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

Then we have the response to AP6. Senator John McCain—perhaps the next Republican President of the United States—said this when it was released:

The [Asia-Pacific] pact amounts to nothing more than a nice little public-relations ploy. It has almost no meaning. They aren’t even committing money to the effort, much less enacting rules to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said this:

This pact has no power for legal restrictions. It is a complement to the Kyoto treaty, not a replacement.

The Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pierre Pettigrew, said:

When you want to complement something, you recognise that the real substance is somewhere else.

That is right. No-one opposes new technology; of course we support that. The question is how you drive that new technology. It is a triumph of hope over experience to suggest that you get new technologies applied without market based mechanisms or without regulation. We support market based mechanisms to drive that change through.

In evidence of that is that in the United States, when the funding debate for the Asia-Pacific pact came on, at first they got zip. They got nothing; they got knocked back. Then, in the end, when this was a bit embarrassing for Australia and the push started, they got $52 million to support the pact in 2007. This is the alternative to the Kyoto protocol! Billions of dollars are involved in the protocol, and they got $52 million. The truth is you need push and pull: the push of new technology and the pull of the market to drive it through. That is why you need strong action.

The work undertaken by ABARE and released by the government at the climate pact showed that emissions would increase by 80 per cent by 2050—that is under their scenario—when we know that there is a scientific consensus that we need a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. Climate change is real and the threat of dangerous climate change is also real. What Labor would do is cut Australia’s greenhouse pollution by 60 per cent by 2050. We know that, if you have a target, it is like a one-day cricket target: you do not bat out the first 30 overs; you send out Adam Gilchrist to get some runs on the board early because it makes it easy to get to the target later on. That is what the business council’s Global Roundtable on Climate Change has said. That is why they have called for early action.

We would ratify the Kyoto protocol. We would significantly increase MRET. We would introduce a national emissions trading scheme. We would have a climate change trigger in the EPBC Act. We would have specific policies to drive change, such as the green-car challenge to introduce a hybrid car being made here in Australia. We would make every school a solar school. We should be the silicon valley of the solar energy industry.

What is happening with this government? Where does it stand? It is increasingly isolated. Yesterday in the Sun newspaper in London the front page was ‘Go green with the Sun’. It said:

Man the lifeboats. Will your town be underwater if global warming takes hold?

You could log on and find out exactly what the situation was.

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