Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ten years ago this parliament had the opportunity of coming together and doing something important: reducing carbon pollution, reducing power prices and improving power reliability. Instead of coming together and voting to do that, those from the Greens political party, combined with those from the Liberal and National political parties, voted against Labor's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and we've seen the fruits of that over the last 10 years. I have lost count of the times people committed to action on climate change have stopped me in the street, often parents with young children, saying to me, 'I could never understand why they did that; I could never understand why the Greens let us down in that way, making the perfect the enemy of the good,' and I say to them: I can't understand it either.

What would have happened if those parties had joined with Labor to support real action on climate change? By 2020 we would have seen 218 million fewer tonnes of carbon pollution in our environment. Surely, taking 218 million tonnes of carbon pollution out of our atmosphere is something this whole parliament could have gotten behind. Instead, what we have is higher pollution, higher power prices and lower reliability because of those in that corner joining with those opposite. (Time expired)