Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The member for O’Connor intervenes again on the question of climate change and its impact on agriculture. Can I say to the honourable member that this government and many other members in this place take the challenge to agriculture fundamentally seriously. Take the Murray-Darling: for the last 10 years we have had inflows into the Murray-Darling 50 per cent below their historical average. The impact for Australian agriculture coming out of the huge food basin in the Riverina is massive as a consequence of this. That is the challenge we are seeking to deal with. Let all those opposite engage in some reality at the moment. This is a problem to be solved, not a problem to be ignored.

Moving to the other side of the question posed by the honourable member, which is the response—what you do and how you treat agriculture and how you treat food—I say to the honourable member that we are dealing with these fundamental shifts in the availability of water and with temperatures rising that also fundamentally affect the distribution of pests across Australia. It also impacts on your ability to grow in areas where it has been possible to grow particular crops in the past. That is the change which is occurring over time.

On the question of the inclusion specifically of agriculture within the CPRS regime, the honourable member will be familiar with what we have done, which is to defer such a decision until further work can be done as to the desirability of its inclusion in 2015. Secondly, the other measures that we are taking by way of mitigation—

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