Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate calls on the Morrison Government to legislate their technology-driven plan to deliver net zero emissions by 2050, such that every Australian will be $2,000 better off a year in 2050 compared to a business-as-usual scenario.

I didn't always believe in climate change. I used to think that it was all a bit of beat-up, to be honest, and something that leftie types were drumming up for votes or social media kudos—no offence—but not something that the rest of us really need to worry about. I'd tell people that the weather getting warmer had nothing to do with what humans were doing. I figured that the climate is always changing, and I didn't see what Australia could do about it. I don't think like that anymore; I've changed my mind. A lot of Australians have changed their minds as well. I'm not the only one. And you know what? The coalition have followed suit. They have signed us up for a net zero target for 2050 and they say that every Australian will be $2,000 better off under their plan.

I think it's a good thing that we have a net zero target. Anyone can see that it wasn't an easy process for the coalition to get there, but they did, and I'm grateful that they did. We're all sick of the political back-and-forth on climate change. It's been going on since 2007. The country's moved on. That's why I'm proposing this motion. The motion calls on the government to give Australians certainty that their plan will be the plan from now on. Let's lock it in and get on with it.

While we've all been fighting over emissions targets, we've missed something really important. We haven't done anything to prepare the country for the fires, floods, droughts and storms that are headed our way in the very near future. This is what scares me. We have no plan of attack to deal with the natural disasters that are already destroying people's lives. We have had out-of-control bushfires starting months before the fire season should have begun. People seem to have forgotten about the 2019 fires that were running all the way down the country just before COVID hit our shores. Those fires weren't just ferocious; they were everywhere. The smoke was so bad it went all the way across the Pacific to South America. It went all the way around the world. We lost 34 people, more than 46 million acres of land and thousands of homes. Right now, families are still living in tents because they can't afford to rebuild the homes they lost.

What the experts are telling us is that fires like those—fires that cover the whole country—are going to be more frequent and more full-on. Even if we do pull back our emissions, those fires are coming. This is the problem with the way we've been talking about climate change in our country. No-one—absolutely no-one—is talking about how we deal with the clean-up. There's nothing there to make sure we're ready when the fires hit. It's the same with the floods, the droughts, the storms—you name it. We're going to have more of these extreme weather events whether we like it or not. That's the reality.

So what are we doing about it? When the 2019 bushfires rolled through, we were flying by the seat of our pants, let's be honest. We didn't have boots on the ground when we needed them. Think about what we're asking of our volunteer firefighters. Those 2019 fires started in June—in June! It was the middle of winter, and we already had fires starting. Things got bad in September and they stayed that way until March. That's more than six months of having our firies on standby. We're asking them to be on call in case there's a fire at any time from June through to March. That means they have to be prepared to go to their boss for leave at short notice or turn down shifts at work so they can help their community and go fight the fires. That's not practical and it's not realistic, and neither is it sustainable—it's just not.

That's just when the disaster hits. Then you've got the clean-up. Right now, we're counting on the SES to go in and tidy things up after disasters. They're wonderful people, and we'll always be very grateful for what they have done, but we're asking way too much of them. They don't have enough people either, and that means the Australian Defence Force gets called in. The government admitted they were going to have to rely more on the Australian Defence Force when they introduced a bill last year allowing them to call in reservists to help when a fire or flood has come through. But the ADF are supposed to be protecting our national security from external threats. They aren't really supposed to be in the country handing out bottles of water to people and sandbagging rivers.

We need to get more organised with this stuff. We need to get on the front foot and we need to do it right now, because at the moment we're clearly making it up as we go along. That's going to get harder and harder as the weather gets more extreme. This is what I reckon we need to do. It's actually quite simple. If we want to take care of our country and our communities, we're all going to have to pitch in and do our bit—everyone. We can't go on letting our elderly pick up the slack, because, as I said, they are elderly. Volunteers in this country are getting older. We cannot just continue to allow the elderly to pick up the slack. Everyone goes about their daily life and says, 'No worries; that's fine—they're doing the clean-up,' pretending they don't have a role to play. Guess what? You do have a role to play.

Australia needs a national guard to respond to the threats of climate change. If you're under 25, you are not working or studying and you're physically and mentally able, you will be expected to join up, do your service and help your country—to give back. How about that?

When the fires roll in, the national guard will put boots on the ground to get people out safely, get people housed and clean up the rubble after the fires and floods have gone through. The national guard will build resilience. It will reinforce shorelines to protect houses from rising sea levels, help farmers out with better irrigation systems to manage the droughts, and put levees on rivers so they don't overflow into neighbourhoods when it floods. This is all good stuff that we need to do. But not in 20 years' time; I need them now. The country needs them now. We need to be realistic about that.

For the people who sign up, we'll make sure you have a choice in what you do. You can choose to help out in local community organisations. Or you can decide to go out and fight fires with the fire service. It's up to you. But, whatever you do, you will get your hands on training and a decent job. You'll get paid and you'll be doing something meaningful for your country and your neighbours. There's nothing more hardy than that, trust me. It's going to take a massive change in the way we think about our disaster response. And that's what we need. We need better coordination between the states and the Commonwealth so that we aren't doubling up and going over the top of each other. We need to get a national view of how we're going to manage our response, because the problems we've got are nationwide.

The other thing we need is to do a full risk assessment of what climate change means for this country. An independent risk assessment is the only way to take a good hard look at where climate change threats are going to come from and what we have to do to prepare for them. It's about being prepared: prepare, prepare, prepare. We can't keeping doing what we're doing. We still have people building their houses in flood zones, for goodness sake. They're building houses right next to beach where the water will be at their back fence in a decade or two. You aren't even going to be able to get insurance on those properties pretty soon, and I know some people can't already. But we're letting it happen because there's no planning and no forward thinking.

We're going to look at our farmland and figure out where our food security will be in 10 or 15 years time. We have more severe and longer droughts right now, and that will continue. What do we need to do to help our farmers cope with that? Has anybody even asked them? It's about having a sense of what we're doing and where we're going. It's all well and good to say, 'We'll get there. We'll get to net zero by 2050', but what are we doing on the way there? What road are we on right now? If we don't know where we're going, whatever target we have for 2050 isn't going to matter very much, is it? We'll be in bad shape no matter what.

Australians deserve to know the truth of what to expect over the next 30 years, because the honest truth is that it won't be very pretty. It is going to be tough. Walking around pretending we're all ostriches who can't see what's going on because our heads are in the sand is only making things worse. The reality is that we're all going to have to pitch in. We're all going to be doing the heavy lifting. We won't have a choice. This government and future governments after it are all going to have to figure out how we deal with these more severe national disasters. We won't be in a conventional war; we're going to be at war with climate change. That's the truth of the matter. While you're worrying about targets, I'm more worried about having volunteers and boots on the ground.

I don't care if you tell the universities students they'll get 30 or 50 per cent off their fees if they go and volunteer. I don't care. But right now, we have a very old cohort of volunteers out there. In the next 10 years, or even five years, they won't be there. So can someone please give me the answer to the question: how are we going to fill those boots without doing something like a national guard? Please put it on the table. I'll be working really, really hard during the second half of my term in parliament to push this ahead. I want this national guard up and going. You can no longer rely on our Australian Defence Force. God forbid if we have to send them to Taiwan, because you have no boots on the ground here then. We've got a Defence Force that fills just over half the MCG, and 25 per cent of them are officers; they sit in an office. That's what they do.

We have to be realistic about this. And we've got no-one to clean up; we've got no-one to compare. Really? I think this would be great for the younger generation coming up. We have to be specific. We have to be leaders. We need those boots on the ground, and we need to start discussing this. As a parliament, all of us here are going to have to take hard questions from the Australian public. It won't be easy, but I'd rather tell people the truth about what's going on. I don't even care if I'm leading front and centre and get some smackdowns along the way; I just don't care, because I can see what is going on out there, and it's not much, and we're not prepared.

Climate change is happening. We might be able to reduce emissions and slow that down eventually, but it ain't slowing down tomorrow, and these weather extremes are getting worse. God forbid, I dread to think what they're going to look like in five or 10 years time. So I just want everyone out there and talking about how we're going to do this, instead of talking about how hard we're going to rally and saying we're going to reduce emissions. I want to move to that next stage. It's fine if you want to rally to reduce emission, but, quite frankly, I need young guns out there. You need to be a part of this, because the elderly cannot do this volunteering for much longer. We've got a big gap in society here. That's the truth of the matter. We are running out of time to get ourselves ready. We are already miles behind. And it will be Australians who bear the brunt of that delay. It will be the next generation.

We are miles behind. It is time to get some courage and it's time to start talking about this. It is time to sell this to the next generation, because they are the ones who will be out there with their boots on, cleaning it up. We have to be honest and truthful with them about that. We owe them that. We are leaving them our mess, saying: 'Hey, guess what? It's not about rallies anymore; it's not just about that. We're going to put some boots on.' I'm sorry, but that's just being realistic, and we need to be honest with the next generation about that. That's all I have to say.

I do want to say a very quick merry Christmas to all Australians out there, especially Tasmanians, of course. I know it's been a tough year for all the parliamentarians—a tough couple of years. Sometimes I don't think we give ourselves enough credit. We have been running around with COVID, and that's been really difficult. Many of us, too, have spent a lot of time in isolation. I know we don't say much about that. But I do want to I thank my colleagues in both houses. It hasn't always been easy, as I said, but I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year—and of course all the staff who work in parliament. Thank you very much. Merry Christmas and happy new year.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This motion on net zero emissions, on the last day of the 2021 sittings, highlights the top agenda item for Senator Lambie, and it's the extreme-green agenda. You can't pretend to be the champion of the worker and those doing it tough whilst you're in cooee and put forward an extreme jobs-destroying green agenda when in Canberra.

The call to legislate a net zero emissions outcome by 2050 is a glib, shallow approach, devoid of any analysis or consideration for our fellow Tasmanians. Legislation means it would be illegal not to reduce emissions, irrespective of the cost. We all have a common vision, and that is for as clean an environment as possible. To legislate targets may sound good, but it has job-destroying, livelihood-destroying consequences. The extreme-green ideology embedded in Senator Lambie's motion has consequences—job- and livelihood-destroying consequences. It will hit the poorest hardest, and our manufacturing jobs. Legislating targets is exactly the same as saying you support a carbon tax—something the Australian people, quite rightly, comprehensively rejected in 2013. Handing over control of our economy—our Australian jobs—to courts and activists, which would occur if this was legislated, is something the coalition will never do, but Senator Lambie champions it. It is irresponsible. A bit of research tells the story, but of course doing research might mean a bit less time for dancing for TikTok.

Where climate targets have been enshrined in legislation in the last two years alone, the people have been the losers. Look at Germany. Look at France. Look at the United Kingdom, where extensions to Heathrow Airport, under this type of legislation in the proposal of Senator Lambie, were delayed. The motion would usher in a new era of green lawfare. But, of course, Senator Lambie voted recently to protect the Bob Brown Foundation, to enable it to continue its un-Tasmanian work.

On this side, we have never legislated emissions targets—and for a good reason: it destroys jobs for everyone other than for green lawyers. On this side, we make calculated, balanced commitments, and then we get on with meeting them and beating them. We beat our 2020 target. We're on track to meet and beat our 2030 target. The only time an emissions target was legislated in Australia was the carbon tax. And that didn't end very well, did it? The people repudiated the Labor-Green carbon tax, without hesitation. They will do so again, even if Senator Lambie is used as the stalking horse for the Labor-Green alliance. It really does seem that Senator Lambie has been sitting between Labor and the Greens for a little too long, and the colour with which she started off her political branding—namely, yellow—seems to change to green when she hits Canberra.

But let's be clear: emissions are already more than 20 per cent below 2005 levels, while our economy has grown 45 per cent. We're on track to meet and beat our 2030 target. We've set out a credible plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Here I have the comprehensive book setting it out, with over 100 pages—and of course, that is so much more hard work than a glib two-line motion before the Senate. We've set out a credible plan, preserving jobs in existing industries, taking advantage of new economic opportunities to grow jobs, ensuring our regions grow even more jobs and establishing Australia as a leader in low-emissions technologies.

We do this through technology, not through taxes, and by empowering choice and delivering affordable—a word never mentioned by Senator Lambie—reliable energy to all Australians. We achieve this by getting the cost of clean energy and low-emissions technologies down, not by driving up the cost of meat, fuel or steel, or of aluminium and other goods that use intensive energy. We need to protect the cost of living—something of which Senator Lambie's contribution was completely devoid. Those doing it tough rely on us to have the calibration of our policy position to ensure that they can make their household budgets balance. That's what we are on about. A carbon tax, albeit by a different name, and sector mandates, favoured by supporters of this motion, would shred affordability.

Australia will achieve net zero emissions by 2050 in the Australian way, and that isn't through an expensive, job-destroying, ham-fisted, mandated, one-size-fits-all legislative fix, which is being promoted by the Australia Institute—of which Senator Lambie, in recent times, seems to have become the ventriloquist's doll. We will act in a practical, responsible way to reduce emissions while preserving Australian jobs and taking advantage of new opportunities for industries and regional Australia. Our plan is not a plan at any cost. It will not shut down manufacturing production or our exports. It will not impact households and jobs. There's a very straightforward message: you can either adopt this flawed, glib, green motion, or you can be clever and clean, which is our Liberal-National Party practical approach in this policy area.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Green, unfortunately we've run out of time for the debate. I wish you a happy Christmas.

Debate adjourned.