Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to take a moment to thank all the members that have participated in this debate. Unlike our esteemed member from Bruce who says that MPI debates are where great speeches go to die, I think it is this time in the parliament when the community wants to see us have real and sincere conversations. Before I dive into what I want to say, I want to make a few comments in response to esteemed members who have spoken today.

Firstly, from the member for Richmond we heard a lot of information about everything the Albanese Labor government is currently doing, yet what really struck me was one line when she made the point that we are largely here because we have had 10 years of inaction due to the opposition. She also made the point that the opposition are bound to fail because they are advocating for nuclear. Her argument against nuclear was that it would cost $5 billion each, and we would need $8 billion to build the number of nuclear reactors we need. I am very sorry to inform the member for Richmond that that money required, the $40 billion, is infinitely within reach as this current government has continued to subsidise fossil fuels to the value of $41 billion. So whether or not you agree with the opposition's take on nuclear energy, this should not be a discussion about what money is being made available where, because money is already there in our federal budget.

Then the member for Bruce paid us—me and my colleagues on the crossbench—the compliment of saying we were here because of inaction from prior governments. I say to the member for Bruce that that may indeed be one of the reasons we are here, but it is also because Australians were tired of the legislative gridlock we found ourselves in in this place.

I would argue that a government is only as strong as the ambition it sets and the change that it drives, and in this context I would warn our current government that its ambition may not be strong enough nor its pace fast enough.

The member for Corangamite then did a great job of talking about how government is committed to unlock opportunities, and I thank her for taking us through the comprehensive plan of how the government is going to make the most of this. But I make the point that the numbers we heard were numbers like $1.6 billion, $1.3 billion, $2 billion, $38.2 million and $100 million—which, all combined, still do not add up to the $41 billion dollars currently being provided for fossil fuel subsidies. The member for Lingiari again talked about some fantastic numbers for social housing and community, but again it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars as opposed to the billions of dollars being invested in fossil fuels. And the member from Holt has just finished talking us through how the government will not ban or mandate a move away from a gas, yet I have worked in an environment where, had we not banned or mandated a move away from tobacco, we would still have hundreds of thousands of Australians dying every year from lung cancer. You can indeed mandate things when it is in the best interests of your community and your society.

From my perspective, when I was elected a year ago one of my pledges was to get North Sydney to net zero by 2035, and I'm incredibly grateful to the people I get to work with—both the experts and my community members who are working to make this happen. They do it by nudging the 80,000 homeowners, landlords, families and businesses in our electorate to make a set of decisions over the next 12 years to get them to choose home appliances that bring them closer to an electrified future. The reality is that capital, government, community and innovators must come together to support individuals to achieve positive climate and social outcomes. For anyone interested in learning more about what is being done in North Sydney, I encourage you to visit my website, kyleatink.com.au, as my team has literally just launched a web resource for every person who lives in my electorate to help them find the subsidies, the rebates and the channels to enable them to electrify faster.

What is clear is that for us to move our country forward we ultimately need to break not only our society's reliance on gas but also our government's addiction to gas. In our recent budget we saw the government attempt to sell us on modest changes to the petroleum resource rent tax, but what they actually showed us is that, ultimately, the government will make more money off those people who are addicted to tobacco than they will of those who are permanently extracting our limited gas resources. It is time we moved beyond platitudes and million-dollar headlines to really be the change we need to see.

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