Wednesday, 9 February 2022

Climate change

Mr EDBROOKE (Frankston) (16:46): Speaking of listening to Victorians, I stand this afternoon to grieve, in fact to weep, for communities across Victoria and Australia, including my own in Frankston and greater Frankston, whose calls for action on climate change with Liberal opposition members and also federal Liberal coalition governments just fall on deaf ears.

I get around to a lot of schools in Frankston and have been a teacher in those schools too, and I can tell you now that there are children and there are parents who absolutely weep for the future because they see the science, they see the logic and they see scientists telling us that climate change is real and giving us advice. Yet we have people on the other side of the chamber and indeed in other states and federally who once again, much like with the COVID crisis, will not take expert advice, will not look at the data and statistics and instead turn a blind eye and say, ‘I know better’. Well, there is a bunch of people in Frankston and all over Victoria and Australia who know that climate change is real. They believe the evidence. It is irrefutable, it is logical and it is everywhere. I just do not understand what it is going to take and how many times we will have to have this argument about whether climate change is real. Certainly people on this side of the chamber in the Andrews Labor government know it is real, and we are listening to the people of Victoria and we are acting on that.

While I will go through some of the initiatives, policies and budget items that have brought Victoria to leading the nation as far as renewables are concerned, I think it is fair for communities to go back to, say, 2014 and through some of the electoral cycles to see what the opposition’s idea of climate change is and what the opposition’s policies on renewable energy and the environment are. I can take us all the way back to 2014. Maybe I was a little bit naive, but I thought every political party would have a stance, a policy or a platform on the environment, because in a place like Frankston—the most beautiful place in Victoria, I might add—Deputy Speaker, do not look at me like that, it is; Bendigo East is great, though—we have the beach and everyone is connected to that beach in one way or another. They know that with climate change happening and with the community changing we need to embrace that. It is not that hard. Our youth are crying out for us to do that.

It was very interesting to see in 2014 during the environment forum that they actually did not have a Liberal candidate turn up—there was just no interest in the environment—while there we were, as an alternative government at that stage hoping to be elected, with a whole raft of policies, which have played out and played out quite well. Again, they are bringing us to that national level and international recognition. We are running parallel with global trends on what to do about climate change. We are leading the nation—sadly, we are leading the nation. So why should the children that I see in my community be left with this mess, be left with a bunch of climate change deniers that would repeal everything we have done and leave them to clean up the mess in this house when they are older? Because that is what will happen if we see a Liberal opposition win government at the next election. Like I have said, the science is there. Much like the advice we receive on COVID and the many changing aspects of COVID, we have to be fluid. We have to react and respond, adapt and overcome, to the different advice we are given—and it is the same with climate change.

Now, the 2018 election, again, was one where—I had the member for Bentleigh just before steal a little bit of my thunder—we had come through a time where there were accusations that the state government closed down Hazelwood power station, ignorant of the fact that Engie, a French multinational that owned the Hazelwood power station, was divesting out of coal. Anyone on the opposition side, the doyen of financial politics, I guess, could have just looked at the stock market and seen that any ETF, any bank, were actually divesting out of coal and into renewables. And yes, at the start there was some bleeding-edge technology, but now most of it is leading edge and is becoming cheaper by the day. So the people who invested in that technology and the governments that invested in that technology have won.

But in 2018 we had a bit of a mismatch or a mis—I actually do not know what you would call it. I saw the David Speers interview with the candidate for Frankston, and I still do not know what I watched. But I would just like to go through that dialogue, which gives a bit of context about what the opposition bring to the party as far as their belief in climate change, dealing with renewable energies and making us the renewable energy capital of Australia, and also some comments from some people in the upper house about climate change and what it means to them and what it means to their community, because I am damn sure that those comments are not consistent with anything out in the community. It is very sad that you have got these people defenestrating themselves on this embarrassing opinion that climate change does not exist and that everyone in their community is telling them that. There is nothing that would suggest that. In fact it is the total opposite.

I remember being on a pre-poll line in 2018 with the candidate for Frankston, and we got along okay. We did not agree on everything of course and had a lot of different opinions on how Frankston should go and the future of the Victorian community, but certainly I did an interview with David Speers, and I gave him my point of view on what we should be doing locally with the environment and also in Victoria as well. But this does give a bit of an idea about how incoherent the Liberal Party strategy for climate change and energy policy actually was.

Mr Newbury: Deputy Speaker, I draw your attention to the state of the chamber.

Quorum formed.

Mr EDBROOKE: Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I do like more of an audience when I perform. So I will cut straight to the candidate for Frankston when David Speers was interviewing him on Sky News at the last election:

SPEERS: … there’d be a new power station paid for by the state—

LAMB: By the private sector, yep.

SPEERS: Oh, by the private sector.

LAMB: We’ll tender to the sector, whatever the market decides, we’ll tender out.

SPEERS: They can do that already, can’t they?

LAMB: Who’s that?

And this is where I think people in Frankston were getting very confused about the fact that we might have a new coal-fired power station somewhere on the peninsula.

SPEERS: The private sector can build a power station if they want.

LAMB: Well, they haven’t been allowed to under this government.

And it just goes on, and the member for Bentleigh did a great acting job of that excruciating exchange which made the news on various channels and was very embarrassing but I think wrote the book on the policy on the environment and renewable energy that the Liberals were bringing and the coalition were bringing to that election.

But there are also, to give context, some quotes I have from a member in the upper house, Mr Finn:

The election of President Trump in the United States was a clear, unequivocal statement from the people of the United States that they think climate change is nonsense, and that they have had enough. Indeed Australian people are saying exactly the same thing.

Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Deputy Speaker, it has barely been a minute and a half and the government has cleared the chamber pretty much already. I draw your attention once again to the state of the house. It is the government’s responsibility to maintain the quorum. If the government decides that it does not wish to be here, then the government should vacate the floor entirely.

Quorum formed.

Mr EDBROOKE: As I was saying, what we have seen from the opposition can be summed up in a bunch of quotes:

The election of President Trump in the United States was a clear, unequivocal statement from the people of the United States that they think climate change is nonsense, and that they have had enough. Indeed Australian people are saying exactly the same thing.

This is from a member of the upper house, Mr Finn. We also can see a quote from him that states:

What we are seeing is one of the great cons the world is yet to see exposed. It is staggering. I will not stand by and let these people get away with it.

Also:

When we talk about the damage of climate change, the damage is not to the planet. The damage of climate change is those who are what is known as global warmists, who promote this nonsense ad nauseam, and the threat that they pose is to other human beings—to families.

…

What we need in this state, in my personal view, is another coal-fired power station. That is what we need in this state. We have got more coal than we can poke a stick at.

…

Let us get ahead and let us stop with all this nonsensical climate change rubbish.

And that pretty much sums up the climate change policy and environment policy and renewable energy policy of the Liberal coalition.

Just to conclude in, I guess, my last 3 minutes of this contribution—and it is great to see so many people in the chamber—the opposition literally smashed the renewable energy industry with the Leader of the Opposition effectively banning wind farms. We might be the only state on the whole globe to do that. We drove the largest increase in renewable energy in Victoria’s history, and I am very proud of that. The opposition voted against Victoria’s renewable energy target, and the opposition leader promised to scrap the target if elected in 2018. We saw how that went; we got a number of marginal seats that were formerly safe seats. We created the first state-based renewable energy target, which has created 24 000 jobs and driven billions of dollars worth of investment, just like other nations. The opposition promised to use Victoria’s power contracts in hospitals and schools to fund construction of a new gas-fired power plant in 2018, and once again we saw how that went. We promised to power all government operations, including trains, hospitals and schools, with 100 per cent renewable energy, and we see trams going up and down Collins and Bourke streets today powered by almost 100 per cent solar energy.

We have heard about Hazelwood, but as the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change said today—and a big shout-out to the minister for environment, her department and her advisers—ABS figures show that power bills are at their lowest level in five years, having fallen by nearly 10 per cent in the last 12 months alone. The Australian Energy Market Commission expects Victorian power prices to fall a further 8 per cent over the next three years, largely due to the significant influx of renewable capacity. That is something that is reflected internationally. It is unfortunately something that is not reflected when my son uses his hairdryer on his mullet; that 8 per cent will probably be taken up by that energy use. But we have got an opposition who also voted against legislation to ban cold-calling and door-to-door sales of retail energy contracts and other dodgy marketing practices. It is the bane of many people’s existence around dinnertime, the call, ‘Hi. Is that so-and-so? I’m so-and-so’. We have banned that.

A member interjected.

Mr EDBROOKE: You just hang up on them? I used to give them to my toddler.

So whilst we lead the nation on climate change related policy, I stand here today and condemn any party, any people, any individuals that are bound to these arbitrary policies—made up, not based on any evidence at all, no data—and continue to embarrass themselves every day by defenestrating themselves and flogging this dead horse.

If I can speak for the youth in my electorate—that speak ever so loudly—they weep for the future. They hear everyday people talking about the fact that climate change is not real. They hear people talking about, ‘Oh, we don’t want renewable energy. We don’t want electric cars’. These kids, the youth, are going to end up with this problem. They want us to change it now, and this government is doing it.