Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Lyons is right. Anyone who has had a look at this area in any depth—at the white paper of two years ago and at the responses by the Prime Minister to this over time—knows that not enough is being done and in relation to what is being done there is certainly no great urgency. A good part of that, one might think, is because of the fundamental point of view that is taken by the Prime Minister about this issue and whether or not much can be done.

Al Gore is in Australia today—on the fifth anniversary of the attack on the twin towers—to promote his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which, along with other members and senators, I just saw in the last sitting. It is a fantastic promotional vehicle for him in terms of another potential push for presidential nomination from the Democratic Party in the United States. But it is not, as this government’s Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources said, simply or purely entertainment. That is the most dramatic misreading I think I have ever seen of anything. I just wonder whether the minister has seen this film at all. It is a compelling piece of work. One of the misconceptions that is put—misconception No. 5, as Al Gore calls it—is this:

There is nothing we can do about climate change. It is already too late.

He regards this as the worst misconception of all because if you deny most of it and if you look at most of the government’s responses we effectively have pure denial—not complete unadulterated denial, but as close to it as you can get. The Prime Minister in question time today told us, as is his wont, that there may be climatic change—and we may have some proof for that—but the way to fix this is not to do what everybody else in the world has done, except for the United States and Australia: that is, sign up to the Kyoto protocol because the Kyoto protocol will not do enough and because it will not do enough we will not sign up to it. We will have a fundamental argument that the developed nations would be carrying more of the weight and, as the Prime Minister has done in this very paper again, say that too much of the burden would be on Australia.

What is most indicative about the arguments put by Al Gore is that the kind of pillorying of him by the Republicans as a presidential candidate and, previous to that, as a vice president is mirrored here by this Prime Minister’s response to Labor and its approach to these matters and to the environment. What they did was take Gore and try and demonise him—put a stamp out to say Al Gore is so out there, a crazy leftie; he is off about all these environmental things. They said that the core business of the United States is just ensuring the other side of the coin—economic prosperity—and that they will do this by continuing to do things the way they have been done in the past. He just missed becoming President of the United States by a fraction—a very small number of votes in Florida. Since President Bush has been in office we have seen that he has not addressed the fundamental problems that Al Gore started to talk about many years ago.

The film lays it out very simply: his motivation in this area and the manner in which he has approached it have largely been driven by his experience as a science student in the United States under the leading proponent of the theory of what was going to happen in the future with the exponential effect of the increase in greenhouse gases in our environment and the fact that they would be trapped by the upper layers of the atmosphere. As that quantity of greenhouse gases produced largely by our industrial activity was trapped over time, you would get a cloud effect—an increasing and denser cloud—far fewer of the sun’s rays hitting the earth would be reflected and you would get a gradual but inexorable increase in the amount of heat that is retained.

Utilising some of the work that has come from the CSIRO as well as other leading groups in climatology in the past couple of years, what Gore demonstrated—and demonstrated to great effect—is that this effect is true and it is real. What he laid out when he first went into the Senate, when he first had hearings in the United States congress on these matters and their potential effect, has been demonstrated so conclusively and so compellingly that you cannot just gainsay it and say, ‘There is plenty of time to do something about this,’ which is part of the other key point.

The only significant measure that we have seen in the past year is through the United States and China, India and a few other users coming together and saying: ‘Kyoto is not enough.’ Most of the people who are involved in this either did not sign up to Kyoto or, having done so, have said that more needs to be done. They identified that you need not only the Kyoto protocol but ‘Kyoto protocol plus’ to actually have a go at this fundamental problem. They found that you really need to drive at this through new technology and new approaches to fuel use in order to decrease the burden of greenhouse gases on this planet. We need to use innovative ways to get a resolution of this problem and a diminution over time compared to the current rate.

In fact, if the Kyoto protocol were put into place fully and all of its measures undertaken, we know that would do part of the job of reducing greenhouse gases significantly, but it will not do the whole job of dealing with the current projection that science is telling us we need to consider. In Gore’s book, he makes it very simple: what is the fundamental target? The target is a 60 per cent reduction in our greenhouse gas production. His argument and the argument that is put forward in a leaflet that accompanied this book from the Australian Conservation Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund, titled Australia’s Inconvenient Truth, is that it is actually possible to reach that by a series of measures. Gore had a pie chart at the end of his presentation which indicated that a series of measures could, in fact, achieve that by 2050 if we have the will and the determination. As a former Vice-President, Gore has argued that that will and determination have been absent in the United States, and he gave Australia a mention in passing. It is true: they have not been evident here.

What is in the Prime Minister’s paper to address this? A number of relatively small changes—again, small, iterative changes—and really no fundamental desire to take this up and really run with it. There is a complete refusal to mandate a whole series of areas. I think we do need some mandatory policies in this regard. I think we need to look at the situation carefully.

The problem we have got was recently dramatised by Tim Flannery in his book on this area. A comparison is that it will not be a problem for us in geological terms. In the past—100 million years ago—the earth’s climate was very different. We have had periods of intense greenhouse activity in the past and there is indeed some really good scientific work that has recently been done, demonstrated in a TV program called The Future is Wild, which looked at the world 100 million years hence. They argue that the world will suffer a massive greenhouse effect in some ways dwarfing what it is currently facing.

The reason that those greenhouse conditions will be generated and that the effect they will have on the climate will be so great will be the continuing movement of the Australian continent and other continents. In 100 million years forecasters expect that the Australian continent will effectively be a high plateau that will smash into North America and help to create a whole mountain range as high as 12,000 metres. The Himalayas are about 5,000 metres high. I doubt that in 100 million years we will be around as a species. In geological time you can have a glacial approach to these matters. The earth will survive. It will renew itself. But it will be enormously different.

In our time—because we do not live in geological time—we actually need a pretty good approach to this and pretty quick action. Vice-President Gore argues that we have a window of about 10 years. The Prime Minister has proposed that the government will spend some money on one of our greatest resources—liquified petroleum gas. They will give 1,000 bucks to people as an incentive to buy LPG fuelled cars—that is, if they have already come off the production line. We have a massive resource in LPG. That resource has not been properly tapped and driven. This is an area you could mandate more. You could do a great deal more with government fleets—federal and particularly state owned fleets. You could start the process by getting this thing running hard.

Secondly, there is ethanol. The discussion in this paper is about the distribution of ethanol. The Prime Minister finally came back to say that 10 per cent ethanol is okay. In this paper he takes a whack at the shadow minister for primary industries, resources, forestry and tourism, Martin Ferguson—extremely ungenerously—and at a number of other people within the Labor Party. Then he says, ‘It is only the coalition that has ensured this.’ The Prime Minister only took the step of going back to the ethanol debate and getting an agreement on ethanol and its use because the shadow minister came to the government and said that it was time to fix this.

The original approach did a great deal of damage to a number of people in the industry. Labor’s fundamental approach was that there was one person and one company that was benefiting from those measures. A fundamental argument was being used. There was a broader debate on that. I know how deeply affected that company was by that debate. I know how deeply affected people who had petrol stations were as part of that. It happened in my electorate, which is why I was involved in the discussions. But the fundamental thing here is that you actually need an agreement on both sides. We have had that and we can push it forward.

But, where the government is providing money to help with the implementation of these measures, it will not mandate 10 per cent ethanol. I see no reason whatsoever not to mandate that 10 per cent of ethanol in order to get this up and running and driven along by whoever is in government. The Prime Minister is capable of doing it and he will not do it because he believes that you should just leave this open to choice. We could do a small part of what has already been done in the United States. We could do a fraction of what has been done in Brazil. All of those members from regional areas know what the capacity is. Henry Ford worked out in 1925 that you could use just about any source of vegetable matter on this planet to produce alcohol and therefore fuel. We could do a great deal more. This energy paper just does not do enough.

Further, we have the question of petroleum exploration. The Prime Minister rightly points out that, at a time of rising prices, we have a historically low level of exploration being undertaken worldwide. Australia properly needs to really get this moving very quickly. It is a correct thing to do to use Geoscience Australia’s work in order to look for a great deal more. But there is not a single sentence uttered in this paper—not even a syllable—about shale oil and what Australia has already done with that. We have massive resources in that area. It could be exploited. The government has done nothing to help that along. Gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids are important technologies that have not yet been addressed. A great deal more needs to be done. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mrs Gash) adjourned.

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