Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Money talks, doesn't it, folks? Looking at the donation disclosures released on 1 February, we see that there has been $5 million donated in the last four years to the Liberal Party, the Labor Party and the National Party by mining and resources companies. So is it any wonder that we have a virtually non-existent climate policy from the current government? And, sadly, yesterday we saw Labor release a climate policy that's basically the scraps of the Liberals' climate policy. Money talks. Interestingly, those same companies which are able to make very generous donations to the large parties to buy their way out of decent climate laws can also afford good accountants, because they have paid barely any tax. It's no wonder that people in the community are outraged by big corporations writing their own rules, when they can see that donations buy them outcomes, yet they don't even pay tax.

People want action on climate change. I'm from Queensland. We saw unprecedented bushfires late last year which wreaked havoc in central Queensland. We've also just seen devastating floods in Townsville, which had been stricken by drought for many years prior to that. People understand that we are changing the face of this planet with our profligacy. You need only look at the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that we have had two of the most severe bleaching episodes in back-to-back years, which have, as the scientists tell us, killed half of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef—which, incidentally, provides 64,000 people with a job. So we are talking about the future of our planet.

We're also talking about the future of our community here. Regional Queensland is crying out for jobs, and we hear that; we hear that loud and clear. What we also hear is Adani bragging to the share market that they're going to automate from pit to port. Both facts can't be true: they can't be providing jobs, which they admitted they massively exaggerated by a factor of 10, when, at the same time, they're telling their financial supporters—not that there are terribly many of those—that, actually, they're not going to create any jobs because they're going to automate. You won't hear those facts from either side of parliament, sadly.

Not only would there be no jobs created by this proposed new coalmine—flying in the face of all of the science, which says we can't take any additional coal being added to our system—but the massive water impacts of this proposed coalmine would wreak incredible havoc on that already devastated region. It is desperately unfair that this coalmining company and others would get free water when all of the other water users in that region are paying through the teeth for it. It is desperately unfair and, again, it just shows that the big corporates write their own rules. They don't comply with environmental laws and they write their own tax rules, and people are absolutely fed up with it. There's one possible piece of good news here, in that, when the election is called—and, frankly, it couldn't come soon enough, because Australians and the Greens are sick of this awful government and cannot wait to see the back of it—Adani's groundwater management plan will need, under the caretaker conventions, the Labor Party to say yea or nay to it. It will be interesting to finally see Labor have to take a position on Adani, in particular on the water impacts of this new proposed coalmine, because, I might say, they've been rather slippery up until this point in time on whether or not they actually want to see this proposal go ahead. Once we hit caretaker mode—and that might be very soon—we will find out. Acting Deputy President Hume, I see the clock has just reset somewhat bizarrely. Can I seek some clarification on how much time I've got left?