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

In respect of the ministerial response to my order for the production of documents for the disclosure of the National Climate Risk Assessment, I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is a document that has been sitting in the cupboard, buried by this government, for about nine months now. The No. 1 duty of a government is to keep its citizens safe from harm and danger, and there is no greater threat to community safety, to our way of life, to cost-of-living pressures, to the economy or to nature than the climate crisis. Coal, oil and gas companies are throwing fuel on the flames of the climate crisis. They're making record profits for themselves while they do, and they're putting the rest of us and the planet in harm's way.

Last December, nine whole months ago, the government received the National Climate Risk Assessment, which is a report that catalogues and details all the dangers that the Australian community faces from rising emissions caused by coal and gas corporations. The context of this is that they're about to set their climate targets for 2035—the climate pollution reduction targets that will have such consequence for all of us.

Those climate targets are not just figures on a page. The climate crisis is causing life or death events for people and for communities who are already experiencing worsening natural disasters, climate turbocharged disasters. Australians need to know what is in store for them under the climate future being determined by this government and their unflinching support for new coal and gas projects. But the government is keeping this report, their own analysis of the dangers that we all face, secret. They are hiding the reality of the climate crisis from the community—yet forewarned is forearmed, and people deserve to know what is in this report. They also deserve a government that does everything it can to actually solve the climate crisis, but so far we've seen incrementalism at best.

In any other job, if you were to refuse to produce a report like this, you would probably be fired. There would be serious consequences. Instead the people who are facing the consequences are those who are suffering on the front lines of the climate crisis. People who have seen the contents of this report and who have bravely spoken out and blown the whistle, have described it as 'dire', 'extremely confronting' and a number of other descriptors, which really illustrate exactly why the government is burying this report. It's a bad news story, and they're trying to cover it up.

We passed an order for the production of documents. Today the minister said, 'Soz, we're not going to give it to you.' That's not on. We'll be moving to force disclosure, and we will also be moving for an inquiry into what is in this report.

How can Labor honestly say they are representing the community, when they are hiding a climate report? Which big coal and gas company are they serving today? Is it Woodside, is it Chevron or is it BHP? At least have the guts to be up front, telling Australian people what is in store for them. Members of the government know that their communities are going to face worsening floods, more frequent cyclones and more devastating bushfires, yet they still want to keep people in the dark and in harm's way. Let's be clear about what purposes this is serving. Labor is refusing to produce this reported to cover up the fact that they're about to announce emissions reduction targets that will lock us into more than two degrees of warming and more coal and gas. And boy does that suit the coal and gas donors for the Labor Party!

If you're in a life-and-death emergency, the first thing that you are taught to do is to remove the danger. You get out of coal and gas as quickly as possible. But what does our new environment minister do 16 days into his job? He ticks off on the North West Shelf gas expansion project—a massive climate bomb. What an absolute farce. It makes a mockery of this government's so-called commitment to climate, and they are still burying this climate risk assessment report.

You don't want to show us what's in store, because what it will actually tell us is that we need to phase out coal and gas exports and we need that transition off dirty fossil fuels. That is what Australians voted for, not this secrecy and not this continued kowtowing to coal and gas companies.

The 2035 target has to face up to coal and gas exports, or we are consigned to live in the terrifying future that this very report documents—this dire and extremely confronting climate assessment report. People deserve to know exactly how the climate crisis is making our country less safe, destroying the environment and supercharging climate disasters that are already costing communities. The only reason the government would be trying to hide this report that they don't want you to see is that they're about to announce inadequate 2035 climate targets.

Global temperatures are higher than they have ever been. Global emissions are also higher than they've ever been, yet this government, just like the last, continues to approve new coal and gas projects. Setting an end date for coal and gas exports is the biggest contribution that Australia could make to the world's decarbonising, because we would be setting in place a timetable for the rest of the world to follow—that is, as the second-largest fossil fuel emission exporter in the world. We're actually in quite a powerful position here. Australia has done far too little for far too long, and we now need science based targets that keep warming below two degrees. That requires a monumental effort and it requires reaching net zero by 2035, not by 2050 and not by never, as Mr Barnaby Joyce would have had us believe in the other place earlier today.

I want to wrap up this contribution with an observation about the reason why the government says it can't tell anyone about this disastrous climate risk report, which we know contains cover-to-cover bad news and tells the truth about what we face if this government keeps kissing the hand of coal and gas companies. The government claims that they can't tell us what's in this report that they've been keeping secret for nine months, because it's somehow cabinet in confidence. Well, we've had a look at what the rules about public interest immunity are, and they are not just a carte blanche 'we wheeled it through the cabinet room, so it's okay—we can't tell you'; the document actually needs to detail cabinet deliberations. A document that merely informs cabinet and informs their deliberations is not a document that reveals cabinet deliberations, so this is a completely farcical excuse to not disclose an inconvenient report.

The Senate didn't order a draft; we didn't order an incomplete document. These aren't deliberations of the Public Service. The order for the production of documents sought the release of the final report, so we will move for the Senate to again require the production of this climate risk assessment and to reject the flimsy fig leaf that the government has tried to come up with because they don't like the climate bad news.

The rest of Australia knows exactly what is coming down the line, and, frankly, the government are just trying to use it as cover to release 2035 climate targets that will keep big business happy rather than being led by the science and being based on actually trying to keep us all and nature safe going forwards. Once again the fossil fuel companies, their donors and their promise of lucrative lobbying jobs after politics have clouded the judgement of this government, and the Australian public is sick of it. They voted for something different, and what they're getting is more of the same. They are sick of the favours for Woodside, for Chevron and for BHP, these big companies that are exporting this polluting material, not even paying their fair share of tax, not dealing with people's domestic energy bills, making the world less safe for all of us and trashing nature in the process. What an absolute abomination of a decision by this government, to keep this risk assessment report in the bottom drawer—for shame. We will move again to force the disclosure of this report.