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

It is good to see the member for Herbert staying here. I am sure he is on the speaking list with the opposition! On Sunday, which was a beautiful day in Melbourne following a rather tragic preliminary final the day before, I had the pleasure of attending a rally that I am told had up to 30,000 people present. It was the flagship event for Australia of the People's Climate March. It was the first of a series of literally hundreds of thousands of events that spread from Melbourne—following the sun—to New York 14 hours later, where the largest march in history against climate change took place in New York City.

There were up other marches around Australia. There were marches in my city of Adelaide; there were events in pretty much every other capital city and in some regional centres. Effectively, what was seen in that outpouring of hope and expectation was really a great sense that the New York City summit—convened by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon—would start to galvanise and catalyse action in the lead-in to some very important negotiations next year.

There were more than 120 leaders at the climate summit that was held on Tuesday, in New York time, this week. President Obama attended, obviously. There has been a great deal of media coverage of the President's speech at the UN General Assembly during the summit. Prime Minister David Cameron from the United Kingdom, President Yudhoyono from Indonesia and countless other world leaders were there.

The Australian Prime Minister did not attend the climate summit in New York on Tuesday. He is not the only world leader who did not attend the summit, but I am not aware of another world leader who arrived in New York within hours of the summit. He could have quite easily rearranged his diary to be there. The Prime Minister said that he was busy and that he wanted to attend parliament instead. I am sure that had this clashed with Monday's sitting day, where the Prime Minister had to make a very important statement on national security, everyone would have perhaps forgiven him for not attending the summit on Tuesday in New York time—which is effectively Wednesday.

But it was quite clear that if the Prime Minister had attached any sense of priority to the climate summit being attended—as it was by some other very busy world leaders as well, including the President of the United States and Prime Minister Cameron, who has been fairly busy over the last couple of weeks—then rearranging his diary to arrive in New York City a few hours earlier might have given some sense to the rest of the globe that this Prime Minister takes climate change seriously.

The Prime Minister has form in this area. Only a matter of weeks ago, when the Prime Minister was in Canada with his soul mate, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, he very bravely announced the creation of a coalition of the unwilling, of like-minded states, who would band together and fight against this progress, this sense of momentum leading up to the Paris conference next year. The Prime Minister announced that Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand would be a member of this coalition and that Prime Minister Cameron from the United Kingdom would also be a member. Of course, as we know, it took both of those prime ministers only a matter of hours to rush to a press conference to disassociate themselves entirely from the Australian Prime Minister's attitude to global climate talks and to reinforce their countries' commitment, their Tory governments' commitment, to domestic action on climate change and to the international momentum building towards the Paris conference next year.

There could not be a greater contrast between the Australian Prime Minister's regular public utterances about climate change and the speech that was given by the US president, President Obama, in the last day or two of the UN General Assembly, where he said that the 'urgent and growing threat of climate change' was an issue that would 'define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other'. It is utterly impossible to imagine the Australian Prime Minister talking about climate change as a threat or something in any way close to it.

Even if the Prime Minister had been able to rearrange his diary for Tuesday, one can imagine why he would not have wanted to attend the Climate Summit. He set the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who has performed very admirably on the world stage over recent weeks and months, a very, very difficult task: to front up to the rest of the world and explain what this government has done on climate change in its first 12 months. And what did the foreign minister have to say to the rest of the world? She had to say, as the Prime Minister would have had to say, had he turned up: 'We've abolished the cap on carbon pollution; there is now no restriction on the amount of carbon pollution that can be produced here. Also, we've abolished any legislative targets to reduce carbon pollution either in the short term, for the 2020 target, or in the long term, by 2050.' The foreign minister professed to reaffirm the five per cent reduction by 2020, but we know from the Prime Minister's appearance at the Press Club during the election campaign that, at best, this is a very soft target for this Prime Minister.

We know the Prime Minister has not mentioned once the conditional targets that were supposed to be bipartisan, the 15 per cent and the 25 per cent targets, either. He would have had to front up there, as well as at CHOGM, and say, 'I and the Canadian Prime Minister decided to withdraw from the Green Climate Fund,' apparently associating it with the ideas of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation here. The Green Climate Fund is a fund set up to assist the poorest countries, including nations in own region, adapt to the impacts of climate change—a very proud act by the Australian Prime Minister!

Mr Hunt interjecting—

The Minister for the Environment, who is going to speak in this debate, I imagine, intends to convene a rainforest summit later this year. This is a worthy idea, and I look forward to some details about that summit, because we know the impact that deforestation in our own region, including in Australia, can have on a range of things—on biodiversity and conservation but also, obviously, on climate.

We know that pretty much all of the heavy lifting in Australia during the Kyoto protocol period was done by changes to deforestation in Queensland, particularly the land-clearing laws put in place by the Beattie government which are now in the process of being reversed by the Newman government in Queensland.

Government members interjecting—

Some of the Tory MPs are saying, 'Hear, hear!' We would like to know, if the minister is convening a rainforest summit to talk to other parts of the Asia-Pacific region about deforestation, what he is saying to the Newman government about the deforestation underway in the Gulf Country there.

The Prime Minister could also tell the rest of the world about the ambush on the renewable energy target that was put in place earlier this year. We have had lots of opportunities to talk about the renewable energy target. I am hopeful that media reports that the Minister for Industry and the Minister for the Environment have been brought back in from the cold and given some authority to try and get this thing back on the rails, because, frankly, what has happened over the last several months is an utter atrocity, an utter atrocity, in a sector that had attracted billions of dollars of investment. I am quoting from the Warburton review here. The RET had created billions of dollars of investment, created thousands of jobs, driven down carbon pollution, would help to keep power prices lower over the next 15 years—Dick Warburton's own findings—and had been a bipartisan policy for four election campaigns, including 2013, when the minister sent his parliamentary secretary to the Clean Energy Council conference and reaffirmed the Liberal Party's commitment to the 41,000 gigawatt hour target. They then tried to junk it by setting up this ridiculous review.

We know what that has done to the sector. Over the first six months of 2014, only $40 million has been invested in large-scale renewable energy, because of the massive blow to investor confidence from this Prime Minister's reckless attitude towards renewable energy. This is the wonderful story the Australian Prime Minister could have told to the rest of the world, had he bothered to turn up in New York just 24 hours earlier!

The Prime Minister has described himself as a weathervane on this issue. He has famously described himself as a weathervane. He probably pats himself on the back for having won an election about the dreaded carbon tax. This is a serious issue, though. This is a serious challenge for Australia and for our partners in the region and the rest of the world. It is time for the Prime Minister to reflect on his attitude to the challenge of climate change and to get with the rest of the world, who are moving forward to an ambitious global agreement in Paris next year.

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