Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026
Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (16:31): We're anticipating a bad summer for bushfires. I ask the assistant minister to commit to going to the regions at the end of the summer and explaining to those Australians who have just lost their home how this government can possibly justify its active, ongoing and generous support for the fossil fuel industries which are driving the escalating human and economic cost of climate change.
Our reefs are bleaching, our forests are burning, our seas are choking with algal blooms and our communities are bearing the brunt of extreme weather events, but over the forward estimates this government proposes to spend five times more on fossil fuel subsidies than on environmental protections and climate resilience. Australia is the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world.
We continue to expand our fossil fuel extraction and export industries. In fact, this government supports them with subsidies of over $14 billion every year. The government has announced inadequate targets, but it doesn't intend to legislate them.
To date, it has never legislated a policy which will actually force emissions reductions. Other than via some dubious land sector accounting, we haven't significantly reduced our domestic emissions since 2005. The Safeguard Mechanism allows our biggest polluters to buy offsets instead of actually decreasing their emissions.
We don't accurately measure or enforce emissions standards or limits on highly polluting industries, and, in those instances where underreporting is identified, our environmental protection agencies, such as they are, generally fail to act. The great stupidity of our climate policies is exemplified by the billions of dollars we spend on conservation efforts for the Great Barrier Reef and for Macquarie Harbour while we actively facilitating the expansion of the industries which are responsible for their degradation.
In the same week that the government released its terrifying national climate risk assessment, it approved the North West Shelf extension, the most polluting project in the southern hemisphere. This brings us to the transport industry. According to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, transport emissions actually increased by 0.5 per cent in the year to March 2025.
This was driven by record consumption of road diesel and domestic aviation fuel. Transport accounts for over 20 per cent of our national emissions. It will become the largest source of our emissions by 2030.
That trajectory is utterly incompatible with our climate targets and demands urgent intervention. At the moment EV sales are stuck at less than 10 per cent of new vehicles sold, which puts a serious question mark over the Climate Change Authority's recent advice to the government that half of all cars sold between now and 2035 need to be emission-free. Without a shift in how we move people and goods we risk undermining our national climate commitments.
Instead of the big build, our cities need slim-build, low-cost infrastructure which reduces emissions and improves health. It's a better model for urban Australia and it will be a more efficient allocation of our tax dollars. In my own electorate of Kooyong, the proposed Hawthorn to Box Hill bicycle path is a local solution with national relevance.
Strategic cycling corridors transform urban commuting. They link suburbs and business centres, and they connect integrated cycling networks. The benefits of the Hawthorn to Box Hill path to Kooyong residents would be substantial.
They would include safe, car-free commuting for thousands of residents every day, reduced traffic congestion on our major roads, lower transport emissions, increased physical activity and reduced air pollution, and the economic savings that we'd see with reduced fuel and vehicle management costs. The choices that we make in this parliament will shape Australia's environmental legacy for generations.
We have to stop subsidising fossil fuels. We have to redirect our precious tax dollars to clean energy, to conservation and to the preservation of our biodiversity. We need proactive and preventative investment in climate resilience and nature protection, and that has to include scaling up investment in active and public transport to have any hope at all of meeting the bare minimum 70 per cent emissions reduction by 2035.
This government needs to back up these targets with action.