David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Climate Change Bill 2022 is a very important bill. As the honourable member has just outlined, a lot of the Australian public have the wish that more be done. But all through the last parliament and the parliament before that and the parliament before that—all the time I've been here—we have been committed to addressing the imperative of reducing our carbon emissions. In fact, anyone would think we hadn't done anything, judging by the relentless barrage of saying we're not doing enough.

To put things in perspective, less than three per cent of the world's energy is delivered by renewable energy across the whole globe. But at times in Australia we have reached 26 per cent, long before the Albanese government came into the government benches. We have achieved more on the climate targets and delivered more reductions than Canada, New Zealand and most of the EU, who set totally unrealistic targets. We have a track record. We've met the targets that were set at Kyoto, and we should not be feeling embarrassed or ashamed, because we've actually done a lot, and we seem to get no credit for it.

But, to give them credit, they said they would have a target of 43 per cent, so they're legislating it. They've already written off to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and that is our target. So this legislation is a bit of symbolism, but I find it's pretty sinister in that, yet again, this legislation means that this room and our elected representatives will have no control over investments in things that keep our nation running. It'll be decided by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, by ARENA and by CSIRO. You've only got to see what the Leader of the Greens, Adam Bandt, announced today in the National Press Club: that Export Finance Australia—which has funded coal and gas projects, which, incidentally, delivered the energy that has built this country and which we still depend on for 65 to 70 per cent of our energy—will not be able to fund any of the things our nation is crying out for. We have a dependency on liquid fuel from overseas. We have, as you've seen only recently, electricity shortages. There's not enough generation.

This sort of legislation will lead to the things that have happened in the UK. Activists and other antidevelopment entities will use these legislated targets to mount legal arguments, like stopping high-speed rail—as they did in the UK because of similar legislation—and stopping the government from continuing highway maintenance and building new roads, because cement is a bad thing. In the UK, this is real. This is not theoretically what could happen. This will happen if you put legislation in that gives standing to obscure climate based arguments and restrictive trends. We have the LNG plant in Darwin that needs to go ahead. We're keeping the rest of Asia and lots of our customers supplied with energy. We also want to have energy in our country, but the changes in this legislation will have rather big consequences.

I did hear the good member's comments about why she thought climate change and climate action was such an emergency. It was because her family members were caught in those horrible fires in the Adelaide Hills. But I do remember, as a young doctor, Ash Wednesday. We've had Black Saturday fires, but 513,979 acres were destroyed in South Australia and 9,904 square kilometres, or 2.46 million acres, were burnt in Victoria on one day. My whole family migrated from the Snowy region into— (Time expired)

See this speech in context