Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened with interest to the member for Tangney’s 15-minute discussion on Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, he did not actually glance at the report in front of him. I will try to correct that, having been one of the members of the committee that did work on this report, a committee which involved people from the National Party, Independents, Liberals and the Labor Party, a broad group of people. But the member for Tangney obviously did not take the time to engage with the report when he was standing up in the chamber giving his diatribe.

I probably did agree with his first three sentences where he talked about the role that farmers have played in Australia. But after that he went off on a bit of a flight of fancy that did not have much to do with the real world that we live in—the real world that involves real facts from real scientists who have provided peer-reviewed information that insists that climate change is real. That is the first fact that I wanted to bring the member for Tangney back to. The report we have in front of us understood that very clearly. Even though we dealt with a range of farmers over a range of areas in Australia, from very wet to very dry and everything in between, farmers understood that the climate is changing. It is not just variable; they understood that the climate is changing.

I too am familiar with the Garnaut report. I am not a scientist or a farmer, but I do understand the basic aspects of science. If you keep increasing the heat in a system then something will happen. If you look at page 26 of the Garnaut report and just look at the measured trends of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—which have been measured with varying degrees of accuracy, but certainly quite accurately from the 1800s to the 1900s—there is just a clear progression. It makes scientific sense to me that if you keep increasing temperatures then something will happen. If you look at some of the other graphs in the Garnaut report, you see what Australia’s role is in terms of being one of the 20 largest greenhouse gas emitters. Even though we are a small country, our per capita emissions mean that we have a particular responsibility to the rest of the world to show some leadership.

Why is that so? If you look at the history of Australia, we have always been particularly susceptible to the variations of climate—temperature, rainfall and the like. Obviously the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were able to adapt to these harsh variabilities, whether they were fisherpeople, hunter-gatherers or whatever. If you look at the first white settlers from 1788 on, they came with European sensibilities and farming practices. They were reasonably advanced compared to the rest of Europe, but they still ended up sowing the wrong crops at the wrong time. They quickly had to learn how to be Australian farmers rather than European farmers. They had enough ingenuity. Even though the First Fleet nearly starved to death, they eventually worked out how to survive.

Australian farmers, from those days to now, have always been at the coalface or the cutting edge when it comes to coping with climate change. I think ‘the cutting edge’ is a farming term, but both the coalface and the cutting edge are expressions that are out of date because the minimum tillage farming used by modern farmers is nothing like the farming that I grew up with, as we saw on some of our field trips. It was incredible what they were doing with GPS guided ploughs. They use minimum tillage so they are able to minimise disruption and produce incredible crops. In terms of our productivity gains over the last 50 years, farmers have held their heads high. They have been at the lead in the economy in terms of making sure they can produce lots of crops, take them to the world market without the subsidies of the Europeans, the United States and a few other countries, and hold their own. From what we saw from the field inspections and from the peak bodies that we interviewed in the committee, we certainly will be able to hold our own in the years to come because they understand climate variability and they understand climate change.

This report brings together that intersection that we need for the future. You will always need the individual ingenuity of farmers. We always need that and the strong, financially secure farmers do that. We also need the market forces so people who make money out of innovations—fertilisers, ploughs or whatever it is—can take those innovations to the market and sell them. That is one of the ways that we bring in innovation, but we also need government support and guidance and some of the peak bodies to look at opportunities that come with climate change. We have seen it. The peanut board saw that climate change was going to bring rainfall variations and said, ‘In the long term, we need to find other places to grow peanuts.’ They said, ‘There will be rain and reasonably available land in the Northern Territory and it suits peanuts, so we will go there.’ If you are sitting at home as a farmer down in Kingaroy or something like that, you might not necessarily know that. So that interaction between the peak bodies, the market and government support seems to bode well for a bright future.

The member for Tangney, in his rambling discussion, mentioned the CPRS but forgot to mention the fundamental problem with the history of the CPRS as told by the members of the Liberal Party. I was in the chamber; I saw how people voted on the CPRS legislation. Apart from one bloke from the seat of Wentworth, everyone I saw was on the other side of the chamber. Everyone in the Liberal Party voted against the CPRS. They voted against bringing in a price on carbon. When the legislation went to the Senate, I held out some hope that at the Copenhagen climate change summit we might be able to stand up and show some guidance to the world, go there with a bit of certainty and say, ‘This is what we might do.’ I was hopeful. Young, optimistic, I thought—

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