Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

So here we are again with our three-cornered conversation around climate, energy and the future of Australia. I don't think it's going to surprise anyone in here when I advise you that Labor will not be supporting this motion. We will not be supporting a motion that has a blanket moratorium. Rather, we will be transitioning Australia to a clean, sustainable energy future because the extremities of all and the extremities of nothing are not going to give us a strong economy, a safe country and an opportunity to do everything that we can to transition to that.

Rather than pointing fingers at what everybody else might have done, I thought I would just take the opportunity, given the debates we've had so far on this today, to talk about what we have done in 12 months and where we think that's going to take us.

We do know that natural disasters are increasingly frequent and increasingly unnatural. How many times have you heard somebody say, 'Oh, that's our second 100-year flood in 10 years.' Times have changed. These 100-year floods, 100-year fires, that's not how it's moving anymore. Things are changing. It is a crisis; we need to take action. Obviously, there is a lot of disagreement about what that action should look like, but we will take action, and we have taken significant action in the 14 months that Labor have been in government.

Our major focus, coming into government, was to lock in a policy environment that was going to drive our climate and energy priorities, which we've been really clear about for a number of years. We wanted to create policy certainty for business and to encourage investment, because the kind of change we're looking at is going to take everybody pulling in the same direction and putting ourselves out there as an investment certainty, as a good opportunity for investment, which helps drive that development quicker. It helps drive that process towards a more renewable energy base quicker. Then we went about rebuilding relationships internationally and with our states so that we could actually get that connectivity that we've heard some talk about already in terms of, internationally, who's doing what to who, when and how. I will make a point of saying I think that the commentary about us being responsible for a country who's got much more robust action going on—in a negative sense—is out of line. We went about the negotiation with the states and the rebuilding of the relationship with the states, so that we could then get traction on those issues that are shared responsibilities or connected responsibilities, and we have seen the fruits of that hard work from Minister Bowen.

We set our emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030 and net zero by 2050. We committed to 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030. We have given the safeguard mechanism teeth so that the biggest emitters will need a net emissions reduction of almost five per cent per year every year. We had the Chubb review to verify the carbon credits and make some changes. We've got emissions reductions finally in the national energy objectives so that our regulators and our operators are actually using that as a baseline for decision-making and for setting the rules in our energy market. We've got the Climate Change Authority back to play a real and meaningful role. We've put net zero in the objectives of the CEFC and the ARENA Act and made it relevant to other key agencies that are playing in this space, namely Infrastructure Australia and Export Finance Australia. We are upgrading and expanding our power grid, with $20 billion in Rewiring the Nation to increase the grid's security and to drive down power prices and unlock new renewables. We've finalised the law for offshore wind. We have released our National Electric Vehicle Strategy, which comes with fuel efficiency standards and electrical vehicle discounts that, we've seen, actually work. We're seeing movement. We are seeing significant changes. There is not enough time in the five minutes I've been given to list all the things that we have done, but we are working so hard to make sure that Australia has a sustainable clean energy future.