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

Today the Prime Minister, who famously described climate change as 'absolutely not real'—which apparently is the parliamentary way to now describe his quote—has been dragged kicking and screaming, finally, to announce a target to take to the Paris conference in December—kicking and screaming. We are the last major developed economy to do so.

Presumably the Prime Minister was waiting and perhaps hoping that global momentum behind the conference scheduled for Paris in December would either slow down or perhaps even reverse. He did his own bit over the course of 2014 to try to marshal the troops—to marshal other leaders—particularly those in the developed world who were sceptical about climate change policy, to try to oppose the momentum being led by the United States, China, our friends in the United Kingdom and in so many other countries around the world. But the momentum has not stalled. It certainly has not reversed. It is continuing to build around the world for a conference in December that is expected to put in place an agreement to start to reduce carbon pollution levels in an ambitious way and in a way that is consistent with the agreement that 195 countries of the world made five years ago to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, it would appear, and the Minister for the Environment, who has taken some time from the coalition party room meeting to participate in this debate, I am glad to say, apparently got a sense of that building momentum around the world, because reports in The Australian newspaper this morning indicated that the two ministers had taken a much stronger position to the cabinet.

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