MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator HODGINS-MAY (Victoria—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (17:40): Well, here we are. It's another day in this alternative reality that is the Senate in the Australian parliament. People elect us to come into this place to fight to protect them and to fight for their communities, but instead we have these corporate parties who are more interested in going in to defend coal barons and who are more interested in protecting corporate profits than they are in standing up for the Australian people, who are staring down the barrel of a terrifying El Nino and who are going to court to fight for their communities and to fight for a safe climate future.

We had a member of the Labor Party describe the Greens as the 'extreme left' for wanting a safe planet for our children and for future generations and for fighting for ecosystems that are on the brink of collapse. There is nothing extreme about that. The only extreme thing is two parties that are absolutely wedded to coal and gas and are failing to take the sort of climate leadership that the Australian public deserve and expect.

We have seen the High Court make it incredibly clear that you cannot ignore emissions from Australia just because they were burned overseas. The High Court is doing its job, the communities of the Hunter Valley are doing their job and the young people are doing their job. I had the AYCC, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, in here today, desperate to get a meeting with decision-makers about the sort of planet they're going to inherit.

But they got fobbed off to staffers. Do the coal lobbyists get fobbed off to staffers? Do the gas industry?

Tomorrow we're going to see the Labor Party, another corporate party, going in to bat for the gas industry by introducing their watered down, weak gas reservation policy. It's a policy that they initially said would be '20 per cent' but that has now been rewritten by the gas industry to 'up to 20 per cent', which could mean a big fat zero. Well, we say enough of this corporate protection racket these corporate parties are running and more action for climate and for the communities who voted us in to keep them safe.