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

I thank the member for Canberra for her question. I can inform the House that the Rudd government has taken a new direction to meet the challenge of climate change, a direction which takes responsibility for Australia’s sustainable future. It is a new direction which comes after 12 years of inaction from a coalition government that refused to take responsibility for Australia’s future and, even more clearly—after 12 months of setting out on this side of the House—it is a comprehensive plan to tackle climate change. This government is delivering on its commitments.

Let us be clear: Australia is extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts. Some members may have seen a recent edition of the respected journal Nature which reported the increasing impact that climate change will have on our environment, on the biophysical limits of the environment that we all have to live within. Just this morning we read that houses on the coast at Taree, in New South Wales, are facing mounting coastal erosion pressures. These climate change impacts are real. They affect us, they affect our environment and they affect our economy.

At the last election Australians were offered two distinct approaches for the future. In the international arena we had a choice between refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, thus being a spoiler in international climate change negotiations, and ratifying the protocol, which was the first official act of the Rudd Labor government. This gave Australians a seat at the negotiating table where we now, through Minister Wong and other ministers, play a significant role. We had a choice between a Prime Minister who previously said a five-degree increase in temperatures would be ‘uncomfortable for some’ and the Rudd Labor government, which accepts the science, listens to the experts and acts accordingly.

Australians chose between a Liberal Party with no target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the Rudd Labor government, which is committed to the target of 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050. On emissions trading, the Liberal Party’s predawn conversion was a scheme that the previous Prime Minister spent years blocking and then grudgingly accepted and which would have started in 2012. Under the Rudd Labor government Australians will be implementing in 2010 a scheme that we should have had years ago. Whilst they were talking down the science they were talking up the nukes, with Mr Howard’s nuclear power crusade and a commitment to repeal nuclear legislation and bring nuclear reactors to a suburb near you.

See this speech in context