Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

There are 174 countries heading in one direction who have ratified the Kyoto protocol and there is Australia heading in the opposite direction. The minister said in that same MPI:

We are leading the world on energy efficiency.

The National Framework on Energy Efficiency was established in 2004. There has been very little action since. The lights are off; no-one is home. We do not lead on energy efficiency in cars; we do not lead in planes; we do not lead in kitting out our homes; we do not lead in commercial buildings or in virtually any other area. The minister said:

We have also been a world leader in changing the standards for stand-by power ...

Will the government now support Labor’s policy of a 10-star appliance rating system and greenhouse and energy minimum standards?

When the cliches fail to take root—and after 11 years of recycled lines and cliches it is not surprising that they have not taken root—then the government simply goes for spin. The recent APEC meeting is a very good case in point. Labor welcomed the APEC deliberations. We welcomed the attention given to climate change, but careful scrutiny of the declaration reveals that, again, the action and the words produced by the Prime Minister and the government do not match what was agreed at APEC itself. The Prime Minister claims that the APEC Sydney declaration was an important milestone. That is very wide of the mark. In fact, the Prime Minister set his own benchmark for the APEC meeting when he said:

The Sydney Summit will be one of the most important international gatherings of Leaders to discuss climate change since the 1992 Rio Conference.

But, at the end of the day, there was no substantial international agreement. The result fell well short of the Prime Minister’s hype.

See this speech in context