Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the time allowed tonight in this second reading debate on the Energy Efficiency Opportunities (Repeal) Bill 2014, I want to comment, in passing, on the previous speaker—who is walking away—and his abandonment of the only three environmental policies that the Howard government ever implemented with any credibility. They were the Renewable Energy Target, the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Act, which we are discussing tonight, and the emissions trading scheme. These three policies were the bedrock of the Howard government's climate change agenda, and the previous speaker derided them because he does not accept the science of climate change. Well, I have got some news for the previous speaker: 97 per cent of published scientific papers in this area, by climate change experts, have concluded that climate change is real, that it is occurring and that it is man-made. To the previous speaker, I would rather be on the side of NASA, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology than on the side of Alan Jones and the cranks that you have been quoting. Scientists now say that climate change is real and man-made with a certainty of 95 per cent. To put that into context, that is the same certainty with which they say tobacco causes cancer. But that is not good enough for the previous speaker or, quite frankly, for the coalition, who reject the science of climate change because it is inconvenient for some and others are mired in Alan Jones radio talkback land.

What was more even more incredible was the hypocrisy about the power of markets in this area. This is a party that is rejecting a market based mechanism to combat climate change, also known as an emissions trading scheme, as first proposed by the Prime Minister Howard and adopted by the Labor Party, as recommended by Lord Nicholas Stern, Ross Garnaut, Paul Krugman and every serious economist, and instead it has endorsed Direct Action, the worst form of Soviet command and control since Stalinist Russia, where the government dictates which businesses will reduce their emissions and pays them accordingly, but no other emissions count. Under Direct Action, which is supposed to replace legislation and policies like this, each company is supposed to put in their emissions-intensity baseline every year and report against it. So I do not see how this is reducing red tape if you are replacing it with something else and then picking only a few companies to reduce their emissions.

As I said at the beginning, this legislation yet again demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy of the coalition— (Time expired)

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