Jessica Collins (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate takes note of answers given to all coalition questions.

Wasn't that very, very telling today to see the response to our questions on net zero, to have the minister absolutely panicking about the questions we asked. Evidence that we put to him from the ANZ CEO, Mr Nuno Matos, that was put to the House of Representatives' economics committee—he called that dishonest. That was evidence given by somebody outside of this parliament to this parliament. That evidence was that some still believe that net zero by 2050 is possible, but I would say, at this point in time, it seems to be difficult to reach with the current dynamics, with the current technologies and with the current public stance in many parts of the world. He also said that net zero by 2050 could be the medicine that kills the patient. I don't know if anybody else in the chamber saw the news last week that found asbestos in the wind farms that were coming in from China. Perhaps just in that part he is absolutely right.

Industry just can't do it with the current technology, and it is time, as we saw this morning with the Defence awards tribunal bill, that this government again admits that it is wrong. We heard from the minister that the government's approach is to take the lowest cost approach. Senator Babet asked about the security risks and the sovereignty risks with having State Power Investment Corporation, which is owned by the Chinese Communist Party and governed by the Chinese national security law 2017. This means that all of its employees have to do what the CCP wishes with that business. That is a massive security risk. That goes outside out levels of scrutiny. We've heard of issues of malware and kill switches, yet the Labor government's approach is for the lowest cost which we have seen is absolutely not happening. The families are hurting, small businesses are hurting, and industry is hurting.

I also asked Minister Ayres about the 180 workers at Rio Tinto's alumina refinery that were sacked last week to align with the decarbonisation pathway. This is deindustrialisation. The minister said, 'My message to those workers is: work with your unions.' It is the government's fault that they are losing their jobs, and the government are driving them to grow the business in unions. It's outrageous—absolutely outrageous. He said, 'Work with the business and the federal government that backs you.' Well, that business is no longer going to be there. How can they talk to the business that can no longer survive because of Labor's net zero agenda? Of course, we all know that the federal government is not backing these workers, because they're sticking by this net zero agenda that is killing our industry.

Remember, behind every job that is lost is a family that is suffering. There are children that might not have enough money to buy their shoes to go to school or have their breakfast in the morning. Behind every job that is lost, there's a family that is suffering. What we see with the damaging Labor net zero agenda are higher bills, stagnating emissions and suffering families. That is the farce of all of this. Tomago, Glencore copper smelter—these are the other places that are suffering too. We heard from Orica CEO Mr Sanjeev Gandhi:

Industries like ours, who are hard to decarbonise, we are depending on technologies that are not yet commercial …

This is why, in the next decade, bills are only going to increase. It's because of the scale of the cost of this transition.