Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Looking at the whole issue of climate change and the differing approaches of the Labor Party and the government, Labor’s argument seems to be that they believe and the government does not believe. The Labor Party’s approach, though, is a triumph of the symbolic over the substantial. The Labor Party’s policy on climate change for the last 10 years has been that we should ratify Kyoto. That would have no effect at all on Australian greenhouse gas emissions; not one molecule of carbon dioxide would that change.

Where has the Labor Party been in the last 10 years? Over the last decade, long before Al Gore won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, the Howard government launched Australia’s National Greenhouse Strategy. Since then, $2.8 billion has been set aside to fight climate change. This has resulted in an 87 million tonnes per annum reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2010—that is equivalent to a reduction of the entire emissions of the Australian transport sector. But there has been a whole raft of activity going on: $6½ billion of private sector investment into technological development looking at ways to address the problem of climate change. Why would we have done all of that if we did not believe that climate change was a serious problem that required addressing?

Global warming is one of the key challenges for this century, and any global response requires the involvement of all major emitters: the United States, China, India. So what has Australia been doing? We have got the $500 million Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, which is looking at things like leveraging private sector investment, carbon capture and storage, and solar power stations. Carbon capture and storage has great potential to sequester a large portion of our emissions. There is $200 million to reduce global deforestation; $100 million for the Renewable Energy Development Initiative; $75 million for the Solar Cities trial, including one in northern Adelaide; $20 million for the Advanced Electricity Storage Technologies Program; and $14 million for a wind energy forecasting program.

In addressing the issue of climate change, we need an Australian solution for a global problem. Australia has a specific resource profile. We are not the same as Europe but we are on track to meet our Kyoto targets, which a lot of other countries are not. What we need is a balanced approach— (Time expired)

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