STATEMENTS BY SENATORS – Fossil Fuel Industry

Over the weekend, there was the extraordinary news that an Australian government is wishing for and planning for the loss of over 60,000 jobs in Australia. The energy minister, Chris Bowen, over in Brazil, without any communication to the coal and gas workers of this country, has signed up to an agreement which says it wants to go towards ‘a just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels’. There are 64,000 people who work in the coal and gas industries in this country, and there are hundreds of thousands more who rely on those industries for their livelihoods. Your Labor government, which professes to support workers, has signed in Brazil a death warrant for the jobs in those industries. They have done so with just 24 other countries. We signed up with Austria, Belgium, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Luxembourg, the Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Nepal, the Netherlands, Panama, Spain, Slovenia, Vanuatu and Tuvalu. These countries represent less than 10 per cent of the world’s GDP. Why have we signed up with such a small number of countries to be out of step with the rest of the world? None of those countries is in the top 15 of our trading partners. Why are we joining with those countries and then letting other countries in our region, our trading partners, take our coal and gas to supply jobs to their countries? Why would we seek to shut down our nation’s second- and third-largest exports? It’s not just the workers here. These exports and these industries support the wealth of all Australians. The government now, as I said, is signing a death warrant for our second- and third-largest exports, with no plan to replace them with any other thing. The government’s plan for net zero is a plan to make all Australians poorer.