Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

You throw the mud without saying, 'We do too.' How about we just debate the issues? How about we just do that? All the donations are public. All the donations are fine. All the donations are publicly listed. Why don't we just debate the issues, instead of questioning each other's motives constantly?

The reason the Greens movement has often had to increasingly resort to this kind of rhetoric is it's actually losing the debate on the issues. Your vote is declining. Your support is going down because people are no longer buying the rubbish that has clearly been shown to be wrong. You made a lot of promises: that clean energy would lower power prices and bring manufacturing to this country, that we'd have a critical minerals industry, that we'd have hydrogen and that we'd clean up our environment. None of those things have come true, and that's why people are walking away from this agenda. Instead of trying to debate those issues and reflect on what you might have got wrong, you instead are lashing out now and saying, 'It's not because we have got things wrong; it's because other people are corrupt or are involved with certain businesses or industries in this country.'

You can see you're losing the debate, guys, because even the government has flown up the white flag on this. This week, in the budget, the Treasurer mentioned the words 'net zero' just once, and it was a lame, fleeting reference in relation to the world going to net zero. It's not, but, anyway, he said it. The Minister for Finance is saying, 'We're not going to spend much money on net zero anymore; we're going to slow it down,' but the fine print says otherwise. The government is clearly walking away from this agenda as fast as it can because the Australian people know it's failed. It has failed as an idea. It has failed around the world. The pursuit of net zero has only made our country weaker and more dependent on other countries. It has hollowed out our manufacturing industries, pushed our energy prices to record levels, crushed the living standards of the Australian people and forced real wages back 15 years. They're back to 2011 levels under these policies. They have failed on every level.

Most of all, they have also failed to protect our natural environment. Our bushland is being destroyed by large-scale solar and wind projects. Our farmlands are being bought up by overseas interests trying to produce carbon credits. There's a beautiful farm in north-east Tasmania that's being bought up right now by a rich UK business in order to stop farming and start creating these ridiculous things called carbon credits. How is that any benefit to our natural environment? How is that any benefit to this country? Why are we allowing foreign interests to come in here and shut down Australian farming in the pursuit of this ridiculous idea of net zero? It has to be scrapped. Let's fight the issues, get off this rubbish and instead start dealing with the issues that the Australian people face and lower their cost of living.