Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I thought I might take this opportunity to provide a small intervention from the opposition at—where are we now, day six, or day five?—of debate on this bill. I think we've had in excess of nine hours of debate on this legislation, and I find it incredible that we're not moving forward at any pace. This morning a motion was even moved to allow us to continue to sit until whenever—it's not actually specified in the motion—to complete debate on this motion. It's a welcome development, I suppose, because it appears there are still a lot of questions there. But I thought I might take this opportunity to inject a bit of reality into this debate, because we've heard a lot about the nasty, evil fossil fuel industry and how they're destroying everything and how that's their sole aim in life. But, last time I checked, the majority of energy generation in this country actually depends on those horrible fossil fuels.

Now, it may not be optimum, but it is the reality. It is the way the world is at the moment. A transition should occur, but we can't just turn the tap off because the lights would go out and trucks would stop delivering goods from one end of the country to the other. It would destroy our economy, jobs would evaporate, and communities would become non-existent, particularly in our regions, a part of the country that many in this chamber seem to forget about when we debate these things. Not once this morning has anyone from the government or the crossbench talked about the cost of living. Most of the Australian public who march through this place are struggling to pay their bills. They're having trouble with increasing mortgage repayments. The cost of energy in this country has gone through the roof. Even in my home state of Tasmania, where the majority if not all of energy generated for consumption is renewable, it is expensive. In Tasmania it's gone up by roughly 25 per cent in a 12-month period. That's a huge impost on any household—any business, for that matter—trying to make ends meet. Yet here we are demonstrating to the people of Australia how out of touch we are by not talking about that at all. And what's worse in all of this is so that the government can keep pointing to things like safeguards as a means of having met our international obligations to reduce emissions.

As we predicted and pointed out at the time of the passage of that legislation, that bill will drive up the cost of doing business, will drive up the cost of living, and it appears that's exactly what is happening. What's more, it potentially will drive those industries that exist here offshore. Yes, they happen to be heavy emitters and they'll go offshore to places, as I've said previously in this debate, where they don't give a stuff about the environment. These countries don't care about carbon emissions, and many companies do or would prefer to do business in jurisdiction where there are no regulatory regimes around environmental protection, where they don't sign up to international agreements to reduce emissions. These jurisdictions simply invite businesses to operate, and there are no labour laws to protect their workers. People get paid next to nothing to do what we in this country have proper laws to protect workers from doing. And that's why we're here, of course, because of Labor's terrible legislation, which is damaging the economy, and now we're trying to make a bad situation better.

This government has found itself in this mess as a result of being intransigent and not even willing to work with the opposition on a fairly modest request to have an open inquiry into transmission lines across our country. Heaven forbid—a democratic, transparent process, a function of this chamber, the Australian Senate! It's not even a new committee that we're asking to have set up. It's an inquiry by an existing references committee. But such is the intransigence of this government that we now find ourselves in the sixth day of debate on a bill that the government has the numbers to pass. We're still here, and we're going to be here for a while, as evidenced by this motion to sit until whenever. I don't know why the government doesn't just get on with business and agree to have an inquiry. What's there to hide? What's there to worry about? I do not understand for the life of me why we are still here when the government could simply move things on. We could be debating counterterror laws. We could be, as I said before, dealing with the cost of living. But no, no, no, no, this debate is so the government can save face. The crossbench have characterised it in a different way, but it is purely a face-saving exercise. They refuse to move, and they think, by attrition they'll be able to wear everyone else in this chamber down.

I will be interested to see how strong the resolve of the crossbench is as we move on, whether they'll continue to debate until this bill is concluded.