Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

All governments bring different priorities and different focuses to the task of setting and pursuing a national agenda, but there is always a set of core issues whose immediate and long-term significance demands the attention and application of any responsible government. Here, now, in 2014 climate change has to be at the very top of that list. Some would say that national security is at the very top, but let us remember that, according to the US defense department's Quadrennial Defense Review this year and Australia's current National Security Strategy, climate change will create grave and complicated security challenges, including a number that are specific to our region. Some would say that the economy is second only to national security—and that is a point many would accept. But, again, climate change represents a severe future cost and risk to our economy. I know a lot of people who would say health is the greatest priority, and it was heartening to hear from Professor Fiona Stanley at the climate change day of action rally in Perth that I attended on Sunday, when she spoke about the severe health impacts of climate change, especially for vulnerable members of the community, including the elderly and children.

Remember that in 2009, The Lancet and University College of London issued a statement that said:

Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century. Effects of climate change on health will affect most populations in the next decades and put the lives and wellbeing of billions of people at increased risk.

The reality is that action on climate change is action to improve security, to strengthen a sustainable economy and to protect the health and wellbeing of Australia's and the world's people and the environment. Indeed, climate change remains the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation. It is a known existential threat to all life on this planet, but it is particularly serious for small island states, such as our friends and neighbours in the Indo-Pacific region, who are already facing increased cyclonic, drought and storm surge events, and sea level rise eroding precious land and polluting crops and freshwater with salt. There is nowhere for them to go.

That is why this government's approach to climate change is its greatest flaw. It is why the coalition's abandonment of the bipartisan commitment to addressing climate change that emerged between 2007 and 2009, and that was sacrificed on the altar of political ambition, is the most damaging political development of this century to date. If this government's only failure was to not take climate change seriously—to perhaps look in other policy directions while nevertheless leaving the Clean Energy Future reforms of the Labor government to proceed on track—then you might accept their preference for sticking to their knitting, as the PM would have it, in terms of a conservative wind-back of progressive social reforms and the promotion of an anything-goes, free-market, big-business oriented program.

Instead, unfortunately, it has made the dismantling and destruction of Australia's carefully established and effective climate change action architecture a key part of its general program of nation un-building. In the first twelve months of government it has: removed the price on carbon; defunded the Climate Change Authority and a range of renewable energy and energy efficiency programs; and indicated its intent to undermine the Renewable Energy Target. An article in Crikey this week by Paddy Manning responded to a sobering report from the Climate Institute on the extent of effective subsidies to our hydrocarbon-dominated energy sector by noting:

Putting a price on carbon—the most efficient way to tackle climate change—was an attempt to "internalise" these costs so that purchasing decisions would forever more take into account the impact on the climate. Energy from fossil fuels would get more expensive; renewable energy wouldn't. That's not a subsidy. That's a level playing field.

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Now the carbon price is gone, the government is proposing to pay polluters from a taxpayer-funded Emissions Reduction Fund as part of its Direct Action plan, and the public also have to pay for the damage done by climate change.

As he says, the level playing field is being torn up. Our economy is being returned to an artificial state of affairs where emission-heavy energy production and other industries operate on a cushion of direct and indirect subsidies, shifting the economic health and environmental costs to the Australian public, the Australian taxpayer, to the future generations of Australian people.

As I have mentioned, last Sunday I attended a rally in Perth as part of a global initiative to mark a day of action on climate change. Tens of thousands of people around Australia joined this effort as did hundreds of thousands of people around the world including the UN Secretary-General himself. The Prime Minister, by contrast, chose to convey an opposite message. He chose to abdicate his responsibility when it comes to one of the most important policy issues facing this country and the planet by refusing to attend the United Nations Climate Summit in which President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron participated among more than 100 other world leaders.

The failure of this government to take climate change seriously is a failure to take science seriously; it is a failure to take economics seriously; and it is a failure to accept the responsibility for the health, security and wellbeing of Australians and our living natural environment now and in the future.

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