ADJOURNMENT

Ms BOELE (Bradfield) (11:12): Two things happened recently. Last week, the Australian government hosted a climate conference in Fiji to help drive climate action and focus the world's attention on climate impacts in the Pacific. The week before that conference, the largest coal mine extension in New South Wales history was approved.

These two events happening side by side sums it up really. Australia says it cares about preventing climate change both at home and in the Pacific, but then it ploughs ahead with more coal and gas, with more of the very thing that is causing the supercharged heat we're expecting this summer and the Pacific Islands to sink beneath the waves. Tuvalu's prime minister has said that fossil fuel expansion represents a 'death sentence' for his country.

It's nonsensical and unconscionable that these two events—a climate conference and a huge coal mine extension—happened in such quick succession. But we can't simply chalk this up as a case of bad timing, because these kinds of clashes keep reoccurring. Last month, the PM attended the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau, where he signed a declaration reaffirming that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the Pacific.

But, just days before, his government celebrated the opening of a new fracking project in the Northern Territory's Beetaloo basin, which has the potential to produce about 10 per cent of Australia's current climate pollution. These kinds of clashes speak to the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Australia's climate response. The government wants to be seen as a climate leader and as a good neighbour in the Pacific, but it also doesn't want to do anything that upsets the coal and gas lobby, which has previously run very impactful campaigns against sitting governments.

Our coal and gas might be sent to other countries, but climate impacts don't stay overseas. They come back home to bite. A few months ago, the New South Wales government, based on research by Deloitte and the University of New South Wales, found that incomes in New South Wales were approximately $20,000 less per person than they would have been if they hadn't been experiencing the impacts of climate change.

Altogether, that's $180 billion lost from the New South Wales economy in 2024 alone. Whatever we export in coal and gas we import back in climate change; in fire; in flood, like the devastating floods in northern New South Wales last year; in higher insurance premiums that people in my electorate are feeling; in lower crop yields; lower productivity; and harder, poorer futures for our children and our grandchildren.

Of course, the flip side of all of this is that our future incomes are projected to be much higher if we do more to reduce pollution and stabilise climate change. The same modelling found that lowering pollution could save around $1,000, on average, in a New South Wales household's annual grocery bills by 2070. Building the clean industries of the future would generate thousands upon thousands of new jobs, far more than we currently have in the fossil fuel industry.

A few years ago, a research partnership between the University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, Princeton University and the Nous Group estimated that between one million and 1.3 million new workers will be needed to meet climate pollution reduction targets. People living in coal-producing regions like the Hunter Valley need job security. They understandably want to continue living, working and thriving in the communities that they've built over decades or even centuries.

But more coal is not the solution. It's a quick fix. When the government approves extensions to existing coalmines or new mines, it's handing communities a bandaid for a haemorrhaging, long-term structural decline in the coal market.

Instead, these workers deserve money, support and strategy to help them move from coal to new industries in the region. The largest coalmine in New South Wales history, the one that was approved by the state government a couple of weeks ago, is now sitting on the federal minister for the environment and water's desk for approval. He has a choice: approve it and make our futures harder, or reject it, support coalmining communities into new industries and set us on a new, safer, more prosperous and wealthier course.

It's up to him.