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

by leave—I move:

That this House:

(1)

censures the Prime Minister for:

(a)

refusing to acknowledge the reality of climate change;

(b)

failing to join the international community in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol;

(c)

ignoring the need to develop a long term comprehensive plan to combat climate change; and

(d)

failing to act while Australia is exposed to the catastrophic economic and environmental impacts of climate change detailed in the Stern Report; and

(2)

demands that the Prime Minister adopts Labor’s systematic climate change plan in the national interest.

The Prime Minister has had about seven different positions when it comes to the issue of climate change and what ought to be the country’s response to it. When you take a look at what they had to say about Kyoto—when they signed Kyoto, I might say, and negotiated it—you see that what the government of the day then said was full of pride. It was full of pride in the fact that they had got themselves, as opposed to their European counterparts, a very substantial benefit in the form of being permitted to actually see an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from Australia.

The Prime Minister signed Kyoto in the full knowledge that a number of countries were, as he described them, annex 2 countries, not yet committed to any particular set of targets, though anticipating that, subsequently, targets would cover all of them. He signed it in the knowledge that any emissions trading scheme and all the other arrangements placed, or contemplated, and targets contemplated within the framework of Kyoto would have different application in some countries from applications in others. He signed it with all his ministers saying that the targets that were being suggested for Australia contained no problems as far as our minerals industry and our manufacturing industry were concerned and that there were a set of targets agreed by the Australian government that would be eminently achievable within the sorts of constraints that the government considered economically perfectly acceptable in terms of providing employment opportunities in this nation.

Something happened after that. It was not the position of China and India; that had not occurred. It was not the issue of the particular achievement or otherwise of the targets associated with our European counterparts. The thing that changed after that was that he had a discussion with a new administration in the United States, and that is a tragedy.

Paradoxically, the one piece of advice I have seen recently by George Bush, in some way or another related to this debate, that the Prime Minister chooses not to follow was the one piece of good advice that George Bush has given—and that is that he wishes to see no other uranium enrichment plants established anywhere on earth, because of his concerns about the proliferation impact of it. The Prime Minister does not mind standing up here, in question time after question time, challenging that piece of advice from the United States. But he does mind standing up and committing himself to his original position. Even though he gets up in this place and lays out this panoply of horror—for Australian workers, he says—in the same breath the Prime Minister says, ‘Of course we’ll achieve our targets.’

The two go together. If on the one hand the targets are going to create that unemployment, which seems to be his argument, why would you put it in place? Despite the fact that the United Nations has now tumbled to the fact that we might not achieve those targets, are you still insistent that we will? And are you still insistent that achieving it is okay? Prime Minister, you cannot have both. You cannot on the one hand have your argument that the targets created under Kyoto create enormous problems for us, and on the other hand that you are going to achieve them—and without creating those problems. You do not know what you are doing on this, Prime Minister. You are all over the place.

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