Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

After a decade of denial and thumb twiddling, the renewable energy transition is happening in earnest. Managed properly with robust, transparent and early community engagement, the prior and informed consent of traditional owners, worker protections and careful consideration of its environmental impacts, the energy transition will lower our climate emissions, provide reliable and cheap energy for centuries to come and lead a renewal of regional Australia. I can tell you that my own community of Gladstone in Central Queensland, which still bears the scars of fossil fuel boom and bust cycles, is incredibly excited about its bright future as a renewable energy hub.

Those watching proceedings in this place over the past couple of days would have been treated to the somewhat surprising spectacle of coalition senators expressing shock and dismay that some energy projects may have an adverse environmental impact. I for one am delighted that, after years of not giving a flying fox about biodiversity, the destruction of the reef or species extinction, the coalition seem to have finally come to their senses. They are of course correct that large-scale projects of any kind carry with them a variety of risks, which is why the Greens have long been calling for an overhaul of our broken environment laws. I expect that, with their new-found concern about sediment run-off and native vegetation loss, we can count on the coalition's future support for a more robust environmental protection regime.

As newly-minted environmental activists, my Senate colleagues may also be dismayed to learn that the extraction and burning of coal and gas, which they have championed and defended for so long at the behest of their fossil fuel donors, is the primary driver of runaway global heating. Welcome to the environmental movement, comrades.