Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the minister for what was perhaps the biggest heap of garbage I have ever heard in this place. For a bit of context, I think I was 12 years old when the CPRS happened in this country, and the government conveniently forgets that, yes, the ETS went through. We got a price on carbon. We got the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. We got the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. We got more action on climate, in that short period of the Gillard government, than we have ever seen from you guys since. I also want to say that we on the crossbench share our speaking spots. That is why the member for Ryan only spoke for five minutes. So thank you for your grandstanding there.

The science is clear. We are in a climate emergency. We are facing harsher and more frequent fires, floods, heatwaves and droughts. It threatens the safety of people, our health, water, the ability to grow food and the air we breathe. The stakes could not be higher. A climate emergency requires an emergency response. It means putting the climate crisis at the centre of all policy and planning decisions and mobilising the whole of government to protect Australia's people and ecology.

The biggest cause of global heating is the mining, transporting and burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas. In an emergency, the very first action we have to take is to immediately remove whatever is causing the damage. That means keeping all untapped coal, oil and gas fields in the ground. This is not some far-off distant threat. We are already experiencing a shift in climate, with one-in-100-year bushfires and floods every few years. Already, the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences has calculated that each Australian farmer has lost at least $29,200 in average reduced income per year because of climate change.

Significant bushfires in Tasmania and New South Wales in 2013 and the Black Summer bushfires in 2019 to 2020 show that an El Nino weather event is no longer needed to produce a bad fire season. Even a neutral phase can now produce periods of extreme and catastrophic fire danger. As the International Energy Agency has made clear, not one new coal or gas project can proceed if we are to stay below 1.5 degrees. To meet net zero by 2050, not a single piece of new fossil fuel infrastructure can be built: no more coal; no more gas. It is simply that straightforward.

So what is the Australian government doing to address such an emergency? This is a government that, just last week, passed a sea-dumping bill which paves the way for fossil fuel giants to expand their Australian gas projects.

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