Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

I love it when the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction talks about numbers, because the truth is the numbers he usually relies on are in fraudulent documents, like those relating to the City of Sydney. They're the only documents that he's genuinely interested in, and they're the only numbers that he relies on. But let's talk about a couple of numbers from the government's own documents. Their emissions projections reports show that, when Labor was last in government, we cut annual carbon emissions by 87.5 million tonnes. Off the minister goes, because he's afraid he'll actually learn something. I don't think he reads the government's own documents. He's too busy having his office make up other ones. Under Labor, 87.5 million tonnes of emissions, on an annual basis, were cut from our greenhouse gas emissions. Under this government, from 2014 to 2019, it was 22 million tonnes—less than a third of what Labor achieved.

How did they achieve those emissions reductions? This is from their own reports. Principally, it was from the renewable energy target, from Labor's RET, which they tried to abolish three times. Now they're claiming credit for it, such is the chutzpah of this organisation. Secondly, they shut down car manufacturing—that's the second reason emissions fell between 2014 and 2019. Thirdly, it was because of the drought. So the three causes of emissions falling between 2014 and 2019 are Labor's RET, killing the car industry, and the drought. I wouldn't be bragging about that if I were the minister.

The truth is that they did achieve emissions reductions last year. A massive 26 million tonnes was cut from emissions last year. Do you know how they did it? It was by the Morrison recession. If you shrink the economy by 6½ per cent, which is what they did, you cut emissions by 26 million tonnes. A recession led to that.

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