Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I will start with some comments on the parliamentary secretary’s rather extraordinary response. I note that when he spoke about the context he accepted with good grace, I must say, land clearing as being the reason why that has occurred. I might note that the only reason we will get anywhere close to meeting our Kyoto target is the decisions made by the New South Wales and Queensland Labor governments. And when the government says that we are going to meet the target of 108 per cent, we should bear in mind that we had an extremely generous target. We had the second most generous target in the world, beaten only by Iceland in the industrialised world of annex 1 nations. Iceland had 110 per cent and Australia was on 108 per cent. A last-minute concession to the Australian delegation was land use changes being included. I give credit to former senator Robert Hill on that delegation for achieving that outcome for Australia. Given that we achieved that generous outcome, for us to then not ratify Kyoto and to withdraw I think serves to rub salt into the wounds of the fact that we are an international pariah, along with the United States, when it comes to industrialised nations taking leadership on climate change.

With regard to our renewables, the parliamentary secretary is certainly right that our base was higher than the rest of the world’s, but, then again, we should have been the Silicon Valley of solar energy. We were extremely well positioned a decade ago to take advantage of our position in renewables. The rest of the world—with places like China working off a base of almost zero—is just storming straight past us. That is a tragedy. I draw his attention to Mr Zhengrong Shi. He was educated in Australia at the University of New South Wales and ANU and is now the fourth richest Australian in the world. He is a dual citizen. His company is called Suntech, and he is worth $3 billion. That gives you some idea of the opportunity that is there in this industry.

I ask the minister: given that a number of ministers in the government have said that they support a price signal for carbon emissions and that it is an important component, why is it that that price signal will not be introduced immediately? Surely the parliamentary secretary agrees that price signals are there to drive technology. You do not wait for the technology to be developed before you put the price signal in place. It seems to me to be fundamental economics that that is the case. If the government will not support a national emissions trading scheme, when it speaks about a price signal, is it speaking about a carbon tax? Because that is the other form of price signal that you can have. The Labor Party has made its position quite clear—it supports a national emissions trading scheme.

Ministers have also spoken about the need for reduction targets, and I note that the ABARE figures have been proudly quoted. They show Australia completely overshooting the mark and achieving nothing like the 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050 that I have heard the parliamentary secretary and certainly the minister repeatedly say is necessary. So isn’t that an up-front concession of defeat? With regard to the climate change pact, isn’t it the case that the United States has rejected funding of the climate pact through the congress and, in fact, that Australia is the only country that is currently funding the climate pact?

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