Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

In his argument today, the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources has certainly relied a lot on the term ‘inconvenient truth’. But I think the inconvenient truth and the rather sad truth that we have heard from the minister is that this is a minister who is now circled by people on the government benches who are in a state of denial about the seriousness of climate change or, at best, are very sceptical. This saddens me because the minister and I spent some together on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage, which made a number of very significant recommendations in the Sustainable cities report, one of which was picked up in the announcement made today by our shadow minister. If you do not believe me, Minister, let me quote a few of the words used by your colleagues about this very important global issue.

Senior ministers, like the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources, are in an absolute state of denial about the seriousness of this issue. Can you believe that a senior minister of this government dismissed the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth as ‘just entertainment’? The same minister said on a TV appearance: ‘Carbon dioxide levels go up and down and global warming comes and goes.’ No wonder he admitted on that same program, ‘I’m a sceptic of the connection between emissions and climate change.’ Is it any wonder with an attitude like that displayed by the minister for industry that we have had a government paralysed by inaction on the most serious issue facing not only our nation but the whole planet? In fact, public opinion is way ahead of this government and this minister.

The Stern report followed on from the showing of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. For the first time, I do not think anyone with any rational appraisal of the issue could ignore its very comprehensive analysis and the alarm bells that it rang. This morning I was very fortunate, along with my shadow minister, to have the opportunity to hear directly from Sir Nicholas Stern at the Press Club. I looked around the room and I could not see one government representative, one MP, at that talk—not even my good friend and colleague the member for McMillan. Sir Nicholas Stern reaffirmed today, in a very compelling way, that delay is costly not only in economic terms but also in terms of catastrophic consequences. He made the point that time is running out. He described climate change as the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. Something he said today really alarmed me. He said that, if we as a global community continue to deny this problem and do not take serious action, we face the possibility of a five-degree centigrade rise in temperature by the turn of the century.

That is just horrendous in terms of consequences. What does it mean? It means that species face extinction across the world. It means that we will have rising intensity of storms, fires, droughts, flooding and heatwaves—and the impact on people cannot be underestimated. We are already seeing in our Pacific neighbourhood the impact of rising sea levels on their fragile and vulnerable communities. As a nation with so much of our population on the coastal strip, the rise in sea levels can have catastrophic consequences for us as well. The cost of inaction will be a devastating environmental and economic outcome not just for our country but for the whole globe.

Despite what we now know and despite the science—which should not be contested by anybody and has in fact been reinforced by the most eminent scientists in the world in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—this government continues to obfuscate the issues. We heard it today in question time. The Prime Minister said, ‘We didn’t ratify Kyoto because it would place us at a competitive disadvantage.’ Very soon thereafter, the Treasurer admitted, ‘But we are on the way to meeting the Kyoto targets.’ There is no logic at all in saying that we are going to meet the target but we are not prepared to ratify an international treaty that commits us, along with the rest of the world, to trying to address this growing and serious problem.

When we first signed up to Kyoto—and it was this government that first signed up to Kyoto—we then said that it was a win for the environment and a win for jobs. So I cannot for the life of me understand how we can now have a totally different attitude when it comes to ratifying the convention. I find quite amoral the argument that we should not ratify because developing countries like China and India are not compelled to reduce their emissions in this first round of the Kyoto protocol. In fact, China and India have ratified the Kyoto protocol.

If the rich nations of the world are now contributing 75 per cent of global emissions, surely that imposes a moral obligation on countries like Australia and the United States—which have stood aloof from ratification—to take the lead, particularly when you consider that the countries that are being spoken about as not pulling their weight are countries that are trying to lift their populations out of extreme poverty. That is why they are referred to as ‘developing nations’.

If every one of the 158 counties that have ratified took this narrow view expressed by the Prime Minister and the minister—that we should not ratify because China’s emissions are growing and India’s are growing—we would have no global or international vehicle. Despite its limitations—and I accept that the Kyoto protocol is an imperfect vehicle—it is an expression of the fact that the whole global community thinks that we have to work in a constructive and collaborative way to address this problem.

The third argument that you hear constantly from the Prime Minister and the minister against ratifying Kyoto is that there is a cost involved in doing that. He maintains that there is a cost in jobs and in international competitiveness. But he never tells you the other side of the equation: that there are opportunities forgone. As an MP who represents a coal-mining region, I am very mindful of the importance of balancing this with economic and employment outcomes. It can be done in a very meaningful way. We are trying to address that through a very large investment in clean coal technology that our leader announced.

What the Prime Minister and the minister hide is the fact that many companies are leaving our shores precisely because they do not think that the government is taking this issue seriously. In answer to a question raised by my colleague the member for Melbourne Ports about a company called Global Renewables, the Prime Minister seemed to imply in his reply that they had moved offshore only because they had a good investment opportunity and a good commercial deal. This is what John White, the Chairman of Global Renewables, said about why he was moving:

We—

Australia—

are 10 to 15 years behind Europe. When Australia does get serious about renewables we will hopefully be able to come back.

That is the reason he gave for them leaving. His is not the only company that has moved offshore. Its offshore move follows the move of the Danish company Vestas. It closed its wind turbine manufacturing plant in Tasmania last year. We all know that the Australian citizen Zhengrong Shi left our country. He used his intellectual capacity to develop solar technology, could not get it commercialised, moved to China and is now a leader in solar technology. We know that the Roaring 40s company shelved two Australian projects to concentrate on their business in China. When the Prime Minister talks about the costs associated with Kyoto, he never tells you about the opportunities forgone. Opportunities for the creation of new jobs in the renewable sector are immense. The Stern lecture today comes on top of the documentary movie An Inconvenient Truth and the Stern report. They are alarm calls; they are wake-up calls. We do not have much time. We need to take this issue seriously. (Time expired)

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