Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to correct the record for the member for Casey. We've come out of nine years of coalition mismanagement on climate change action. In case you didn't get the memo, the last election was the election where the Australian public voted for climate action. There were nine failed energy policies. I think it's useful to have a look at what's happening in Australia nationally. In Western Australia we haven't had the same rises in electricity prices, but another place where we haven't had those increases is the ACT. I think it's really interesting that, when I'm talking about these facts, the coalition is not listening. I don't know if they really want to hear the truth. At the last election we saw across Australia that people wanted action on climate change. We saw that in independent areas, in different parts of the country, but we also definitely saw that in Western Australia.

Before I had children, I would regularly speak to school students about climate change, through the scientists in schools program. One of the exercises that I used to do with students, which everyone is welcome to do right now if they'd like, is ask them to close their eyes and imagine a fantastic experience that happened in the last 12 months. I'd get people to do this for 30 seconds, and then the students would share their thoughts about those experiences. Often those experiences could be something like a bushwalk or going to the beach with friends or camping in a special part of Australia. This is where I could say that we could pretend that humans can only survive in an urban and industrialised world, but that's not the reality. Humans fundamentally need the earth. It nurtures us, and we must nurture it. I realise I probably sound like a tree-hugging hippy, but the truth is that I'm born and bred in the Goldfields, I'm an engineer that's worked on the mines, I grew up in a nickel-mining town and I'm really proud of the contribution of the resource sector, particularly from WA. Also, critical minerals will play an important role in the decarbonisation of not just Australia but the world.

After having a look at the mismanagement of the coalition in both climate change and energy, the thing that I was really proud about when we first had the announcement of our cabinet was the talented ministers that had been assigned to climate change and environment. These ministers are people that get work done.

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