Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was very interested to hear the comments from the earnest member for Flinders trying to chastise the Rudd Labor government for the supposed negative consequences of the introduction of the cap on the solar panel rebate. I must say that when I was listening to the member for Flinders, and knowing his earnestness about the issue of climate change and global warming, it sounded like a case of ‘he doth protest too much’, because the more one heard the more the hypocrisy was so evident.

I notice the member for Flinders is now engaged in very earnest conversation with his colleagues, but I do want to say a little about the history because I think it is very important. We have a group of newly elected members in this parliament and a smiling former minister for industry at the table. I will discuss some of the comments that were made.

What we need to understand is that, for all of the period of the Howard government, there was a decided lack of attention to one of the most serious issues, if not the most serious issue, facing the globe and our nation. It was a decade of inaction, it was a decade of scepticism and it was a decade where earnest members like the member for Flinders must have been mightily embarrassed about the nonsense that we heard from that side of the chamber when they were in government.

Let me just give you a taste of what they were saying. I will share. Just less than a year ago four members of the then Howard government now in opposition—two are still here and they are so surprised they did not all get back—dissented in a parliamentary committee report that was looking at the issue of geosequestration. Do you know the reason for the dissent? The grounds in their dissenting report were that the majority report was, ‘One-sided in assuming climate change was the result of human activity.’ Can you believe that? They said—and the member for Flinders would have been very embarrassed; yes, he looks up very sheepishly—‘Whether human activities are disturbing the climate in dangerous ways has yet to be proven.’ This was a year ago. They went on in the dissenting chapter and used the word ‘fanatics’ to refer to those who believed that human activity caused global warming.

But perhaps the most extraordinary claim in that dissenting report, signed by four members of the backbench of the Howard government, was that evidence of global warming on other planets, such as Mars and Jupiter, made it unreasonable for humans to take pre-emptive action on planet Earth. You have to ask: what planet was the coalition on, what planet did they inhabit then and what planet are they inhabiting today? Quite frankly, the member for Flinders would be well advised to spend his earnest time educating his side of the chamber on the science of global warming, instead of coming in here and reading a litany of sins allegedly committed on this side of the House.

But please do not think it was just backbenchers who did not understand the science of climate change. I see at the table the former minister for industry, the member for Groom. We all recall the impact that Al Gore’s memorable documentary An Inconvenient Truth had on our community. In fact, as I argued previously, community opinion was well ahead of the Howard government. Do you know how the then minister for industry described it? He said it was ‘just entertainment’.

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