Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 and the cognate bills—bills that are dressed up by the Prime Minister as bills to terminate the so-called carbon tax. Were they just that then the opposition would be in a position to support them, but they do so much more than simply terminate the carbon tax. For that reason, the opposition cannot and will not support the bills without them being substantially amended.

This is just a taste of what these bills would do beyond simply terminating the carbon tax: they will also remove the legislated cap on carbon pollution, an essential discipline in ensuring that we meet our 2020 target to reduce Australia's emissions. The bills abolish the entire framework for an emissions-trading scheme, a scheme which caps and then reduces our carbon pollution while letting business—not the minister or his bureaucrats here in Canberra but business—work out the cheapest and the most effective way to operate within that limit. The bills also abolish the Climate Change Authority, a statutory body charged with providing strong and independent advice to government about matters, including the Renewable Energy Target as well as caps and targets for carbon pollution or carbon emissions. The authority is chaired by former Reserve Bank governor Bernie Fraser, with a board made up of highly esteemed business leaders, economists and scientists, including Australia's Chief Scientist, Professor Chubb.

Of course, in this respect the Abbott government has form. Two emerging themes with this new government are, firstly, secrecy—perhaps exemplified in the immigration portfolio—and, secondly, the shutting down of any strong, independent voices. The Rudd government's first action in the climate change area was to ratify the Kyoto protocol. This minister's debut was to abolish the Climate Commission, a body established to provide the community with digestible information about climate change. As members know if they have been watching this debate, there has been an extraordinary community response to this blatant act of political censorship. The community have responded by opening their wallets and sending money to allow the commission to continue their work, as the new Climate Council, a non-government organisation encouraging informed debate about climate change in our community.

But the Climate Commission was just the first casualty. These bills would also shut down the independent voice of the Climate Change Authority on the critically important question of targets, extending yet further the emerging theme of this government: to ensure that all advice—advice to the parliament and advice to the Australian community—is managed and controlled by the Prime Minister's office. Well, Labor will stand up for strong, independent advice. We will oppose the bill that abolishes the Climate Change Authority outright.

Last but not least, these bills carve into the Household Assistance Package by abolishing tax cuts legislated for households in future years, a blatant breach of the Prime Minister's promise to retain the package in its entirety.

These bills are the culmination of one of the most hysterical and at times downright mendacious campaigns in modern Australian history. It was a campaign driven by two forces. The first was what my friend the member for Grayndler used to call the longest dummy spit in Australian political history—the Prime Minister, as he is now, never accepting the fact that he did not end up with the keys to the Lodge in 2010 and resolving simply to tear the place up. The second was the triumph of the hard Right in the Liberal Party, when the Nick Minchin forces threw their numbers behind the member for Warringah to defenestrate the member for Wentworth, on the condition that the member for Warringah cross over to climate scepticism, indeed that he renege on the policy that his mentor, John Howard, had taken to the preceding election to introduce an emissions-trading scheme.

Having thrown John Howard's policy overboard and reneged on the commitment that he made to the electors as a candidate in the 2007 election, the now Prime Minister released a policy on climate change laughably called direct action. Even a cursory glance at this policy will reveal that what little action there is in the policy is anything but direct. Admittedly it is a catchy title, but 'direct action' would usually conjure up thoughts of regulation of emission standards in power stations or motor vehicles. This policy does nothing of the sort. It is little more than a dressed-up slush fund with a fancy name.

After the now Prime Minister dropped Liberal Party support for a market based emissions-trading scheme, the member for Wentworth wrote, with refreshing frankness, in Fairfax:

Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing. After all, as Nick Minchin observed, in his view the majority of the Party Room do not believe in human caused global warming at all.

That goes straight to the heart of the difference between Labor and the coalition in this policy area. Labor accepts the advice of climate scientists that human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, is causing the earth to get warmer. Since the defenestration of the member for Wentworth, a consistent tactic from the new Prime Minister has been to suggest to the Australian community that scientists are divided about climate change. In July 2009 the now Prime Minister said:

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

In October 2009 he famously described the science as 'absolute crap'. In March 2010 he said: 'I don't believe that the science is settled.' In March 2011 he suggested:

… whether carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven.

This approach is not the new Prime Minister's approach alone. It is common among Australia's climate change sceptic media, as it is in other nations where this debate continues to flare. Only in the last fortnight we read of the last coalition Prime Minister telling a British audience that he preferred to rely on his gut instinct rather than scientific advice in this area.

To suggest that climate scientists have not yet reached a settled view about global warming is simply misleading. Earlier this year, NASA—that notorious hotbed of alarmist left-wing propaganda!—confirmed that 97 per cent of climate scientists who are actively publishing in this area agree that human activity is causing global warming. In September, as the Leader of the Opposition pointed out, the Fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released. This report was completed by hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, with 209 lead authors and more than 600 contributing authors. The fifth report strengthened the consensus around human-caused climate change. Now the world's climate scientists are 95 per cent certain that a process of global warming has been underway for some decades and that its major causes are human activities, in particular the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use.

Since pre-industrial times, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere has increased by 40 per cent, with around 500 billion additional tonnes of the gas pumped into the atmosphere over that same period. Scientists tell us that this is the highest atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in at least 800,000 years.

The latest IPCC report confirms that average global surface temperatures have increased by almost 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1880. Ocean surface temperatures have also warned, which causes the water to expand, contributing to sea level rise. The World Meteorological Organisation advises that sea levels are now rising about twice as fast as they did on average across the 20th century. The IPCC report confirmed acceleration in the overall loss of polar ice, which is also contributing to sea level rise, with accelerating loss of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, the loss of about four per cent of the Arctic sea ice per decade, and accelerating loss of glacial ice.

The report also confirms an increasing acidification of our oceans as they absorb more of the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As we know, more acidic oceans pose dangers for a range of marine ecosystems, including coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef. The report reaffirms the need to limit overall global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial fridges. That has been agreed by all major nations, including China and the United States, as the benchmark for international negotiations leading into 2015—negotiations to which, I note, the government has not even bothered to send a parliamentary secretary.

The report also confirms that the number of unusually hot days is increasing, as is the frequency of heat waves in a number of regions, including Australia. You do not need to read the IPCC report to understand that our climate is changing. Many communities in the Murray-Darling Basin area are still recovering from the worst drought in living memory. Other parts of Australia remain in drought today. Last summer was Australia's hottest on record. The 12 months to October this year were the hottest 12 months on record—remarkable outside of an El Niño phase.

The latest State of the climate report from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology restates the scientific advice that the number of hot days in Australia will increase, as well as advising that droughts and intense cyclones will become more common.

During the recent bushfires in and around the Blue Mountains the government got himself involved in an unseemly slanging match over a connection between bushfires and a changing client. The minister confessed to using Wikipedia as a primary research tool. The Prime Minister accused the UN official of the 'talking through her hat'; and former Prime Minister Howard chimed in with a very helpful observation that there were extensive bushfires in Victoria in the 1850s!

It seems pretty obvious to me that no-one can credibly draw a direct causal connection between a single weather event and climate change. As the minister's extensive Wikipedia research revealed, there have indeed been fires in Australia for a very long time and the direct cause is usually the action of an idiot lighting the fire, with factors like hazard reduction, urban planning and the like also influencing the fire's extent. But weather conditions do influence the level of risk and you do not need to go to Wikipedia to find advice that global warming is increasing the underlying risk of events like a bushfire occurring. The minister could have gone to his own department's website to find that advice or to the CSIRO or Bureau of Meteorology's latest telephone that report; or to the Climate Commission's advice; or, indeed, to the Country Fire Authority in the minister's own state of Victoria. The fact is that the government simply overreacted and mishandled a complex and very sensitive matter. The Prime Minister again encouraged the impression that he wilfully turns a blind eye to the best available scientific advice in this area.

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama dealt with this debate in his own country and said:

Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods -- all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science -- and act before it’s too late.

There is now a point of agreement between Australia's two major parties that the carbon tax should be terminated as soon as practicable, but there is a profound disagreement about what replaces it as the centrepiece of Australia's action on climate change. These are not easy questions to answer. As the OECD Secretary-General said a few weeks ago:

It would be hard to imagine a more complex risk management issue than that posed by climate change.

The different paths before us are on the one hand an emissions trading scheme and on the other the Liberal Party's so-called Direct Action policy. The opposition will move amendments to these bills to ensure that the carbon tax is replaced by an emissions trading scheme—an ETS. The ETS model has been recognised around the world as the cheapest and the most effective way to drive down carbon pollution. It is the most effective way because its centrepiece is a legislated cap on carbon pollution. The annual cap provides the discipline to ensure that Australia reaches its target of reducing carbon pollution by 2020 and beyond. It is the cheapest way to achieve that objective because it creates a genuine market. The ability to train pollution permits means that business works out the cheapest way to operate within the national pollution cap.

One of the more recent of a long list of falsehoods argued by the Liberal and National parties is that an ETS and a carbon tax are the same thing. Those arguing this case are either deliberately trying to mislead the community or they simply do not understand the basic economics of the two models. A carbon tax seeks to change behaviour by imposing a price signal without any other legal discipline on the behaviour—in this case, carbon pollution. An ETS, on the other hand, changes behaviour through the discipline of a legislated cap on pollution and then lets business work out how to operate in the cheapest way. The effective price on a tonne of carbon pollution under an ETS, as has been shown by Treasury, would be only one-quarter of the carbon tax.

The ETS is by far and away the most common model around the world employed to reduce carbon pollution. Some nations do this at a national level while others trade at a city or state level. Some of Australia's oldest trading partners have a national ETS in place: the United Kingdom and France, for example; as well as Germany, the world's third-largest exporter, poised to move into second place this year. In North America, a number of US and Canadian states also have an ETS, including California the ninth-largest economy in the world in its own right.

In our own region, China this year started seven pilot ETS schemes in regions covering more than 200 million people, with the aim of having a national trading scheme in place at the end of this decade. As the head of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox said in June, these pilots show that 'even nominal Communists recognise that cutting emissions at least cost requires the power of market mechanisms'.

Following this move by China, our two nations agreed to set up a joint carbon trading experts group to reflect our shared commitment to serious action on climate change. As part of their campaign of fear and hysteria, the Liberal and National parties have regularly pontificated that the world's two biggest polluters will not take any serious action to reduce their carbon pollution, so neither should Australia. The minister has talked about the inexorable rise in China's coal consumption—up to seven billion tonnes per annum perhaps. But China is putting in place a cap on coal consumption in the energy sector of around four billion tonnes, as well as consideration of a broader national emissions cap in 2015. While President Obama continues to struggle to see an emissions-trading scheme pass the Congress, initiated by John McCain, the US has in place a target to reduce carbon pollution by 17 per cent by 2020, compared to our target of a five per cent reduction. To achieve that, the President is deploying direct regulations of power plants in the transport sector emissions. South Korea, Australia's third-largest export market, begins an emissions-trading scheme the year after next.

Although former Prime Minister Howard last week—or last fortnight—tried to shrug it off as an exercise in political opportunism, it must be remembered that the Liberal Party took an ETS policy to the 2007 election. Back in 2008, the now Minister for the Environment, gushed that 'perhaps the most important domestic policy was the decision of the Howard government that Australia will implement a national carbon-trading scheme'. The member for Sturt, with his typical understatement, was equally enthusiastic when he said in 2009: 'Let's not forget: it was the Liberal Party that first proposed an emissions-trading scheme when we were in government. The idea that somehow the Liberal Party is opposed to an emissions-trading scheme is quite frankly ludicrous.'

Those opposite might have done an about-face for political reasons but the ETS is still recognised as the cheapest and the most effective way to tackle climate change. The OECD said precisely that only last week—that hotbed of left-wing environmental fanatics, the OECD—

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