Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Heritage, the Arts and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say that a matter of extreme public importance is the fact that we have the failure of this government to implement effective climate and water programs. In the budget address-in-reply last year Mr Rudd, in what was one of his first major speeches as Leader of the Opposition, very tentatively said, ‘Well, yes, we need to deal with the challenge of climate change and the water crisis before the costs of inaction become too great.’ Now we are looking for the Rudd government action. There have been a few months of Rudd government now. We had a lot of expectations built during the campaign that this government would be serious about climate change and water. What has it done? Very simply, it has signed Kyoto—a very easy thing to do.

In government, we the coalition led the climate change umbrella group with the minister of the day, Robert Hill. We introduced as an issue carbon sequestration through vegetation into the whole Kyoto debate. We also, as leader of the umbrella group, tried very hard to bring in the developing nations to the whole Kyoto agreement arena, knowing that, no matter what the developed nations did, their efforts would be completely subsumed by the emissions from the developing nations over a very short period of time. We knew it would have been dead easy simply to sign Kyoto and look as if we were serious. We knew it was much more important to use our weight to change our own domestic economy. We had a coal dependent energy driven economy that we had to manage very carefully while bringing ourselves to achieve the Kyoto target. We made the point in the international community that Kyoto was not good enough without the developing nations. That is what we did, and we achieved international acclaim for that stand.

We introduced the first Greenhouse Office, for example—the first in the world funded with over $1 billion. We made, as you are aware, such a careful response that our economy continued to thrive. We had employment grow through that time. We had new industries come to this country and invest with security, knowing that the hands on the wheel were steady. They knew that we understood climate change but would balance it with the needs of the economy. We also, during our period of office, funded the largest and most significant natural resource management program this nation had ever seen. It was called the Natural Heritage Trust. We also, several years later, introduced the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality, the NAP.

As we speak, there are about 15 regional catchment management authorities staring down insolvency and having to sack many workers because this government has refused to say anything at all about the future funding of the Natural Heritage Trust. Come on; it cannot be that hard. We had a multibillion-dollar program that was right throughout Australia. We know that it did enormous good in terms of biodiversity protection and water quality protection. Minister Garrett, you cannot organise yourself to tell the Australians who delivered this program on our behalf what you are going to do with it. These catchment management authorities, who delivered this program on behalf of us and our state colleagues, are, as I said, staring down insolvency. Read about it in the ANAO report just delivered. They are having to sack their workers, presumably because the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts has not got around to thinking about it. Or perhaps he just does not understand.

Let me say, too, that we introduced the National Water Initiative. It has been referred to by my colleague the member for Calare. We understood the failure of Federation, where we had four state governments, a territory government and the Commonwealth presiding over a dog’s breakfast of different water laws, different water allocation systems, different property rights—all of them in there—trying to manage one ecosystem. Successive Labor governments at the federal level had never tackled this Murray-Darling Basin problem, and the wall-to-wall state Labor governments in the basin have continued to use that basin in a profligate way, not dealing with the overallocations, not dealing with our National Water Initiative in a proper way when we put it on the table. In particular, the government of Victoria said, ‘It’s a good idea, but we’re not signing up.’ Mr Rudd, I have to give him credit, did say—

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