The reserves of hypocrisy within the Australian Greens party know no bounds. As I often comment, if only we could capture their hypocrisy and convert it into electricity. It would be the ultimate source of renewable power. It is infinite in its supply. Here we have an urgency motion from the Greens saying that they don’t want any money from fossil fuels to fund sports in Australia.
At every election that I’ve known in my time in this place, the Greens policy platform—which can’t even be calculated on modern computers, according to the former Treasury secretary Ken Henry—has been funded by extra taxes on fossil fuels. The only way that they can pay for their political promises is from the funds of the coal and gas industries. If there weren’t coal mines and gas fields in Australia, the Greens would have massive, massive black holes for their crazy plans for high-speed rail all around the country and for health care for everybody, no matter the cost—which we can’t afford. Some of the plans that the Greens have are good things—I’d love to give health care to everybody—but all of them, in the Greens policy platform, are funded by fossil fuels.
We have a motion here today in which the Greens are trying to deny this funding to other people—to Australian sports that struggle. A lot of sporting codes in Australia struggle to make ends meet. The high-profile ones do alright, but netball has been struggling. The Greens are trying to deny sports access to funding from fossil fuels but not themselves. If it weren’t for fossil fuels—if we were serious about this motion—how would we fund our hospitals? Because most of that is coming from our coal and gas industries. We just had a budget that was handed down where a $50 billion increase: not the total amount, but a $50 billion increase came from higher coal and gas prices. We fund our public services in this country thanks to these large export industries. Coal is our biggest export; gas is our third-biggest export. The two together are 40 per cent of our nation’s commodity exports. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be able to fund ourselves. Certainly the Greens wouldn’t be able to fund themselves without fossil fuels.
