Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

A local debate was organised last week so that residents of my electorate could come out to hear what their candidates thought about climate change and what they propose government should be doing to address it. I, the Greens and the Democrats attended the debate. It was interesting—and further evidence that apparently this is not important to many members of the Liberal Party—that not only did the Liberal candidate not attend the debate but also apparently they could not find anyone in the South Australian Liberal Party to attend in her place. Not only did we not have any South Australian federal Liberal members, we did not have any South Australian federal Liberal candidates. Instead, they decided to fly across the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs to represent the Liberal Party at this local debate in the electorate of Adelaide. From this we can deduce that they have decided to pull out the big guns—although I do not think that is likely to be the case; I think they had a hard time finding anyone from the South Australian Liberal Party who cared enough about climate change to come and tell the constituents from Adelaide what they proposed to do about it.

This is yet another example that this government and the Liberal Party do not see climate change as important. In contrast, climate change is the biggest environmental, economic and moral issue of our time. This is something that we have argued again and again within this place. Federal Labor has a concrete plan to tackle climate change at a number of levels—at the international, national and local community levels. It is only under a Rudd Labor government that Australia will be able to make the impact that is required to make a real difference.

On many occasions in this parliament, I have expressed my dismay at this government’s lack of action and I have outlined a number of measures where they have missed opportunities to address this crucial issue. Today I do not propose to do that again. Instead I would like to outline our alternative—our policies to address climate change at the international, national and local levels. At an international level, most importantly, Labor is committing to immediately ratifying the Kyoto protocol. The world already has a functioning carbon trading scheme in place and Australia has been left behind. We would rectify this. Also, Labor has plans when it comes to aid expenditure. Federal Labor is committed to working with Australia’s neighbours to develop and implement climate change adaptation plans to minimise the impacts on our region. This will include an increase in aid expenditure of $150 million over three years to fund initiatives in our region. At a national level we have plans for carbon emission targets, for substantially increasing the mandatory renewable energy target and for introducing an emissions trading scheme. We have announced our $500 million green car partnership and we have made a number of announcements about clean coal initiatives. We have also made announcements on energy efficiencies.

At a local level the Labor Party has committed to helping households by providing 200,000 homeowners with low interest loans of up to $10,000 to install a range of energy and water efficiency measures themselves. The member for Kingsford Smith was with me in Adelaide when we made announcements about solar homes and plans to make Australian homes go solar. We have a plan on this side of the House. (Time expired)

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