Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Remember when former Prime Minister Morrison called his own government a muppet show? Do you remember that? Seems he was right about one thing, because, honestly, the member for Fairfax has just spent 15 minutes inventing his own reality. That was an extraordinary speech which had nothing to do with what we're debating today: the actual legislation and the facts of what is happening to the climate in this world and this country. If you wanted to stand up in this parliament and announce to everyone that you're a muppet, you'd give the speech that we have just heard.

This legislation, the Climate Change Bill 2022 and the Climate Change (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2022, puts in place Labor's climate change policy that we took to the last election. I have to admit that, for the first, I don't know, five minutes, maybe, of the member for Fairfax's speech, I thought there may be a chance he was supporting the legislation, because he did set out the fact that we put before the Australian people the most robust climate change policy that has ever been put to the Australian people. It has been modelled by one of the most respected environmental economic firms in the country.

We put it to the Australian people with all of the details well before the election so that they could scrutinise it and understand it and so that it would be clear, when we went to the election on 21 May, that if they were voting for Labor they were voting for real action on climate change. They were voting for an emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030, for 82 per cent of the energy going into the grid to be from renewable energy by 2030 and for energy prices to reduce by 2025, as the member for Fairfax pointed out, not in the first nine weeks of this government—the first nine weeks where, by the way, what did we find out? Oh, that's right. We found that the government that the member for Fairfax was a member of hid from the Australian people before the election a report about energy prices going up. It's extraordinary.

See this speech in context