Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister is completely confused. He told his party room today, Mr Speaker, that they should not be—and I quote him, apparently across the airwaves—‘mesmerised by one report’. So what the Prime Minister is saying to his party room is: ‘Don’t worry about the science; worry about the perceptions. It is just a political problem. Wait until next winter and it will go away.’

I want to say a couple of things at the outset of this debate, because not only is this a censure motion; it has the positive proposition that the government ought to commit itself to what we have released in the blueprint we put forward on climate change. We are absolutely fair dinkum about climate change. We will fix this situation for our kids. We will be enthusiastic participants in the international arrangements for this. We will be enthusiastically giving all our potential industries that are capable of exploiting this commercially a go. We are going to be absolutely determined to ratify the Kyoto targets; to set real emissions targets; to establish an emissions trading system; to invest in renewables, not in reactors; and to fast-track clean coal technology. We are going to do all those things and be good international citizens and good supporters of Australian industry as a result of that.

The simple fact of the matter is this: we are an inventive nation when it comes to the possibilities of renewable technologies. We are an inventive nation when it comes to working through how we make our fossil fuel industries environmentally friendly and emissions-target capable. We are prepared to do that. And we also understand that if we are going to be taken seriously internationally, if we are going to be able to participate in the international trade in this, our companies ought not to have to go under a Fijian flag or somebody else’s flag—a nation which has not only signed up to the protocol but also ratified the protocol—in order to be able to export that excellent product. But that is what the Prime Minister does.

It is an extraordinary thing that those small projects they have announced so far have basically been dependent upon emissions reduction targets set by the states. They have been able to go ahead and they have been economically viable because of what the states have done. If they had relied on what the Commonwealth has been prepared to sign up to to this point, none of those projects would have gone ahead. If you take a look at that wonderful achievement of the company that was so proudly announced by the Prime Minister with his minister in China recently, that same company, Roaring 40s, is saying, ‘Actually, we’re going to have to cancel projects in Tasmania and South Australia—projects worth over $500 million—because the Commonwealth will not sign up to additional mandatory renewable targets here.’

All of what I have been saying so far of course relates to jobs, job opportunities, innovation in Australian industry and the rest of it. But you have to take a look at the Stern report to understand fully what is at stake here. It is an extraordinary document. The new thing it presents, off the most modest of the calculations the science now presents to us, is the economics. That is the new thing in the Stern report; the science in the Stern report is not new. What it conveys is this: if all the rest of the globe is as short-sighted as this Prime Minister, if all the rest of the globe demonstrates the fossilised attitudes that this Prime Minister has, if all the rest of the globe is not prepared to step out and take an initiative—and of course it would be desirable that everybody signed up to it, but somebody has to make a start—and if all the rest of the globe adopts that position, we will be facing, on reasonable calculations of the economic effects, the impact on the globe of the combined effects of the two world wars and the Great Depression. What would that do for jobs?

We know what that would do for jobs. We already know something about the economics of this because there are other reports around, including reports that the Prime Minister has received, which say that in all likelihood the impact of these changes of climate on sea levels is going to produce a situation where 90 per cent of the coral reefs of the Great Barrier Reef go and where Kakadu goes, salted up. That is the result, again, of a most modest set of calculations based on the science of global warming. In Queensland that means 200,000 tourism jobs. Heaven knows what it means for tourism jobs as far as the Northern Territory is concerned!

And then we see the calculations that he has. The Stern report is more global, although we do come into its ambit for consideration. We see the calculations about what impact it has on rainfall in this country. The Prime Minister has got reports which indicate something like a cut of 25 per cent in rainfall in the south-west and south-east corners. Whatever the Prime Minister may think about this, there is a growing conviction amongst our farmers that, while they are experiencing droughts in ways we have experienced them in the past, the intensity, the breadth and the frequency of them have changed. That is what is happening now around this nation. They have changed as a product of forces beyond those which have been immediately calculated with regard to our geography; they have changed as a result of global warming. There would not be a farmer in this nation who disagrees with me, but you cannot resolve the water problems confronting this nation unless you resolve the consequences of global warming. There would not be a farmer in this nation who disagrees with this proposition.

Thanks to this Prime Minister’s short-sightedness, we are already 10 years behind. He has failed our children and our grandchildren. Frankly, this Prime Minister does not have a plan for their future. Why would the Australian people believe him now when suddenly he says climate change is real, when everything that he has been saying—insulting us in this place about it over the last couple of months—is going to be retracted and he will now reposition himself in a slightly different direction, suddenly paying lip-service to the notion of climate change? Everyone in this parliament knows that this Prime Minister’s heart is not in it. Every one of us knows that. That is why he could say things before the political urgency came upon him. People could talk theoretically about what might happen in Australia and the planet 50 years from now—he is not interested in that. Well, the rest of the world is. The rest of the world and the rest of this country is. The rest of this country understands that this Prime Minister’s heart is not in it.

We need decisive national leadership; we do not need this Johnny-come-lately to the climate debate. He has one answer that he brings into this parliament, and that is his answer in relation to nuclear power. Let me make this amply clear: there is neither economic nor environmental requirement for nuclear power in this country. There is no requirement for it. The Prime Minister is dredging up a debate of his youth, from back in the 1960s when it looked like a new and hopeful technology. The Prime Minister is extraordinarily capable of compartmentalising in his mind two different debates as though the two do not interact and the two do not matter.

Right now there is a massive global concern about nuclear proliferation. There is an understanding and a fear around the globe that new nuclear powers—whether or not they say their nuclear systems will be devoted entirely to domestic purposes—will begin a nuclear arms race. There is concern on the part of the United States—

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