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

I am happy to rise to speak on the package of bills that are before the parliament, which are presented by the government as bills to abolish the carbon tax. The bills do do that—consistent with the position taken to the election by the Labor Party as well—but the bills do much, much more than that. If passed by the parliament the bills will also abolish any chance of Australia having a formal legal cap on carbon pollution and any chance to move to an emissions trading scheme, which I will address in some detail.

The bills also abolish the Climate Change Authority—an independent, strong voice set up to advise the parliament, the government and, perhaps most importantly, the Australian community about the very difficult and highly contested issues associated with climate change. This continues an emerging theme with this government to abolish strong, independent voices and make sure that all advice to the Australian community and all advice to the parliament is filtered through ministerial offices or, more often, the Prime Minister's office.

The bills also abolish tax cuts, or changes to the tax free threshold established for the future, completely contrary to a promise made by the Prime Minister to keep the household assistance package put in place by Labor in full. And, as the House knows, the bills also seek to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

These bills represent the culmination of the most hysterical and mendacious campaign in modern Australian political history. It is a campaign that rests on 10 whopping falsehoods about climate change that have been peddled across this country by the Prime Minister and his fellow travellers. In the time I have to deal with these bills I want to deal with those 10 whoppers.

Whopper No. 1 is that the jury is still out on the science of climate change. That is a whopper peddled by the Prime Minister right across this land over the last four years. As we know, the Prime Minister famously described the science of climate change as 'absolute crap'. He only said that once; his usual formula is that the science—he calls it the 'so-called science'—is not yet settled. The member for Dawson, I read recently, said that this view represents the view of many in the coalition party room. Many in the coalition party room simply do not accept the science of climate change. To use the language of the member for Dawson, and many on the other side of the parliament, they do not 'believe in climate change', as if this were a question of faith rather than a question of science.

This is not a new perspective from those opposite. After his defenestration from the leadership of the Liberal Party, the member for Wentworth famously wrote, in a Fairfax newspaper, about the now Prime Minister's attitude to climate change but also the attitude of the majority of the coalition party room. In that article, the member for Wentworth reflected on the views of Nick Minchin. Nick Minchin is the man who collected the numbers to do over the Liberal Party's policy on emissions trading that had been taken to the election in 2007 by then Prime Minister John Howard. He dangled those numbers in front of any candidate for the leadership willing to go with his views.

The now Treasurer, apparently, to his credit resisted that temptation and stuck to his then principles of supporting an emissions trading scheme—unfortunately he has since discarded those principles—but the member for Warringah, now the Prime Minister, happily took the temptation. The member for Wentworth wrote in the Fairfax papers, immediately after that, that it was Nick Minchin's view, expressed to all of the candidates, that the majority of the coalition party room simply did not believe—again using the language of faith rather than science—in 'human induced global warming', to use the term of the member for Wentworth.

It is simply misleading to say that the science on this question is not settled. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report—its fifth report—in September last year, and in that the 209 lead authors, supported by more than 600 contributing authors, lifted their level of certainty about the existence of climate change and its cause by human activity to 95 per cent. The member for Dawson complains that that is not 100 per cent. If, in coming to this place, the check-in staff at the Adelaide airport had said that you have a 95 per cent chance of making it from Adelaide to Canberra on your flight, then I might have declined to get onto the aeroplane. But, in scientific terms, 95 per cent certainty is seen as a gold standard. It is equivalent to the level of certainty that relevant scientists ascribe to the link between tobacco and lung cancer. Even at its highest, if it is only a 95 per cent risk—and the member for Dawson is right to complain that it is not a 100 per cent risk—what sensible person or member of parliament would not take reasonable action to hedge against a 95 per cent risk, which scientists have been telling us for years, if found out, would have such significant and serious consequences?

Maurice Newman, the Prime Minister's senior business adviser, tells us in regular op-eds in The Australiannewspaperthat the IPCC—those several hundred leading climate scientists who authored the fifth report—are a fringe group that do not represent the mainstream of scientific opinion. He is simply not right about that either. This is a view that the Prime Minister has peddled as well. That hotbed of left-wing conspiracy, NASA, told us last year that some 97 per cent of climate scientists who regularly publish in this area agree with the IPCC that the climate is changing because of human activity. Our own institutions, such as the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO—very widely respected institutions—have expressed the same view on many occasions.

Whopper number two that is peddled by the Prime Minister is that, if there was any global warming over the course of the 20th century, it has stopped—'Nothing to worry about here; it has stopped.' Even the Prime Minister has once said that the world has actually slightly cooled since the 1990s—'So, if there was anything to worry about, do not worry anymore.' This is something, again, peddled by Maurice Newman—the PM's leading business adviser—who wrote earlier this week in The Australian newspaper that it is actually since September 1996 that the warming has stopped. Again, that is just not true.

The World Meteorological Organization told us only some months ago that the decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, which was again warmer than the decade before it, and so it goes on as you go decade by decade back into history. NASA, over the course of the southern summer, told us that the 20 hottest years in the world on record are all since 1990 and that 13 of the 14 hottest years on record are all since 2000. The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have said time and time again exactly the same thing—that global warming continues to impact the world and continues to impact the world's oceans. In their latest State of the climate report, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO remind us that calendar 2013 was the hottest year ever in Australia, in spite of not being an el Nino year, which will usually see the hottest temperatures in Australia. In spite of not being an el Nino year, 2013 was the hottest calendar year ever in Australia, and there were 28 days in that calendar year that were among the one per cent hottest days ever in Australia—28 of them out of 365. That is the same number of days to get into that top one per cent band in temperature for the whole three decades, the whole 30 years, between 1910 and 1940. The world is continuing to get warmer.

Whopper number three by this Prime Minister and his fellow travellers is that the Prime Minister consistently refuses to acknowledge any link between climate change and an increase in the frequency and the severity of extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, fires, storms and more. There are countless examples of the Prime Minister talking about this lack of any evidence of any link between these things, but perhaps the most unseemly example of it was the slanging match into which the Prime Minister entered with the senior official in climate change from the United Nations about the Blue Mountains bushfires which afflicted so many communities in New South Wales last year. The Prime Minister said that there was no evidence of any link between extreme weather events and climate change, and I have said—as many others on our side have said—of course you cannot draw a link between climate change and any single event. But that is not what the Prime Minister said. The Prime Minister said that you cannot draw a link between climate change and an increase in extreme weather events generally, and that is what conflicts with very clear scientific evidence.

I remember the minister resorted to some advice from Wikipedia—I am sure he remembers this as well—to point out that Australia has had bushfires for as long as records go back and as long as our Indigenous memory goes back, and we all know that to be the case. That is not the question. The question is whether there is an increase in risk, whether there is an increase in the frequency and the severity of this type of extreme weather event, and you do not need to go to Wikipedia to find out about this. You can go to our own advice from the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. You can go to the minister's own Country Fire Authority from Victoria that talks about an increase in risk, severity and frequency of bushfires associated with climate change. The minister could have gone to his own departmental website, which talks about a quite clearly established increase in risk of this type of extreme weather event. You could have gone to the Climate Commission's report before the government abolished it.

The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, again in their latest State of the climate report published earlier this year, tracked the forest fire danger index—an index which has been tracked for many years here in Australia—and very clearly found that the risk of forest fires since 1970 has risen markedly associated with climate change. It is up by 50 per cent in the area around Melbourne Airport. The Bureau of Meteorology provides similar advice about the risk to Australia associated with climate change, with Australia experiencing more frequent and more severe heatwaves. All of this advice is quite clear—another whopper from the Prime Minister.

Whopper number four from this Prime Minister and his fellow travellers is that world leaders need not trouble themselves with this issue; that they should focus on the important things like economics and security; and that they should leave these things to environment ministers, because it is not an economic issue—it is simply a fringe environmental issue. Well, shortly before the Prime Minister's visit to the United States, President Obama said that this is 'one of the most significant, if not the most significant, long-term challenges that the United States and the planet faces'. The Tory Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, said climate changes is 'one of the most serious threats the United Kingdom and the world face'. Asked about this, our Prime Minister simply said, 'I don't think so.'

Blocking this from the G20 agenda has been a consistent position that the Prime Minister has taken in his position as chair—again, as if this is not a matter for world leaders but simply a matter that the Minister for Environment and his colleagues around the world should deal with, a fringe issue. Well, that is not the view taken by the rest of the world. In March, the United States and the European Union, together responsible for about half of the world's nominal GDP, signed a joint statement saying that 'sustainable economic growth will only be possible if we tackle climate change. This is a central economic challenge for the world's future'. In February, just a few weeks before that statement, the Premier of China, Li Keqiang, and the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, signed an expansive memorandum of understanding about the view of those two nations—the two largest economies in the world, the two largest emitters of carbon pollution in the world—that recognised 'the urgent need for action' leading in particular to 2015. This month Premier Li of China and UK Prime Minister David Cameron signed a joint statement recognising that 'climate change is one of the greatest global challenges that we face'.

And it is not just an economic challenge. President Obama has talked about the quadrennial US force posture review conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff there. In particular, he remarked on the fact that the Joint Chiefs had identified climate change as one of America's greatest threats to national security. Of course, why should any of that concern the members of the G20? We will just leave it to the environment ministers!

Wopper No. 5 by our Prime Minister and his fellow travellers was enunciated in his famous trip to Canada. There the Prime Minister said, 'There is no sign that trading schemes are increasingly being adopted'—carbon trading schemes. 'If anything, trading schemes are being discarded, not adopted.' Again, that is not right. The only nation that is seeking to discard a carbon trading scheme is this one, under this government. It is simply not right to say that others are doing it. I will talk a little more in my remarks about the position of China. But South Korea, our third largest export partner, introduced a few weeks ago a tax of about $20 a tonne on thermal coal imports. South Korea is our third largest market for thermal coal. They are introducing a very broad emissions trading scheme on 1 January 2015. This adds to the long list of emissions trading schemes in place among many of our oldest trading partners—the United Kingdom, Germany, France and many others—and also many states and provinces in North America.

After the warm embrace of the Canadian Prime Minister, who shares the Australian Prime Minister's views on this matter, we know that the Australian Prime Minister let it be known to Australian journalists that he was going to set about building a 'coalition of the unwilling' who would fight the Americans, the Chinese, the Europeans and the Koreans—all of those other leaders who were intent upon taking real action on climate change. He said he would build that coalition in partnership with the Canadian Prime Minister and he even named the other members of the coalition—the New Zealand Prime Minister and the United Kingdom Prime Minister. But the problem was that he did not actually consult with those other members of this so-called coalition of the unwilling. And we know what then happened: to the great embarrassment of the Australian Prime Minister, the New Zealand Prime Minister was forced to say at a press conference some hours later that he was caught completely unaware by the Australian Prime Minister's announcement about his apparent membership of this coalition of the unwilling. And he restated New Zealand's commitment to taking strong action domestically on climate change but also to being a responsible, constructive part of international progress. And I have stated a number of times the position of the UK Prime Minister. Suffice it to say that the UK government came out very quickly to confirm that they had no intention of being a part of the Australian Prime Minister's coalition of the unwilling.

Wopper no. 6 that the Prime Minister and, frankly, also the environment minister have repeated time and time again over the last several years is that China will never take a serious action on climate change and certainly would never introduce carbon trading.

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