Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. No government in the world is doing more today to put forestry on top of the climate change agenda. One of the great omissions of the Kyoto protocol was forestry. As a consequence, we now have the bizarre situation that Professor Tom Lovejoy spoke about in Australia only a few days ago that the Kyoto protocol is actively encouraging deforestation in tropical developing countries, such as Indonesia, where incentives are offered to produce palm oil and to grow other biofuel crops but no disincentives to reduce deforestation. We now have commitments from leading nations in the developed world to establish a global network to monitor forests and forest cover and emissions. That will enable, for the first time, the vast and growing pools of money available to abate CO emissions to be connected to sustainable forestry around the world. The Australian government is in the lead there and is developing a new approach to ensure that the new global arrangement—the new Kyoto, if you like—will be effective.

This government’s approach to climate change is based on effective results and on doing the hard work required to ensure that we get the economics right. We do not apologise for spending time to build the framework necessary in what will be the world’s most comprehensive emissions trading scheme to ensure that the economic implications, the implications for Australian families and businesses and the implications for Australia of the actions of other countries are fully understood. The government does not apologise for doing that work.

The Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was in Australia this week. Interestingly, he complimented the government’s approach. He said that informed debate based on rational thinking and rigorous analysis had to precede the rolling out of policies on climate change. Dr Pachauri said:

Otherwise one might come up with a lot of emotional and political responses that may or may not be the best, and I think in a democracy it’s important to see there is an informed debate in officialdom as well as in the public.

One would also have to look at the macroeconomic effects—will that result in a decline in jobs and economic output?

I am asked about alternative policies. The Labor Party’s policy on greenhouse is to set a massive target of 60 per cent for emissions cuts by 2050 regardless of what any other country does and regardless of the cost. It is a policy that is as reckless as it will be environmentally ineffective. We need not just a cut in Australia but also a massive global emissions cut, and the Labor Party has nothing to offer on that. It is a consequence of its climate change policies not being driven by economics or environmental science but by hard-left ideology. One need refer only to the remarks of the member for Kingsford Smith reported in the Age a few years ago when he said that every step forward in economic growth is matched by environment degradation or perhaps when he spoke to Liz Hayes in 1989—and this was the undiluted member for Kingsford Smith—and said:

We’ve got to overthrow one very important furphy and that is that we can continue with economic growth—

That is a furphy—continuing with economic growth. He went on to say:

Both of the parties talk about economic growth, but what we now know globally and nationally is that continued economic growth will ultimately mean continued destruction.

That is the genuine voice of the ideology that is informing Labor’s climate change policy. It is antagonistic to growth and economic prosperity and it will deny the poor of the world the economic growth they deserve. You said—

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