontractors. Thirty-one local workers are currently out of work, directly replaced with labour-hire workers. This is happening across the coalmining industry. We have companies very quick to cry poor and we have a government very quick to jump to their defence, but not to the defence of the people working in these industries.

Safety is becoming an issue in our mines because labour-hire workers feel scared and insecure about speaking up, because when you are a labour-hire worker you can be transferred off-site like that. They have no general protections and they have no protection from unfair dismissal, so coalminers are becoming increasingly unsafe in their environments for fear of speaking up about safety. Because of this growth in labour hire in our small towns, we are seeing the death of small towns like Middlemount. The Middlemount post office closed in 2013. There are now fears that the school will close because so many workers at the mine are now labour hire and therefore live in Rockhampton and are drive in, drive out workers. They say they cannot afford to uproot their families and bring them to Middlemount if their job will not exist tomorrow.

We also have the case of black lung—a growing crisis within our coalmining industry. More and more coalminers are being diagnosed with back lung every year. The coalmining union estimates that up to 1,000 coalminers could have black lung. These are the conditions that coalminers are working in, yet we have not heard a word from the government in speaking up for the workers in these mines. All we hear is them speaking up about company profits and coal. Sure, they make a casual link between coalmining and jobs, but they are not standing up here and defending the workers. They are not standing up here with a solution for the growing crisis with black lung disease, they are not standing up for our small towns, they are not standing up for safety and they are not standing up to ensure that workers in mines are directly employed and not facing labour hire. This government is not serious about clean energy and it is not serious about coalmining.

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