The Greens are thrilled to announce educator, NGO consultant and local mum Sonya Semmens as the candidate for the federal seat of Higgins in the next federal election.

Higgins is set to be a hotly contested battleground at the next federal election, with electoral redistribution picking up Windsor shifting the balance towards the Greens, and threatening a key Liberal-held seat.

Labor’s belated recognition that Scott Morrison’s 2030 climate targets aren’t good enough is a move in the right direction, said Greens Leader, Adam Bandt, but he called on Labor to join the Greens in setting science-based 2030 targets now, to help put pressure on Scott Morrison before the Glasgow climate summit at the end of the year.

Labor’s move comes as Scott Morrison has already announced that he is considering ‘updating’ the government's 2030 climate targets before Glasgow, suggesting government targets may be lifted but by an insufficient amount.

Kids and teenagers must be included in the government's national vaccine targets, Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said today. Young people deserve protection and without high rates of vaccination of the whole population, we will never get out of rolling lockdowns.

The Prime Minister’s current targets exclude children and most teenagers. The PM’s 80% target is really a 65% target of the whole population.

Australia’s biggest electricity consumer, stationed right next to a major coal field, is getting out of coal. The announcement comes as nations are rallying around the world to put an end to coal.

The Greens called on Scott Morrison to exercise real climate pressure on China and other countries by lifting our 2030 targets and stopping selling them our coal.

Quotes attributable to Greens Leader Adam Bandt:

“Tomago’s announcement is huge. The biggest user of electricity in the whole country is saying no to coal.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report makes it clear the government’s current 2030 climate targets amount to a death sentence for Australia.

This major report exposes the stark reality that without emergency action and an increase to  2030 targets we will head past the 1.5 degree goal in the Paris Agreement, potentially within a few years.

The report must now force action from the government to lift Australia's ambition by doubling to tripling our 2030 targets, and Labor must stop letting the government off the hook with its silence on 2030 targets.

The Greens have slammed the Government’s response to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Report, which reveals temperatures are set to hit the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold by the early 2030s, a decade earlier than anticipated.

Shooting past 1.5 degrees will mean that we will lose the Great Barrier Reef, have widespread and sustained drought, extreme weather events, and catastrophic bushfires will become the norm.

The Greens have called on National Cabinet, who have so far agreed in principle to the Prime Minister’s latest vaccination plan, to demand it include children.

Greens Leader Adam Bandt, says growing evidence shows that vaccinating younger people is vital to reducing COVID spread and deaths.

The Greens say the absence of children under 16 in the latest vaccine rollout plans shifts baselines and according to recent studies risks thousands of deaths.

Greens Leader Adam Bandt, pressed the Prime Minister in question time today as to why he is not including children in his vaccination target.

Leaving children out of the measured cohort effectively changes the baseline, and if that means we’re targeting closer to 65% of the population, rather than 80%, a study by the Grattan Institute suggests that would likely mean thousands of deaths.