Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say: if the member for Gippsland thinks there is a crisis of confidence in his community, perhaps he could start speaking to them a little more frankly about climate change and the way this country needs to address one of the biggest challenges that faces us. Perhaps with a little less misinformation his community might have a slightly different view. I find it hard to believe that a person could make that speech if he actually believed that climate change was real. To stand there and talk about the impact in regional areas of action on climate change without any recognition whatsoever of the extraordinarily impact that climate change itself will have on regional areas if we, as part of the world effort, do not take real action to reduce the growth in greenhouse gases is somewhat to be in denial.

I assume that the member for Gippsland does believe in climate change. I assume he supports his own side's policy to act on climate change. I assume he supports the same targets that we have, as his side does. I assume that he would stand in his own electorate and tell them that he agrees with the targets that we set and he agrees with the need to act, but he could also tell them that his policy is to actually take tax money from taxpayers and give it to business—give it to the biggest polluters—which is really an astonishing approach. It is known to be far more expensive than the market driven mechanism that we have introduced, but that is the policy which he supports. He believes in climate change, he thinks we need to act, he supports the targets that we have set but he thinks he should do it in a more expensive way: he should take the money out of the taxpayers' pockets and give it to big business, paying big polluters to cut their pollution. We, on the other hand, have gone for a market mechanism approach which is seen around the world—including, for most of its history, by the Liberal Party—as the most effective way to act. It is the appropriate thing to do.

We in Australia have been incredibly lucky. We had in the ground at the time when it was of greatest value enormous reserves of fossil fuel. For the last 100 years, as the growth in the use of fossil fuels has grown, we have been the right country in the right place at the right time, and we have prospered on the back of that and continue to do so. We have cheap fossil fuels in abundance, and that has been very good for us, but in the last years we have seen a dramatic change in the approach of countries around the world to where they draw their energy use from. We have massive investments in renewable technology and in renewable energy, and two of the biggest countries in that field are the ones that most often get accused of not acting by the opposition: the United States of America and China. There are massive investments in renewable energy; in fact, 50 per cent of the investment in new power last year was in renewables, not in fossil fuels.

If the part of the world's activity from which we draw our economic strength—fossil fuels—is shrinking year by year, we would be mad not to try to decouple our prosperity from the old way of doing things; we would be mad not to try to move our economy from a fossil-fuels-reliant economy to a renewables-reliant economy.

I have said many times that we often think in Australia that our wealth is in the ground. There is a lot of wealth in our ground, and it will be there and we will make use of it for years to come. But when you look at our capacity to innovate, our capacity to invent, there can be no doubt that we have even more capacity in our minds. Our capacity to find new ways of doing things is second to none, and you can see that through the work of our researchers and our scientists. We are one of the leading countries in new ideas and innovation per head of population, and that is where we should be now. We have, as a nation, this capacity to invent. We have more wind, sun, waves and hot rocks than most of the world—more than virtually any other country. But there are countries that are further away from the equator than Tasmania that have more solar power than we do. Outer Mongolia, with the same population, has 20 per cent renewables; we have eight per cent. Who are we kidding if we think this nation can continue to rely on the old way of doing things when the rest of the world is moving to the new? That is why we needed to introduce—and we did introduce—a market based mechanism, a price on carbon, to drive innovation.

The member for Gippsland has referred to whether or not the community understands it. Let me put a few facts on the table. I doubt that the member for Gippsland will go back to his electorate and repeat these, but I campaigned on signing the Kyoto protocol in 2004.

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