Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

One of my favourite Australian authors, Gregory David Roberts, who wrote the book Shantaram, said in his book:

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics—

and we're all in the business of big politics—

is the politics of big business.

When the two get in bed together, they're an unstoppable force. That's exactly what we are witnessing here today. A textbook word for it might be cronyism; it might be institutional corruption, state capture. When the people demand that their resources provide a fair return to them as the owners of that resource and the government ignores them because they won't take on big, powerful, greedy multinational corporations, then that is corruption. That is corruption, and we should call it out for what it is.

We need to clean up politics and we need to hold these companies to account. That's what the Australian people put us here to do. It's not as if we don't need the money. We do. We desperately need money. We're cutting billions of dollars from the NDIS—targeting some of the most vulnerable people in our community—because apparently we don't have enough money. All it would take is a decision by a government to turn around to these corporations that have been getting away with it for too long and say, 'You are going to pay your fair share of tax for the minerals and the resources that you mine from this country.' Let's not forget that this gas, a dirty fossil fuel, is pushing us further towards the brink of climate collapse, and who's going to pay for that? Who's going to pay for the adaptation and the mitigation that we need to make sure that future generations in this country and on this planet inherit the joint in better shape, better condition, than we did when we came into this parliament?