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

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Today the coalition had an opportunity to move forwards or backwards, and they moved backwards. They came down on the wrong side of the national interest and they will be seen, in time, to have come down on the wrong side of history. The fact is that the Leader of the Opposition, who does not believe that climate change is real and who thinks that climate change is, to use his own words, ‘crap’, has confirmed that again today in his first day in the parliament as opposition leader and in this debate. I listened very carefully to what the opposition leader said in the debate and I noticed that after about 10 minutes he simply ran out of puff. What he is doing is pretending to the Australian people that he understands this issue and has a solution to it, and he is producing an issue which he thinks is going to serve him politically and is going to be palatable in the short term. But when you actually look at it closely he does not, firstly, understand the real consequences of failure to act on climate change, because many on his side do not believe it, including himself. Secondly, it ignores the most necessary and fundamental measure if you are going to reform the market in a market economy, and that is a price for carbon.

I cannot believe that the opposition parties, after having delivered the climate change LITE policy of this morning, are in the House this afternoon and have absolutely ignored and walked away from the market. The Leader of the Opposition said that he was a great supporter of the market. But this is where the opposition are most exposed: lack of belief and lack of intellectual rigour in bringing forward a policy because they are not providing any signal in the market whatsoever for carbon emissions to reduce over time. There are many economists and there is much modelling. There are schemes already underway in a number of countries which are designed to do just that.

As I was listening to the debate, I was thinking about their fraternal colleagues in New Zealand, a conservative party that wants to have and is due to introduce an emissions trading scheme to have a price in the market so that investment decisions can be made rationally on the basis of knowing that it will cost more if you pollute more and that it is going to be a slow gradual evolving process over time. But that is how you transform the economy. That is the big challenge for any government around the globe at the moment. The biggest challenge is that we have to transform our economies so they reduce carbon emissions over time.

What the Leader of the Opposition has delivered does not do that at all. The member for Flinders only weeks ago, until he was given the new job of coming up with the con job policy that we are debating today, was firmly arguing for an emissions trading scheme, supporting the former Leader of the Opposition, the member for Wentworth, who argued eloquently for an emissions trading scheme. So people listening to this debate and reading the Hansard should not be under any illusions that many of those coalition members opposite believe in the market. They talk about it all the time in here, except on this one issue. They have decided to go absent; they have decided to vacate the economic credibility field. That is what you have done today. You have vacated the field of economic credibility and I look forward to the response from economic writers and researchers on how we actually reduce emissions in the long term when we do not have a price in the market for carbon.

How has it come to this? It has come to this in one simple way, and that is that ultimately the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, lacks conviction on this issue. He flags himself as a conviction politician but he has no conviction about climate change. In fact, so weak is his conviction on climate change that he has decided to reduce the one significant economic lever that those who are responsible for a national economy can bring to use, which is the price in the marketplace, and he has let it drift absolutely out the window with him downplaying the likely impacts of a four-degree temperature increase in our country, Australia, one of the first to be hit by climate change and one of the hardest affected by increasing temperatures.

Let us reflect in this House on the impact of increases in temperatures which have been identified by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. In their climate statement, they said Australia is clearly getting hotter. It is not going to go away. The Leader of the Opposition cannot wish it away because of some conspiracy on the part of those opposite to want us to do something about climate change. He cannot pretend that sea levels will not rise. Yes, there will be arguments about the degree of rise and the significant scale of impact in one region or another. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: go to the people of the Pacific and have this debate and see how they feel about quibbling about whether we should take real action on climate change and go to the farmers of the Murray-Darling Basin and be fair dinkum with them when you say to them that we are not going to do anything about a price in the market and, in fact, we are going to let those people who are polluting into our atmosphere and producing those carbon emissions not be dealt with at all.

That is the position that the Leader of the Opposition brings into this House. What a travesty! He is on the wrong side of history on this issue and on the wrong side of history with this con job those opposite have dished up to us today. I think that the Australian public will see through it. I am confident that they will. I listened to the contribution of the member for Sturt and the chiding and the snide remarks about the greatest moral challenge of our time. Is it a moral challenge or isn’t it to consider the future of every single Australian in a world that is going to be warmer and likely to suffer significant impacts as a consequence of climate change? On this side of the House, we say it is a fair dinkum challenge and we are willing to do something about it. You just squibble over there, snidely making remarks in the House, playing the petty politics. I am afraid this issue is far too important for the approach that the new coalition, going back to the old coalition under the new Leader of the Opposition, has actually brought forward.

I had a chance to look briefly, on the way into the House, at the policy that the coalition have brought forward. I want to make a number of observations about that policy. I am sure we will have the opportunity to subject it to some high levels of scrutiny over the coming days. You can expect this debate to continue in this parliament where the debate should be undertaken. We will put this particular policy that has been brought forward under the high level of scrutiny that it demands. Other than the fact there is no price in the market for carbon and there is no cap on emissions, I think everybody listening understands that in order to reduce emissions you need to cap them. But the coalition have decided they do not want to cap emissions at all. What are they going to do? They are going to play winners and losers in the sequestration arena in order to get around the issue of not having a price in the market on carbon.

What else don’t the coalition have in this particular policy? They have no mention of energy efficiency in any significant way. Energy efficiency is often remarked upon as being the low hanging fruit in this debate. The sorts of programs that the government has out there that encourage people to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and at the same time their energy costs, are all about energy efficiency. None of the kind of information we have on websites—the kind of work we are doing with communities and businesses about reducing our overall use of energy, doing it in a smarter, cleaner and greener way and generating employment at the same time—is mentioned in this policy at all. There is no green employment, there is no employment strategy for sustainability; and there is no consideration, incidentally, of what additional energy efficiency measures might be worthwhile having a debate about. The member for Flinders said almost to the day a year ago—I will not be exact on the day—that the coalition were going to bring forward an energy efficiency policy. Now we have a content-light, con job climate policy with no substantial energy efficiency measures in it at all.

While I am referring to the member for Flinders, I want to make two additional observations. The first is about the continuing misrepresentation by the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Flinders of the figure of $1,100 that is alleged to be a cost to the Australian public. I acted for Minister Wong in the first two weeks of January and I had a debate with the Leader of the Opposition on this issue, and it turned out that the opposition leader’s source for this particular number were reports that he had googled. He could not actually provide any specific evidence as to where that figure had arisen from. The member for Flinders continues that kind of misrepresentation by repeating the lie of this $1,100. The fact is that Treasury modelling shows that under the government’s scheme low-income households are, on average, better off under a CPRS. The price impact is around $420, but the assistance to low-income earners is over $600. So the figure not only is completely wrong but also ignores the fact that this government has done what any thoughtful, sensitive to the needs of the Australian community and policy intentional government would do—that is, it is providing for working families and for other people who are affected by any price increase that comes about as we deal with a difficult and serious problem like this. It is providing them with compensation to adjust to those price increases. That is what this particular scheme does.

Before I conclude my remarks in this debate, I want to briefly amplify the other issue that is absolutely critical in this debate and that the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change touched on. The world is on the cusp of a significant transformation of economies, whether it is happening in farm techniques and management, in agriculture, in manufacturing, in industry, in building, in automotive areas, or in the provision of energy. You can see it when you see wind power and wind turbines starting to pop up in the landscape in places where it is appropriate for them to be. That is what the future is all about: producing cleaner, greener energy and having cleaner, greener jobs to go with it. In order to have the investment from the banks and from businesses to actually build that economy and to transform the Australian economy from a big polluting, emissions-intensive economy to a sustainable economy that can build the jobs for the future and build industries for the future, you need to have a policy that gets you there.

The fact is that today in the parliament the Leader of the Opposition has conclusively proven that he does not have a policy to get Australia into a low-carbon future; and the Rudd government does. That deficiency speaks to future jobs right around this country. It speaks to all young Australians who are coming out of schools, colleges and universities. Many young people want to work in the area of climate change. They believe that they can use their brains, their intelligence and their enthusiasm for solving the problem of climate change by coming up with the solutions to enable us to do that. That is what this debate is also about: delivering solutions and opportunities to Australia so that it can transform itself, just as we have in the past. That is why we are such a great nation. But the opposition leader wants to make us into a nation that looks backward and that is fearful of those changes, challenges and opportunities. He wants us to be a nation that does not recognise the kind of impact—and, in fact, does not believe the kind of impact—that not addressing dangerous climate change will have on the coastline, on the Great Barrier Reef, on the farming lands and on our children and their children as well. His policy is devoid of consideration of the national interest and the international interest. We are very, very happy to debate his policy in this parliament and to point out its shortcomings, but we would also say that, with the absence of a solid policy that has been brought forward on this issue by Mr Abbott, you cannot take him seriously on the question of climate change. He does not believe in it, and the policy that he brought forward today does nothing sensible or serious to address it for the future. (Time expired)

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