Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about gas. This is a complex policy area, but the bottom line is incredibly simple: Australia will blow its carbon emissions budget if gas projects already in the infrastructure pipeline go ahead. We have set this carbon emissions budget, the total emissions that Australia can afford, in our global agreement to curb emissions. It is unconscionable that the possibility of new gas projects is even being entertained by this government, let alone that the infrastructure for those projects be given over $1 billion from the government.

The social licence for taxpayer subsidies for coal, oil and gas has long since expired, particularly at a time of staggering national debt, a grim fiscal outlook and repeated warnings of economic hardship. The Australian public does not want public money to be spent on economically reckless fossil fuel projects and the infrastructure on which those projects rely. This, no doubt, is why Minister Catherine King refuses to admit that the Middle Arm project is unquestionably an expansion of gas production.

We have to remember that the funding for this project was not this government's idea. It was Barnaby Joyce who announced billions of dollars of funding for the Middle Arm precinct as part of what the Morrison government called the five basins gas plan. It's a peculiar name for an allocation of funding that we're now led to believe is not a subsidy for a gas development. Opening a gasfield deep beneath the land in the Katherine and Tennant Creek area known as the Beetaloo basin was the first cab off the rank for Morrison's critically condemned—

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