Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had heard before I was elected to this House that Canberra was another world and I realised last night as we discussed the environment legislation that it is actually a parallel universe. This is a world that operates in the mind of the Prime Minister, a world in which, in the face of all of the evidence about global warming and all of the evidence in our own country of rising temperatures and increasing drought, climate change is just not worth worrying about. In John Howard’s world, the parliament of Australia can do exactly what it did last night: it can debate the central piece of environmental legislation—409 pages of it, plus an explanatory memorandum—which does not even mention the words ‘climate change’, let alone set out a strategy for Australia to do its part in combating it. It is a world where climate change is not just ignored but also deliberately written out of federal environmental policy.

After parliament last night, I went back to the hotel and watched the news and I was transported back to the real world—an actual physical planet in distress and a world in which the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was released and debated around the world. In that world, climate change is here. In the real world, it is here now and requires urgent worldwide action if real economic disaster is to be avoided. In this world of the Stern review, leaders around the world respond with urgency. But, back in Howard’s world, a world that he imposes on this nation—

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