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

I thank the honourable member for her question. The preface to her question is an important one, because this Labor government has been committed to a market based response to dealing with the challenge of climate change, as historically has the Liberal Party of Australia as opposed to those opposite, who now adopt what has been elegantly described by the former Leader of the Opposition as a ‘command and control’ approach to bringing about any effective change on climate change.

Reform in Australia is a hard business; it always has been. Therefore, when you look at this challenge of climate change, it will be hard in this area as well. If we look back over the last quarter of a century, we can see that the reforms, back in the eighties and nineties, to the Australian economy were hard-won reforms. The reforms that introduced compulsory superannuation, for example, were hard-won reforms. This economy, a quarter of a century later, benefits from governments which had the  courage to make hard decisions in hard areas of reform. Had those decisions not been taken by governments back then, the flexibility of our economy to deal most recently with the challenges of the global financial crisis would have been put to the test indeed.

The reform which the economy must undergo in relation to climate change falls exactly into this category. We can either undertake this reform now for the future or we can continue to push it off and push it off and push it off. If we continue to push it off, as those opposite are recommending in their approach, then the reality is that the costs of climate change then come back to fundamentally undermine our future economic wellbeing, whether through its impact on agriculture, the devastation of the Murray-Darling, the impact on tourism in the Great Barrier Reef or the intensification of drought across our nation, our economy and our rural communities as well.

It was for these reasons that, having conducted a large number of investigations, the Howard government, through the task group on emissions trading, the Garnaut review, the UK Stern report on the economics of climate change—all these independent examinations—reached one conclusion: the most effective and least costly means to execute change in response to the challenge of climate change was through a market based system. That was the conclusion they reached and that is why all those individual governments  and political leaders at the time reached the same conclusion. Our approach to climate change is based on five core principles: (1) the science; (2) cost; (3) effectiveness; (4) our global engagement; and (5) consistency of approach. On the science, it is fundamental that we on this side of the House accept the climate change science. The Leader of the Opposition has stated elegantly—or inelegantly but effectively—his view on the climate change science. In his owns words: climate change is ‘absolute crap’. That is his view. That is not the government’s view.

The House may be interested to know what the shadow minister responsible for climate change had to say on the science today. In an interview on 4 February on NewsRadio, the member for Flinders answered in these terms: ‘My view is very clear. I happen to be, on balance, of the view that the science for climate change is strong and compelling.’

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