Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I know something about emergencies. I've been in a few in my time during my career as a frontline doctor. Rather than tell you what I do, let me tell you what I don't do. I don't stand around, hands in pocket, pontificating about, denying or delaying what is in front of me. I act, and I act with a team, with urgency and purpose. I also don't just do one thing. As a team, we do everything. Multiple interventions are deployed, because that is exactly what an emergency demands.

We are in a climate emergency. This is a position that the Labor Party has held since 2015. Our continent has warmed to 1.4 degrees, and we are living, as Churchill said, through the era of consequences that is indeed upon us. We are facing the prospect that parts of our country are becoming unliveable. This is a sobering and traumatising scenario for those communities. Imagine how they feel when they hear persistent rain on their roofs? I'm sure many of them cannot sleep at night. But it's not just the impacts on our land and our environment. There are individual impacts at a very personal level. As a doctor, I have seen climate anxiety manifest in young people, in older people and, indeed, in our elders—across the full spectrum of our population, particularly in Higgins. But something more is happening. I have seen this morph into something far more sinister: what can only be described as a lethal hopelessness. We talk a lot about imperatives. There is, indeed, an environmental imperative, there is an economic imperative, but there is also now a time imperative, and we have simply run out of time as a country.

At a local level, Higgins has been crying out for climate action. I heard that loud and clear when I was campaigning, and for too long those cries have fallen on deaf ears. The Australian Conservation Foundation in March performed a survey, and it revealed that over 70 per cent of people in Higgins believed that climate action would deliver both health and economic benefits—and do you know what? They're absolutely right. I want to acknowledge the work of the Higgins Climate Action Network and note their tireless activism over many, many years. They are the obsessive minority that helped drive change and tip the balance at this election. On 21 May, the Australian people transitioned away from the Liberal-National party towards a renewable energy future that will be delivered now by this progressive parliament.

Today is a joyous day because today we end, finally, the climate wars. We end a decade of dithering inaction and incompetence and of 22 energy policies with the failure to land even one. I have with me this document, the Powering Australia plan. This plan was an inert document yesterday, but, thanks to the efforts of this parliament, we have breathed life into this plan—into this inert document—and now this plan will deliver a completely different future for Australians, young and old. It is a day to rejoice.

The bill itself delivers on the government's election commitment to restore national leadership on climate change by legislating our targets to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 figures by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. It is an important opportunity also for this Australian parliament to affirm the long-held wish of our people that we indeed commit to net zero. The Climate Change Bill 2022 legislates the 2030 and 2050 targets consistent with the nationally determined contributions that we submitted to the United Nations on 16 June. We set a cracking pace from the very beginning. It enhances our accountability and transparency, and this is important because climate integrity is so important. We're about to spend billions and billions of taxpayer dollars, as well as private investment, and we need to wrap probity and integrity around everything we do. So there will be an annual statement to parliament on our climate progress, delivered by the minister. In addition to this, we have empowered our agencies to do what they need to do and what has been denied to them. The Climate Change Authority will provide impartial, independent advice to the parliament and to our government. We have also baked in a regular independent review of the act to ensure that it is fit for purpose as we go forward. We have empowered our agencies to focus on turbocharging clean energy. These include the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, known as ARENA, the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility and Export Finance Australia. And, finally, we will be returning a voice to our peak scientific body, the CSIRO.

What is outside the remit of this bill, but is relevant to its progress and its activation in our country, is that we, as a government, are also addressing the bottlenecks—and these are really important to understand. And there are three: (1) is skills; (2) is industrial capability; and (3) is workforce participation. If we do not address these skills, we will not get to our destination.

With respect to skills, we have a plan. We are going to introduce 45,000free TAFE places, 10,000 of which are focused on energy apprenticeships, and I hope that our young people, men and women, sign up to these in droves. Industrial capability: once upon a time, Australia was ranked by the Harvard Economic Complexity Index—an objective marker of industrial capability and know-how. In 2000, we were ranked No. 60 out 133 countries. We are currently No. 91. We have gone backwards in 22 years, so we have a lot of work to do to bring back onshore manufacturing. We're going to do that through our National Reconstruction Fund, a $15 billion enterprise designed to bring high-tech manufacturing back to Australia so that we actually make those batteries. And I hope that one day we make electric vehicles here again. We currently sell our lithium, for example, for A$60,000 per tonne, and we buy it back as an $80,000 to $100,000 electric vehicle. There is nothing stopping us, except our own imagination, from making these products here, the kinds of products that Australians are desperate for.

So, today we turn the flywheel, and this flywheel will spin faster and faster over the next eight years. But as it turns, market forces will take over and it will mean that we not only reach that interim target, but I am confident that we will indeed exceed it. Australia is a prodigal child that has returned back to the fold. Today is one of the happiest days of my life, because I can say with confidence to the people of Higgins that the Albanese Labor government and this parliament, and I thank the crossbench, is acting with purpose and urgency on climate.

See this speech in context