Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Pocock for bringing forward the Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2025, and I thank all those many young Australians who have advocated this bill. I am thankful for their protest. I thank them for walking the corridors of power in this place and seeking the support of the many parliamentarians, including myself. I wish to tell them and all those millions of young Australians out there that we care. We profoundly care. We are entirely focused on acting on climate change. We understand that this is the issue of our generation and that we have run out of time. I came into politics to be a good ancestor, and I belong to a Labor government, a team of people, who also wish to be good ancestors. We do this in order to leave a legacy and to leave this country in a better shape than what we found it in.

I know acutely what it was like when we came in. In May 2022, when we took government, energy was in a state of complete disorder. We had gone through nearly a decade of coalition rule, and we took the reins of a portfolio that was characterised by chaos, secrecy and 22 failed energy policies, where four gigawatts went out of the grid and one gigawatt went in. That in turn put pressure on prices as well as reliability. This was against a backdrop of 10 or 15 years of the climate wars, which the young generation now will not appreciate. If you're in your teenage years, you wouldn't really understand what that meant, but I remember what that was like. In this parliament, there were arguments about the science of climate change, and they went on for 15 years. Those opposite—the coalition of the Liberals and the Nationals—are still arguing about the science of climate change. But we're not disputing the science of climate change. We know it is real. We know that we are in the teeth of this climate emergency.

The climate imperative is bearing down on us, but we also understand that there are an economic imperative and an environmental imperative to act on that science, and I think the mistake that has been made over many, many years in Australia and elsewhere, globally, is that we have seen this purely through a scientific lens. If only it was just a scientific problem to be solved! That would be easy. If it's a scientific problem, you can create a vaccine to a disease. The disease goes away. Smallpox is a good example. Measles is another one. But this is not a purely scientific problem. This is as much a social problem as it is a political problem and a scientific problem, and that's what makes this hard.

We as a federal government, as a Labor government, are not here to dispute the science. We understand climate change. The arguments we have are really on how we best act. It's not 'why'. We don't talk about 'why'; we get it. It's not like those opposite, who are still arguing about the 'why'. For us, the debate happens around the 'how'. How do we get to net zero as efficiently as possible while maintaining this pesky little concept called energy security and while ensuring that we do not deindustrialise this country while we decarbonise? Why? Because people's jobs and livelihoods rely upon us getting this energy shift right. We must transition in an orderly fashion rather than a disorderly fashion, and we actually take our lead from the Australian people.

A survey of 6,800 Australians done by CSIRO and published in April 2024 showed that Australians want to have an orderly transition. They do not want blackouts, and they are completely intolerant of high bills. The way I see it is that those are the parameters. Those have been set by the Australian people. If I had my way, like Senator Pocock, I would flick the switch, and we would go straight away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We would stop approving or expanding fossil fuel projects, if I had my way. But that's not the reality that we have to deal with. We are shifting from a nation—a species!—who has been entirely entwined in this toxic marriage with fossil fuels for 200 years to now becoming more reliant on clean energy, and that shift is well and truly underway.

When I go to schools and I talk to young people, they are genuinely shocked when I tell them that the amount of renewable energy in our grid is now approaching nearly 50 per cent. In the last quarter of last year, it was 48.6 per cent. They can't believe it. They mostly think that we're sitting at around 20 to 30 per cent. We're not. That's in the rear-view mirror. The momentum has begun, and it is unstoppable. It is being driven by policies that we put in place and that we are building upon—foundational climate policies that we put in place in our first term of government. While those opposite had 22 energy policies that all failed, left the grid in a mess and left this country overexposed and vulnerable to fossil fuels, we came in, and the order of the day, when we took government in May 2022, was passing our Climate Change Act.

We have one policy, not 22. That is the foundation of everything we do. We set targets in our first term of government—43 per cent by 2030. We've recently updated those targets. The 2035 target is now 62 to 70 per cent by 2035, and we need to do that, because, in the next decade, most of our coal-fired power stations—90 per cent or so—will shut. We're not waiting for some great white knight to come over the hill. We are putting in place the supports needed to ensure we have energy reliability that is underpinned by the cheapest form of energy, and that is renewable energy. Australians know that. That is why they're taking up rooftop solar in droves—4.2 million households already have rooftop solar. They are marching with their feet. They are voting with their feet.