Greens Leader Adam Bandt MP and QLD Greens Senate candidate Penny Allman-Payne have announced the latest Greens policy to support jobs and development in coal regions as coal is phased out in the coming decades. 

The Greens are announcing their plan to create Green Metals Australia in Townsville today, driving $5.9 billion of investment and coordinating strategic development of the critical minerals and green metals processing and manufacturing industries. 

Greens Leader, Adam Bandt, has responded to the IPCC report on climate impacts and adaptation released overnight as well as the latest Australian emissions data, slamming Liberal and Labor for their commitment to 114 new coal and gas projects.

To stop coal communities collapsing, every coal worker should have a decade of generous financial support, including wage subsidies to assist in moving to paid employment in new industries including renewables, minerals mining and green manufacturing, retrain, or take an early retirement, Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt MP has announced today.

Greens Leader Adam Bandt MP says the closure announcement of Australia’s largest coal fired plant shows why Australia urgently needs a credible climate and energy plan.

Origin Energy has brought forward closure of the NSW Eraring power plant, one of the most polluting in the country, by seven years to 2025.

Despite this build up of announced coal closures before 2030, the government’s own projections that they took to Glasgow show another one to two further coal plants closing in the next eight years, which the government won’t tell us - or coal communities - about.

Greens Leader Adam Bandt has expressed disappointment at Labor’s capitulation to Scott Morrison’s plan to give $600 million in public money to Snowy Hydro to build a gas-fired power plant that experts say we don’t need.

In 2021 Labor said the plan looked like “a cynical attempt to pick a fight on gas and continue the climate wars, or to reward the major Liberal donor who owns the Kurri Kurri site.

The Greens also said non-binding ideas of converting to green hydrogen down the line are a fig leaf for new gas infrastructure. 

Greens acting Leader, Nick McKim says the confusion and mismanagement of the pandemic on a Federal level is symptomatic of a Government led by people who want government to do as little as possible.

The Morrison-Joyce ‘small government’ neoliberal ideology has contributed to failures on quarantine, vaccination rollout, aged care and massive pressure on state run health systems.

The Greens today are calling on the Government to ensure the UK-Australia free trade agreement upholds environmental standards, labour rights, human rights and includes a First Nations trade chapter.

Yamatji-Noongar woman and Greens spokesperson for Trade, Dorinda Cox said advancing human rights, protecting workers and our environment should be at the heart of how Australia engages in free trade agreements. 

The Greens today rejected Labor’s ‘take it or leave it’ approach to climate, saying people wanted parties to work together on something as important as climate, and that now that the likely reality of a power-sharing Parliament was dawning on everyone, Labor should not let their idea of the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Lines attributable to Leader of the Greens Adam Bandt MP:

“Liberal and Labor now seem to agree on one thing, which is that the Greens will be the most powerful party in the next Parliament. 

At an event last night to mark the 10th anniversary of the carbon price being legislated, Greens Leader Adam Bandt - whose victory in the seat of Melbourne led to the establishment of a Multi-Party Climate Change Committee that developed a world-leading suite of climate policies - has released modelling showing the carbon price was operating so effectively that had it not been repealed, the Liberals weak 2030 targets would have been met in 2020, a full decade early.

The Greens say today’s report that more than 98% of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral reefs have suffered bleaching is a damning indictment of the Morrison Government’s climate inaction and exposes the sickening cynicism of its campaign to keep the Reef off UNESCO’s “in danger” list earlier this year.

Greens deputy leader and Queensland Senator Larissa Waters said:

“Climate change and pollution have already killed off half of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral cover, endangering this precious natural asset and the 60,000 jobs that rely on it.