Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) to a question without notice she asked today relating to climate change.

I want to state at the outset that the Greens are in good and productive negotiations with the government around the climate targets bill, but I did take the opportunity today to ask the government about their position on new coal and gas. My first question to Senator Wong was whether or not they will continue the Morrison government's policy of using public money to subsidise opening new coal and gas mines. Obviously we can have a debate about whether they should be opened, and we don't think they should, but I would hope no-one thinks it's a good use of public money to be opening new coal and gas mines when we are in the middle of a climate crisis and when this government says, 'We're too poor to do great things like lift the rate of income support, for example.' So I put that to Senator Wong, and I noted that the International Energy Agency has made it perfectly clear that if we are stick to 1.5 degrees of warming we can't open any new coal or gas projects and likewise if we are even to meet the government's 2030 net zero target, which is too little, too late, we still cannot open any new coal or gas mines.

Senator Wong, much to my dissatisfaction and dismay, seemed to be making the argument that climate change is not really Australia's problem, because those emissions from that exported coal and gas under an international accounting agreement are not on our books. I'm afraid the climate does not care whose books they are on, and it's a bit of a nonsense argument to say that we can open up new coal and gas mines and have no impact on the climate, simply because we're exporting that coal and gas. That argument didn't wash with me, and frankly I don't think it would wash with anyone else either. I tried to then get an answer to the question of whether or not this government will keep giving public money to open new coal and gas mines. Senator Wong did not answer at that point, so I pursued it again later.

But I also asked, given that the first duty of government is to keep its people safe, what government in its right mind would support opening 114 new coal and gas projects that are currently in the pipeline and awaiting approval. The response I got on that one was that those projects would be assessed under our existing environmental laws. I am an environmental lawyer, so I know what our environmental laws say. They don't have a climate trigger them. They don't require the climate impacts of a new coalmine to be considered when the minister is deciding whether or not to approve that coalmine. They are John Howard's environmental laws, which tells you all you need to know about how strong they are. So I'm afraid I'm not at all satisfied with the response that these new coal and gas projects will have to go through our environmental laws, because I know how weak they are and I know how few refusals have been issued in the 23 years of those environmental laws being in existence.

In my final supplementary I took the opportunity to ask Senator Wong again, 'Will this government keep giving public money to open new coal and gas mines?', because she hadn't answered it the first time, and then we had a very excruciating minute of Senator Wong making the ironically true point that there are so many different subsidies for coal and gas that she didn't know which one I was asking about and therefore she could not answer my question. How ironic indeed! That is true. There are so many different direct grants and different subsidies to coal and gas that it is hard to keep track of them. But our bean counters have done that, and in fact there is more than $11 billion in public money every year that is given to fossil fuel companies in subsidies, things like accelerated depreciation for capital equipment and things like cheap diesel fuel.

We are in such a crisis that we're going to have an austerity budget and we can't afford to raise the rate of income support, can't afford to give free childcare, can't afford to build enough affordable housing to help people and can't afford to fully fund schools and hospitals yet can afford to dish out $11 billion of public money every year in freebies to coal and gas companies, who are making the climate crisis worse and who are contributing to the cost of climate change. The CSIRO today issued a figure saying that by 2050 we will spend $39 billion every year in mopping up from extreme weather events. You want to make an economic argument about the climate crisis? Stop the fossil fuel subsidies and save the money in cleaning up after those devastating fires and floods that wreak so much financial but also emotional havoc on our communities and on nature. So I'm afraid we have a long way to go, and it seems that the fossil fuel companies are still in charge of the two big parties, thanks to the very generous political donations that they continue to make to both big parties.

Question agreed to.