Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week the Australian Electoral Commission published political donations data for the 2020-21 financial year, and guess how much the fossil fuel companies gave to the Liberal, National and Labor parties? More than $1 million. There's no doubt that dirty donations from Woodside, Chevron and Mineral Resources are influencing WA's second-rate climate policy.

In 2020-21, Woodside donated $232,000 to the Liberal, National and Labor parties. In return, they received a green light from the WA government to go ahead with the climate-wrecking Scarborough gas project. The Scarborough project will do irreversible damage to the Murujuga rock art and the Seven Sisters songline. It will also release 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere over the next 25 years.

Chevron donated a total of $74,650 to the Liberal, National and Labor parties. Chevron's WA gas plants are responsible for releasing millions of tonnes of emissions into our atmosphere every single year. In fact, Chevron's Gorgon gas project, the world's biggest attempt at a carbon capture and storage project, has been a big, expensive failure that continues to leak huge amounts of pollution.

Mineral Resources, a lithium and iron ore company, donated a whopping total of $222,400 to the major parties. It's no surprise that the Mineral Resources plan to develop the oil and gas basins in WA are out of line with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.

At a time when we need urgent climate action we have government handing out blank cheques to big corporations and billionaires to enable these climate-wrecking projects. The WA gas industry is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in my home state. If we add up the current and proposed gas projects, WA is on track to emit 41.6 million tonnes of CO2 every single year. That is equivalent to nearly half of our total emissions each year.

So how did we get here? It's clear that the millions donated by the fossil fuel industry to the major parties every year has influenced their continued support for coal and gas. The WA government will tell you that major oil and gas projects like Scarborough will create jobs. What they won't tell you is that the oil and gas extraction industry employs less than one per cent of WA's workforce. In fact, the WA government, in seeking to create jobs for Western Australians, is better off supporting literally any other industry than the gas industry.

As long as there's big money in politics we will see fossil fuel companies setting climate policy in this country. But time's up. People can see the urgent climate action that is delayed because the Liberals and Labor take millions in donations from big coal and gas corporations and the billionaires who own them.

So what will the Greens do about it? For starters, we are the only party to plan a ban on all political donations from the coal, oil and gas industries. We will cap all other donations to $1,000 per year and we will limit the amount that political parties can spend on their elections. We will stop the revolving door of ministers and advisers moving from politics directly to the fossil fuel industry. And we will establish a national integrity commission to hold all politicians accountable. The Greens have a model for a strong corruption watchdog that has already passed here in the Senate, spearheaded by my colleague Senator Waters.

Establishing a federal anticorruption commission in this term of government is a pledge that was made by this Prime Minister at the last election. The big parties have voted against our reforms because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. But, in a balance of power after the next election, the Greens will push the next government to reform election funding, clean up politics and achieve urgent action on climate change.