Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

RUDD, Hon. Kevin Michael, Griffith 11 3.18 pm Rudd, Kevin, MP 83T Griffith ALP Prime Minister 1 0Mr RUDD(Griffith—Prime Minister)(3.18 pm)—I welcome the opportunity for this debate on climate change and I am always taken when the debate begins with an intervention from the member for Sturt, who is on the record as saying that the coalition is the party of an ETS. This was not 20 years ago, not 10 years ago, not one year ago—it was just six months ago. That was last year, not this year. I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:That this House condemns the Leader of the Opposition for:

(a)

being a weathervane on climate change policy;

(b)

presenting today a climate change plan that is nothing more than a climate con job; and

(c)

a con job which does less, costs more, and will mean higher taxes; and

That this House reaffirms our commitment to take action to avoid dangerous climate change in the interests of this and future generations of Australians.”

If the Leader of the Opposition was going to engage in a debate about climate change policies and if you are planning a tactic like he has been planning today, you would have thought he would have been ready for the debate and engage in an exchange about his policy versus our policy, why his stacks up and why ours does not stack up. I listened carefully to his description of his own policy and, amidst everything else that the Leader of the Opposition said, there were about three, maybe four, minutes which were directed towards the plan he has released for the nation today as an alternative course of action. The rest was, let us call it, political rhetoric. If you are going to plan to engage in a debate in the House and if you are going to suspend standing orders to debate his plan versus our plan, let us have a debate about those alternative plans and their content.

On the future of climate change, three questions need to be asked. The first is: what is the science and do you accept the science? The second is: what are you going to do about the science, does it work, how much does it cost and who pays for it? And the third is: are you fair dinkum about the above or not? That is the absolute core of this debate. Let us go to the question of being fair dinkum and belief first. What underpins our entire discussion in this place is the fact that six weeks ago we were engaged in a debate in this place—and in the case of those opposite in their joint party room—where they were split right down the middle on this question. The majority of them voted for an emissions trading scheme. When it came to support for an emissions trading scheme, Mr Howard himself in May 2007 said:

It is fundamental to any response both here and elsewhere that a price be set for carbon emissions. This is best done through the market mechanism of an emissions trading scheme.

That was John Howard, Prime Minister, May 2007. That was the position of the Howard government. That was the position of the environment minister of the Howard government, the former Leader of the Opposition. That was the position of ministers of the Howard cabinet, including the current Leader of the Opposition. That was the position of the former Treasurer, Mr Costello. That was the position also of many other senior frontbenchers, who are now currently pretending they have a different position.

It was absolutely clear-cut that Mr Howard as Prime Minister, Mr Costello as the Treasurer of the Commonwealth, Mr Turnbull as the environment minister and Mr Abbott, when he was a member of that cabinet, all supported an emissions trading scheme for one reason: it was the lowest cost and most effective way of dealing with the challenge of climate change. Then it all changed. The reason it changed had nothing to do with policy. As the former Leader of the Opposition said of the man who succeeded him, ‘The political weathervane’—the current Leader of the Opposition—‘decided that the politics of this had gone wrong’, from his point of view. Having executed and supported every position on an emissions trading scheme known to man, suddenly he arrives on the Damascus road of having concluded it was wrong all along.

Underpinning this is the question of whether you accept the science. On the first test on the question of the science, we have the defining statement from the Leader of the Opposition, the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, that ‘climate change is absolute crap’. That is what he said—his words, not mine. He also reflects a view of Senator Minchin, a person of some influence within the Liberal Party, who was asked this: ‘What proportion of the Liberal Party are climate change sceptics and what do you derive from your discussions with them?’ Minchin said, ‘If the question is do people believe or not believe that human beings are causing or are the main cause of planet warming then I would say a majority do not accept that position.’

On the question of the science in this defining debate, let us be very clear about it: the Leader of the Opposition does not accept the science. He says it is absolute crap. Senator Minchin says the majority of Liberals think that it is absolute nonsense. It does get worse, because this goes to the underpinnings of the science. The current Leader of the Opposition, having become Leader of the Opposition, said:

It seems that notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man-made C02 emissions over the last decade, the world’s warming has stopped.

Can I just say that if that is the position of the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, we are in deep trouble. It goes on. The Leader of the Opposition earlier said:

… as you know, I am hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.

As if these views had not been consigned to the past but actually were part of his own view of the science now, in his speech the other weekend in Adelaide he said, ‘A temperature rise of four degrees Centigrade does not represent any great moral challenge for the future.’ I find that absolutely unbelievable. What would happen to the Murray-Darling? Ninety per cent of the agriculture would be wiped out. What would happen to the Great Barrier Reef? It would be utterly despoiled. What would happen to the number of days in excess of 35 degrees in a city like Adelaide? They would double. These are the questions and the consequences which flow from climate change in Australia. But the Leader of the Opposition says this is not any sort of moral challenge for the future.

Therefore, on this question of whether you are fair dinkum and what your fundamental beliefs are, I submit as the first point in this debate that the Leader of the Opposition does not, on his own admission, accept the climate change science. That is the first point of contrast. We in the government accept what the IPCC has said. We accept what the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia has said. We accept also what the Australian Chief Scientist has said. We accept therefore that it is too great a risk for Australia, for our economy, for our businesses and for our kids to ignore the science on the hope and belief out there at the extremes that somehow it simply will not happen.

Let us go to the second point of this debate: the actual content of an emissions trading policy versus that plan—that climate con job—that was released today. How does an emissions trading scheme work? It puts a cap on carbon. If we are going to reduce 138 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, we have to have a mechanism to do it. If we are going to act on capping carbon emissions then it follows that we must have a cap. That is the bottom line. An emissions trading scheme by definition is a cap-and-trade scheme. That is what we will do: we will place a cap on emissions. That is the reason in part that the previous Liberal and National government accepted an emissions trading scheme.

The second element of this is: who will pay for this scheme? Australia’s biggest polluters will pay—about 1,-000 of them. As a result of their payment, they will have incentives through permits to reduce their carbon emissions over time. That is the way it will work. It is called a market mechanism, which the member for Flinders, in his considered university thesis, saw as the only means by which you could do it.

The third element is how it is funded and what its consequences are for families. You will see in the government’s white paper and in our statements through the course of 2009 an absolutely clear exposition of what the impact will be for each category of family and each category of good and service relevant to those families, and the compensation scheme which applies to each of those families—what happens with low-income earners, what happens with middle-income earners, what happens with pensioners and what happens with those on other forms of benefits.

As far as the compensation arrangements are concerned, they are along the following lines. We have for 2.9 million low-income households an average annual price impact of $420 and average annual assistance of $610, with a net outcome of plus-$190; for middle-income earners—number of households 3.7 million—an average annual price impact of $650 and average annual assistance of $700, with a net outcome of $50; and for all households who receive some assistance—8.1 million households out of the 8.8 million households in Australia—an average annual price impact of $600 and average annual assistance of $660, with a net outcome of plus-$60. In summary, all low-income households will receive full assistance; 50 per cent of middle-income households will receive full assistance; practically all middle-income households will receive some assistance; and, in fact, 92 per cent of all households will receive assistance. On average, these households will receive $660 in compensation or be about $60-plus in terms of the implications of the CPRS in one year.

Those opposite ask: what is the detail of our policy? That is it. It is, first of all, a scheme which caps carbon pollution. Secondly, it does so by making the largest polluters in the country pay. Thirdly, it uses those funds to compensate the working families that I have just described. How does the alternative that has been put forward today—this phoney plan, this climate con job, by the Leader of the Opposition—go against those three measures? As to the first measure, are you credible about putting a cap on carbon pollution? No, you are not, because there is no cap. The reason there is no cap, ultimately, is that the Leader of the Opposition does not believe that the science is valid in the first place. The second is: who pays for the overall scheme?

An incident having occurred in the gallery—

See this speech in context