Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The irony of this motion is obvious to anyone watching from home. The coalition accused the energy minister of prioritising global summits, when clearly they are not doing enough. We failed our COP bid, and the Prime Minister didn't even bother turning up to the world's biggest climate meeting. Our chance to lead the region went up in smoke because of weak leadership and a climate rhetoric that collapses under scrutiny.

I'm no fan of Labor, but I do find it ironic that the same people who are in the comments sections and on the coalition benches ridiculing domestic climate action because Australia is too small to make a difference are now angry that Australia is going to put effort into global climate action at the COP. 'Australian emissions are too small to save the planet,' they said last week while abandoning net zero. 'Focus on Australia,' they say this week, completely undermining their own clown show. Well, here is some good news for the climate deniers on the coalition benches: Labor doesn't really have a plan for climate action either. They take donations from the same fossil fuel industries, they take the same jobs after politics and they approve the same giant fossil fuel projects stretching out to 2070.

Let's be clear. While coalition hypocrisy is loud, Labor's complicity is quiet, but it is just as destructive. One of their own members even admitted this week that our gas export regime is absurd. Here is a fact that every Australian deserves to hear: no gas export project has ever paid a cent of petroleum resource rent tax. The government collects more from HECS—off the backs of our students—than from the PRRT. Now that is a failure of national policy! Despite all of the scare campaigns, 99.7 per cent of Australians do not work in the oil and gas industry, yet our national energy policy continues to be written for them. Meanwhile, tying domestic supply to volatile global gas markets keeps pushing up prices for Australian households, all while Australia's gas is shipped offshore for next to no return, doing nothing for our energy security and leaving behind environmental destruction.

No matter how many talking points the fossil fuel lobby feeds into this chamber, the facts do not change. Renewables are cheaper. Renewables are cleaner. Renewables are reliable. Australians deserve a government and an energy minister who treat that reality as a mandate, not as an inconvenience.