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

They are the three key recommendations of Stern for what he describes as the world’s greatest market failure that has led to dangerous climate change. Today, once again we have seen some more one-off announcements. We welcome one-off announcements—they are good in themselves—but we cannot solve this problem with a command economy approach. We cannot solve it with bureaucrats sitting in Canberra and picking winners. It is an absurd proposition.

You need to harness the power of the market and establish mechanisms so that you drive the whole economy towards the carbon constrained model. We know that the system at the moment is not working. We know that the figures released this week by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change showed that Australia’s greenhouse emissions rose by 25.1 per cent between 1990 and 2004. It is clear that when Kyoto comes in—which it has not yet; the first commitment period begins in 2008—and when land use changes are taken into account what will occur is that some of that figure will go down, but the projections are horrific for the government.

Energy emissions increased by 34.7 per cent between 1990 and 2004. Stationary energy emissions increased by 43 per cent; transport emissions by 23.4 per cent. The only reason that the figure goes anywhere near being positive—and it is still a massive increase—is that land use change and forestry emissions, due to decisions of the New South Wales and Queensland Labor governments—nothing to do with the Howard government—dropped 72.5 per cent. Australia’s emissions, according to the Australian Greenhouse Office report released in November 2005, are projected to rise 22 per cent by 2020.

One of my favourite parts of An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary by Al Gore, is that, just like the Stern report, there is a message of hope. There is a warning of danger, a challenge to governments to take up what is necessary, but an optimistic projection if we have the courage to make the decisions that are needed. As Al Gore has pointed out, the Chinese expression for crisis consists of two characters: the first is a symbol for danger; the second is a symbol for opportunity. What we are getting from this government is all the danger combined with the loss of opportunity, the loss of investment that should be occurring and isolation from the massive trillion dollar emerging market in renewables in our region. This is a government that is showing that it simply is not up to governing in this century. It is a government that literally has been fossilised in the past. It is an abrogation of its responsibility to this generation and to future generations not to have a comprehensive plan to avoid dangerous climate change. (Time expired)

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