Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

Regrettably, the member for Flinders has brought nothing new to this debate on climate change, despite the fact that the tempo of information and dialogue about global warming and the challenges posed by global warming continue to increase. As the member for Grayndler pointed out to the House, that is now recognised unanimously by scientific communities that are recognised for prudence and, more importantly, by those parts of the media community who can see that this is not something that has been dreamt up, that the sceptics have got it wrong, that the science is clearly in. It is a double-jeopardy situation for the government here, really. They are trying to pretend that it is not really a big problem, and then they get up and spend a lot of time in the House telling us what they are doing about it. It either is a big problem and you ought to be doing more about it, or, as some of your members have said in the past, it is not really that much your problem—in which case, why the speech?

Fact 1: Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are of a very high order—we are amongst the highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Fact 2: we are going to continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions in the foreseeable future, but particularly up to 2050. Fact 3: there is a majority of scientific consensus that there will be temperature increases, called global warming, which will occur in that period of time, up to 2050. Fact 4: Australia will be contributing to that global warming. They are the facts that the member for Flinders has chosen to ignore in his address to the House on this matter of public importance.

There are many lawyers in this parliament, including the Prime Minister, who might know that the definition of ‘duty of care’ is: a legal obligation to avoid causing harm. This duty arises, according to the Australian Legal Dictionary, where the harm is foreseeable if due care is not taken; and the type of harm, not its extent, must be foreseeable. The Australian public, the international scientific community and citizens worldwide know that there is a type of harm that will be caused by global warming and that it is foreseeable. So we have reached a point in our history where a failure to meaningfully act on a national and international crisis—which global warming is—where the projected damage that flows from climate change is foreseeable, represents nothing less than a failure of a duty of care that the government owes to its citizens. With the prospect of an average rise in global temperatures of up to 5.8 per cent by 2100, with corresponding sea-level rises, and no sign of real action by the Howard government, Mr Howard as Prime Minister is simply failing to discharge his duty of care and his government’s duty of care to all of us.

In this parliament we become properly consumed by the stem cell debates, and we will speak about those in the coming weeks. We will weigh the prospects of new scientific discoveries and the prospects they hold for improving health against some people’s firmly held philosophies. The opposition will continue to focus on the need for the government to invest in targeted ways in infrastructure and education and we will criticise the Howard government because it has not done enough of that. But, frankly, these debates are overshadowed by the profound challenge of global warming. Global warming is casting a giant shadow across this parliament and the next, and it is casting a shadow across our way of life, literally. The rhetoric and the half-formed arguments we have just heard from the member for Flinders, and the policies that the government puts up to justify its position on the climate change debate, are an insult to us in this House. And they are an insult to the people that we have been elected to serve.

I suspect that next year’s International Panel on Climate Change will provide more factual research material which will expand both our knowledge and understanding and also our alarm about the prospects of global warming. In fact, there are very few sceptics left in the known universe. It is true that the government benches are a sceptics refuge—and it is a bit scarier to be over there than in a wildlife refuge! But dangerous climate change poses a real threat to Australians who live on farms that face drought and to those who live in big cities and face drought—and it seems that the government does not get it. It will not take off its ideological blinkers. It will not say out loud that it has got it wrong. What it really spends its time doing is abusing others who disagree with it, countries and senior politicians from our most important ally, such as the former Vice-President of the United States. This failure to say out loud in this place, ‘We recognise that the climate crisis is on us and we will now do something seriously about it,’ is jeopardising our national interest—and it renders this government unfit for the stewardship that it has to exercise in shepherding our country through this very difficult time.

If you cannot see the stark evidence of icecaps and snow cover shrinking, of lakes evaporating, of warming trends and temperature graphs heading upwards; if you continue to view these pictures through the prism of mad, singular scientists or neoconservative op-eds; and if you continue to ignore the photos and images placed in front of you courtesy of the former Vice-President of the United States in his film An Inconvenient Truth, then you are simply blind. You are blinded by your ideology. When you ignore, as this government regularly ignores, the pleas of our Pacific neighbours already struggling, as the member for Grayndler pointed out, to contend with rising sea levels—they are building small walls around their vegetable plots to stop the seawater coming in—then you are deaf to the pleas of our neighbours who face climate change and global warming now. And when you dress up your arguments you are exposed because it is all about self-interest; it is all about sectional interest. The government cannot escape its ideological straitjacket. When you do that, you are not taking the national interest into account at all.

The Prime Minister maintains Australia will suffer economically if we sign the Kyoto protocol. But his government is willing it seems, and the Prime Minster is willing, to continue to accept that our future economic growth will be partnered by future increases in carbon dioxide emissions. For Mr Howard the natural order of things is more economic growth, more pollution and more CO. But there is another way to do it and that is what smart countries do—they invest in renewable energy. They take serious measures to reduce greenhouse emissions. They develop strategies, policies and products to harness the growing energy-efficient economy that is building rapidly worldwide.

Last week another report on the Great Barrier Reef—our natural and economic treasure that generates billions of dollars per year and employs thousands of Australians, which represents one of the great natural wonders of the world and is a magnet for our tourists—pointed out, as reported in the Courier Mail on Friday, 8 September under the headline, ‘Warming a reef threat’:

SCIENTISTS believe an increase in average temperatures of just 1C could cause coral bleaching on up to half the Great Barrier Reef.

A 2C increase ... 80 per cent of the reef ...

And as scientists simply say:

Mainstream scientific opinion is that the rapidity of change is the problem.

That is what we are facing now: an acceleration of global warming identified by Vice-President Gore, confirmed by scientists worldwide and particularly in Australia. The government refuses to embrace a national trading scheme. It refuses to increase mandatory renewable energy targets. In the midst of the worldwide boom in renewable industries—these are the industries of the future which are already experiencing rapid growth and to which our economic fortunes are tied—the government has no clean energy investment strategy in place. This government will not permit Australian innovators and industry to get the opportunity to build into this market. In fact they are preventing them from doing it, and those that want to do it actually have to head overseas.

Most scandalous of all for a national government is that we have a national trading scheme which is being run by the states. To their great credit the states have taken it up but it will be extremely difficult for them to maintain and run a national trading scheme without the assistance of the Commonwealth. Seeing as this has been identified as the most important environmental issue we face, and that one way of dealing with it is through the market which this mob on the other side of the House supposedly believe in, what is the problem? What is the problem with this government?

The Country Womens Association said it very simply to this government: we need the development of renewable energy sources and that development is required now. But as the world goes for wind and solar, Mr Howard embraces nuclear. As California, Sweden, the UK and others set ambitious targets and time lines for reducing greenhouse pollution, the government vacates the playing field altogether. In fact, as things stand in Australia in 2006 with the most important environmental challenge coming upon us, the Howard government has no national climate change action plan, no time lines, no targets and no policies to significantly reduce our greenhouse pollution or slow our energy demand. So if the Australian people want more droughts, vote for John Howard. (Time expired)

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