Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility Amendment Bill 2026

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (12:42): I move the Greens' amendment on sheet 3685: (1) Schedule 1, page 3 (after line 5), after item 1, insert: 1A At the end of Part 2 Add: 8A Prohibited financial assistance (1) Financial assistance must not be provided under this Act if it would: (a) directly finance the extraction of coal or natural gas; or (b) directly finance the construction of pipeline infrastructure primarily for the extraction of natural gas; or (c) directly finance the logging of native forests.

(2) In this section: native forest does not include a plantation. plantation means an intensively managed stand of trees that is created by the regular placement of seedlings or seed. I will speak briefly. The Greens are not going to support this bill unless this amendment is successful, because we are of the view that public money should not be spent on coal and gas—on fossil fuels—and on native forest logging.

Last year I went to the Great Northern Conference, and, at that conference, I heard from a vet who lives in Tennant Creek. She talked about the year that they'd experienced, a couple of years ago, where they had the number of hot days that they will continue to experience if the global temperature rises by more than 1.5 degrees. She talked about the impact that that warming had had on that community.

That term—where they had day after day after day of extreme heat—became known as 'fight term' in the local school, because kids couldn't get cool, tempers flared and they had fight after fight after fight. The consequence of that, at the end of the year, was that there was a mass exodus of teachers from that community. In addition to the teachers leaving, other people then left because they were partners of those teachers.

So they lost other critical workers in their town. The following year, they had temperatures that were high, and, again, it massively decimated their community. That community has not recovered from a summer of temperatures consistently warmer as a consequence of global heating.

Yet we have a bill here that seeks to continue to fund the very types of projects that are contributing to that heating. The northern parts of Australia should not be treated as a sacrifice zone on the altar of coal and gas corporations' profits. Continuing to open up and invest in coal and gas and oil projects in northern Australia is condemning the people of northern Australia to an unliveable future.

That is the science. Those are the facts. The Greens are pleased that we have worked with the government on other pieces of legislation to exclude public money going to coal, oil and gas, and native forest logging.

That needs to happen in the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility as well. So the Greens are putting forward this amendment to give the Labor government, the government that says that they believe in climate change and climate action, the government that says they believe we need to move to a renewable energy future, the opportunity to make sure that public money through this facility does not continue to go to coal, oil and gas companies.

The people of Tennant Creek already know what it's like to live in an unliveable future due to climate change. The people across the north deserve to have a liveable future, not to be treated as a sacrifice zone. So I implore the government.

If you genuinely believe that climate change needs to be actioned, if you genuinely believe that we shouldn't leave the people of the north out on a limb, sacrificed on the altar of coal, oil and gas corporations, I implore you to support this Greens amendment.