Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The climate is in meltdown while the global economy delivers ever growing profits to corporations at the expense of people and the planet. Our political establishment has utterly failed to recognise and address the link between these twin crises. This is put best by Tithi Bhattacharya, a professor of history at Perdue. She says:

Capitalism's relentless productivist drive has now triggered climate change, threatening all life as we know it. Life-making increasingly conflicts with the imperatives of profit-making. We are confronted with the question of whether life-making will even be possible for our grandchildren.

And it's this life making that I want to talk about today. If generations to come are to have any hope of a meaningful life we need nothing short of a wholesale re-imagination of our politics and economy to reclaim the planet-saving, life-making potential of our society.

As I told the chamber in my first speech nearly a year ago, we cannot fiddle around the edges and somehow hope that the tide will turn. Movements like the green new deal in America and the green industrial revolution in the UK are championing social and environmental justice as two sides of the same coin and these give us all hope.

As government underinvestment has eroded essential life-making services, like education and training in communities, the mining lobby and others have been allowed to convince workers that planet destroying jobs in extractive industries are the only option to make ends meet. Governments and corporations have tried to sell working communities the lie that green politics are incompatible with their interests. This is particularly true for communities who have been historically reliant on fossil fuel jobs. But the reality is that the fossil fuel corporations are no friends of workers. We see these corporations relentlessly pursuing automation to avoid hiring, making promises of jobs that will never materialise—as is happening with Adani—and undermining job security and the quality of life at every turn. The stranglehold that coal has had over communities in places like the Hunter in New South Wales have put them at the mercy of a small number of corporations.

Once coal and gas are no longer economically viable, which is already rapidly happening, enormous fossil fuel companies will pack it in and abandon workers and their communities in search of profit elsewhere. Coal communities, whether that be communities in and around coal mines or around coal-fired power stations, will be left high and dry by these coal and power companies. These companies are extractive in more than one sense of the word. They extract the wealth from communities and leave behind giant unrehabilitated holes in the earth, toxic ash dams and the legacy of respiratory disease.

So it is up to us, as we end the extraction of coal and gas in Australia, to change this reality for workers. We need massive investment in secure, sustainable and rewarding jobs in green industries. We need a national and just transition for workers and an unprecedented commitment to education and training, starting with free TAFE and uni for all. But we mustn't constrain ourselves to a narrow conception of green jobs as work in renewables or replacements for fossil fuel workers. Green jobs are those that actually enrich our lives and enrich the community. They are caring jobs in our schools, libraries, hospitals, nursing homes and community institutions. They are the jobs that that have life making and solidarity as their essential purpose—the exact kind of jobs needed to make our world a more just place for all.

Each step towards a post-carbon future must be taken alongside workers, the disadvantaged and all those whose livelihood have been cheapened by the extractive hunger of rampant capitalism. The time of corporations plying politicians with donations, gala dinners and job offers to buy their continued support for rampant environmental destruction and profit making has to pass. In its place our democracy must emphasise the inclusion of community interests in decision-making. Public ownership of our key services, expanded community decision-making bodies, and greater workplace rights are all avenues to realising this. The challenge of just transitions underscores this. If it were workers calling the shots, then a meaningful transition from precarious industries like coal mining would have begun decades ago.

With the creation of life-making jobs it's essential that we raise the overall standard of living through investment in services, arts, and our environment. It's long past time we moved the goal posts from society supplying the mere essentials—healthcare, education and a modicum of legal protection from capitalist employers—to a guarantee of the opportunity to live a meaningful and dignified life. This means rewriting our industrial relations laws to redress inequality and create more space and time for life. It is passing us by. It means investing in the institutions that enrich our lives from preschools and community centres to local parks, green spaces and arts initiatives. It means investing in future technologies and rebuilding our public universities to conduct the research and development needed for a fair green future.

By restructuring our economy to replace profit making with life making, we make redundant the old measures of economic strength that encourage unchecked growth, exalt business confidence and fetishise surpluses. It's time we turned to measures of society that highlight the impact of the economy of people. We should look to New Zealand's recent wellbeing budget and social measures of inequality in developing new metrics of success as a society. I don't pretend that realising life-making jobs, investment in our communities and a transition to a post-carbon society doesn't demand significant investment. In fact, I welcome it and the benefits it will have. Nothing short of committing a significant portion of our economy to realising this transformation will be sufficient. With that commitment we will need new public institutions to direct this massive investment in our future.

It's vital we don't make the mistake of limiting economic and environmental transformation to an Australian project. These are international problems whose solutions demand international movements. We cannot have global climate justice without recognising and remediating the legacy of extractive settler colonialism that has destroyed countless lives. In Australia, that means continuing our work alongside First Nations people toward treaties and supporting them in the process of truth-telling, healing and self-determination. Internationally, the principles of a fair green future demands we look at climate reparations and commit to ending colonialism, structural inequalities and grossly unfair neoliberal trade and debt systems imposed on the global south. We must look at overseas aid as a global justice issue inextricably linked with our climate change efforts. Our investment must go beyond our borders and ensure supply chains are just and sustainable.

This future cannot be won just from within parliaments and legislatures. The push is coming from the community to deliver the change we need. People are mobalising to take urgent action on the climate crisis we face. But that does not mean politicians have no role to play. To my colleagues here and in the other place, my message is clear. We are not here to swallow neoliberal economic orthodoxy and put markets and profit ahead of people. Our society can't afford us spending another three years watching political paint dry while the climate meltdown accelerates outside these walls. Government must lead in quitting coal, backing renewal energy and supporting workers who are being left in limbo by the major parties' refusal to acknowledge the inevitable decline of unsustainable fossil fuels.

Labor and Liberal governments have provided billions in subsidies to fossil fuel corporations, poisoning our planet. These billions must be redirected to a life-making future and matched with investment of a scale that we have never seen before. The imperative of profit making has driven our planet and society to the edge, with exploitation of the environment and workers, and it must be abandoned. We need to reconceptualise society that isn't predicated on endless unsustainable planet-killing economic growth. That's the fair green future we need.