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

I have been called much worse—not a bad bloke to be compared to, certainly better than most in this place, Madam Speaker, but it is a low bar.

Honourable members interjecting—

Well, it is called show business for the ugly for a very good reason. Of course, the member for Sturt thinks himself much better looking than the average.

It will not surprise the House that we do not support this gag, the first in a series of gags to shut down debate over some incredibly important pieces of legislation. We have heard 90 seconds of justification from the Leader of the House about the need to gag this debate on nine or 10 incredibly important pieces of legislation, on the basis that everyone apparently is well aware of the government's position. But the important thing for this House, for the Australian parliament, for the Australian community, is that there be a chance to deal with all of the very different and complex arguments around this package of bills from the parliament.

The last time this House dealt with these bills was more than six months ago, before Christmas 2013. In a very fast-moving area of policy there have been significant developments which it is important that members of the House on both sides of this debate get a chance to canvass, because these bills rest on a couple of myths that the Prime Minister particularly, but the government more broadly, seeks to perpetuate in the area of climate change policy. The first myth—and we hear this time and time again; we saw chief business adviser Maurice Newman write about this in The Australian only yesterday—is that the jury is out on climate change, that this area of science is not settled. I can point to numerous quotes from the Prime Minister where he has said that he does not accept that the science on this is settled. We heard this back in December when I had to sit in this chamber and listen to countless speeches from members of the government to say that the science on this matter is somehow not settled. Well, over summer we had that hotbed of left-wing conspiracy, NASA, come out and confirm that fully 97 per cent of climate scientists who regularly publish in this area agree with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the climate is changing through global warming and it is doing that as a result of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use. That deserves further debate by this House.

What we have also heard, from the Prime Minister down in the coalition parties, and again just yesterday in the op-ed pages of The Australian newspaper from Maurice Newman, is that to the extent there might have been some global warming—not that that is conceded, but to the extent that there might have been some global warming—it has all stopped and actually, if anything, it might be getting cooler now since the late nineties. Maurice Newman yesterday went as far back as September 1996, saying: 'It's all stopped, nothing to worry about here. It's all getting cooler anyway.'

Again, that hotbed of left-wing conspiracy, NASA, over the course of summer confirmed that the 20 hottest years on record in the world are all since 1990. NASA confirmed that 13 of the 14 hottest years on record are all since 2000, that period when Maurice Newman, the Prime Minister and many others would have us believe that, to the extent we had cause for concern, it has all disappeared, it has all just seeped away into the sands, nothing to worry about. Well, this House needs to debate that and the degree to which this is actually something to worry about.

The other thing that has happened since the House last got a chance to debate this package of bills, and the area of climate change policy more broadly, is the very significant developments internationally. It is only a few weeks ago that the Prime Minister conducted a very extensive overseas trip clearly with one of the objectives being to take the temperature—forgive the pun—of other countries as we move into a range of international meetings this year: the leaders summit being called by Ban Ki-moon in September; the G20 meeting in November which will be chaired by Australia; leading into the UN conference in Paris next year. After luxuriating in the warm embrace of the Canadian Conservatives, who share the views of the Australian Prime Minister in this area, the Prime Minister just let it slip to some journalists in Australia that he was going to build a coalition—a coalition of the unwilling—who together would fight the Americans, the Chinese, the Europeans, anyone who thought that the international community should build towards strong climate action next year. He even went so far as to name the members of this coalition of the unwilling.

The New Zealand Prime Minister and the UK Prime Minister were named as members of this coalition who would join the warm embrace between the Canadian and Australian prime ministers to battle climate action wherever it might emerge, from wherever it might emerge. Unfortunately, the New Zealand Prime Minister—a political soul mate, apparently, of the Australian Prime Minister—was caught completely unawares and went out straight away to confirm New Zealand's commitment to take strong action on climate change and to be a responsible, constructive part of the international developments that will emerge over the next couple of years. The UK Tory Prime Minister, who has been a well-known leader in the area of climate change policy domestically and internationally, was also forced to dissociate himself from this coalition of the unwilling, nipped in the bud. I think the House of Representatives would like to debate this issue and the way in which the Australian Prime Minister has portrayed Australia's efforts in this area on the global stage.

The Prime Minister also said in Canada, it was reported, that Australia is just one of many nations walking away from emissions trading schemes—a falsehood that repeats a falsehood that Joe Hockey, the Treasurer, made on the projects program some months ago. It is important that the House of Representatives debate this point because it goes squarely to the question of whether Australia should be a part of these international negotiations. What we have seen over the last six months is particularly the US and China start to make moves, long overdue, to lead the process into Paris next year. China only last week started its seventh pilot emissions trading scheme, a scheme that will now cover more than 200 million people in China. Two weeks ago South Korea, our third largest export partner, imposed a tax on imported thermal coal of $20 a tonne as part of its introduction into an emissions trading scheme, which will be the second largest in emissions trading scheme in the world, starting on 1 January 2015. And, as people well now, the US President announced a few weeks ago the Clean Power Plan, which will impose emissions reduction conditions on existing power plants in America over the next little while—

See this speech in context