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

I rise to speak to the suspension motion. We will be supporting the motion. What we are seeing is the government yesterday agree to disclose some documents and then today fail to disclose them. This is not the first time this government has done this. We passed an order for the production of documents relating to the Beetaloo basin and the cosy meetings that members of this government have had with donor companies who were then worded up about the grant arrangements on a first-in, best-dressed basis. We passed that OPD, and then we waited a good eight weeks before this government complied with it. So this is their form. They'll say, 'Sure, fine,' and then just not comply with it. The reason they said, 'Sure, fine,' yesterday and let the OPD pass was that they didn't want Senator Canavan to cross the floor and further embarrass the government. This is a government that cannot disclose these sorts of documents because they are so compromised by what those documents would say.

This particular transparency measure relates to the famed 2050 modelling that, naturally, the Prime Minister does not want to release because he is allergic to transparency and is obsessed with secrecy. The reason he doesn't want to release it is that the modelling is absolute crap. How on earth could any modelling say that you can somehow address the climate crisis that we're in by increasing coal and gas? The International Energy Agency has done this work. It looked at the countries that currently buy our fossil fuels and compared them with the 2030 targets those countries have made, and it found that fossil fuel usage will peak in 2025 and then fall. That's why we want to see this 2050 modelling, because it will be revealed as absolute rubbish. It's somewhat ironic that Senator Canavan with Senator Patrick's support want to see this modelling, because they too think it will be rubbish, although for completely different reasons.

The government could solve this by simply releasing the modelling, but it won't do that, because it's utterly compromised and embarrassed on the climate. Glasgow is a week away, and this Prime Minister is still talking about a date that's 30 years in the future. For the rest of the world, the whole ticket to Glasgow, the whole point of Glasgow, is to talk about 2030, and this Prime Minister is having a phony war with his coalition junior partner—which suits the electoral outcomes of both of them, I might add—to distract from the fact that Australia is now the only comparable nation that is not addressing 2030 and has no science based targets for 2030.

The Climate Targets Panel have advised us that, if we want to stay within 1½ degrees of warming, we need to triple our 2030 targets. The Prime Minister's pathetic 2030 targets—which are the targets established by Tony Abbott, that great climate saviour—are one-third of what we need to do our bit in the global effort to keep to 1½ degrees. If we don't keep to that, you can kiss the Great Barrier Reef goodbye. You can kiss our agricultural productivity goodbye. We already know that studies indicate that agricultural productivity in the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by more than 90 per cent if we don't seriously address the climate crisis and constrain that warming to 1½ degrees. These are the people that the Nationals still occasionally purport to represent, and this government is throwing them under the bus. It's not only throwing nature under the bus—we're used to it doing that—but throwing the productivity of our agricultural sector under the bus as well, and it is imperilling the future of our communities who have faced devastating natural disasters already.

Perhaps the Prime Minister's planning on going to Hawaii again when he opens up the international borders. Maybe he won't be around for the next bushfire season. But Australians won't forget, and that's exactly why they deserve to see this climate modelling which this government is not disclosing. These folks just love running protection rackets. They did it yesterday in the House over former Minister Porter. They've done it today. They did it on the Beetaloo basin. They are obsessed with secrecy, and they are failing us on climate. Let's vote them out.