Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Over the last 11 years, the 1995 and 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the 2003 Australian guide to the science and potential impacts of climate change, the 2005 Climate change: Risk and vulnerability report and the 2006 Stern report have all stated what this year’s United Nations climate change report told us—that we have a massive climate change problem on our hands and we have to act now. For the last 11 years, the Howard government has denied climate change and delayed taking any action. It has presided over $89 million in unspent programs over the last year and allowed a soaring level of greenhouse pollution to go unaddressed. I repeat: a staggering $89 million set aside to address climate change over the last 12 months has not been used to deliver these programs. This goes beyond irresponsible; it actually borders on the criminal. In fact, between 1998 and 2006, the government underspent its climate change budget by a staggering 36 per cent.

But this spending shortfall is hardly surprising from a Howard government full of climate change sceptics. The Australian public might be alarmed to know that the Howard government has funnelled twice as much taxpayer money into self-promoting advertising campaigns as it has spent tackling Australia’s soaring greenhouse gas pollution. What a complete and utter disgrace! We know that the Howard government has spent $4.1 million in the last week alone on advertising to rebadge Work Choices and $1.7 billion over the last 11 years on government advertising. The Australian public can quite rightly ask: what sort of priorities does this government have? The answer is: to put its short-term goal of getting re-elected ahead of the long-term health and viability of our nation and our planet.

We also know that the Howard government is planning to send every Australian household—eight million of them—a brochure on climate change, together with a letter from the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has refused to reveal how much will be spent on this government direct mail campaign charading as Liberal Party pre-election material. But one thing is certain: it is going to be a very thin booklet and a short letter from the Prime Minister, because the government is shirking its responsibility to actually do something about climate change. After initially claiming he did not believe in climate change, but then faced with party polling, the Prime Minister suddenly became a climate change realist. The Minister for the Environment and Water Resources this year claimed he was ‘committed to early action on climate change’. It is a bit late.

The budget revealed extraordinary underspending across 11 separate climate change programs. This government has no hesitation in rolling out multimillion dollar taxpayer funded advertising blitzes within days of announcements but cannot deliver its own climate change programs. Four of the programs that were not fully delivered involved Australia’s clean energy industry: the Solar Cities program, with $17 million underspent; the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, with $50 million underspent; the Renewable Remote Power Generation Program, with $14.1 million underspent; and the advanced electricity storage technologies program, with $4 million underspent. On top of all this, this year’s federal budget also failed to deliver on climate change. There was not a mention. The climate change budget is less than 0.1 per cent of GDP and declining over the forecast period, contrary to the environment minister’s claim that Australia ‘leads the world in the fight against climate change’. The budget will not create new Australian clean coal jobs. The budget will not build a strong Australian clean energy industry. In fact, it is a setback for Australia’s clean energy industry—and it is a disgrace.

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