Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very slow to anger. Actually, I have lost my temper about three times in my life but I'm very close at this point, so you might see the fourth one today. Look, government, would you just stop? For 10 years, we have known how important this is. I'm going to quote John Howard's energy minister in 2007, who said:

The Australian Government will commence work on a world-leading greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme with careful analysis on a long-term goal for emissions reduction…

That was from 2007, from John Howard's energy minister.

When Labor came to power, we worked constructively with the government to put together a trading scheme. It was rolled when past Prime Minister Abbott rolled Malcolm Turnbull as the then opposition leader. We then introduced another emissions trading scheme; it was scrapped by this government. Then we worked on a bipartisan approach to an emissions intensity scheme, then we offered bipartisanship on a clean energy target, then we offered bipartisanship on the National Energy Guarantee and we offered it on the NEG. The NEG, by the way, we have announced, is not the policy we would have developed if we were off on our own in a perfect world; but it's something achievable that industry backs, that the government backed in its own party room, twice. It's something that is achievable that industry is calling for.

What the country needs most now, more than anything else, is certainty so that business can get around to finding the solutions to act on climate change. And we have to do that. I went and visited the school students on strike today. I spent an hour with a bunch of kids, some of them from primary school, some of them as young as nine—between nine and 17—and they told me very clearly that what we do today affects their lives. It affects the world they will live in. One of them said it affects whether they are going to be able to go out in the afternoon in summer. It affects that.

We have climate scientists all over the world telling us that we are not on target to hold 1.5. We're not even on target to hold two. We have the UN telling us that Australia is nowhere near meeting our 2030 Paris climate agreement targets, that our emissions will continue to rise right up to 2030. Ten years after 2007, we have some of the highest power prices in the world and the highest per person emissions target in the world. Yet we are a country that is built to respond to climate change, of all the countries in the world. Europe responds better with solar. They are further away from the equator than Tasmania. We are absolutely in a position to benefit from what is necessary.

For every major problem, there are opportunities to solve it. We are so well positioned for that. We were a world leader in solar technology. We had 13 per cent of the world market before John Howard came to power. We were leading the world. But we lost our edge because we gave it away, because we couldn't provide the industry with certainty so they could invest. The rest of the world is doing it. It is inevitable. It is now cheaper to produce wind power and solar power than it is to produce coal-fired power, particularly if you have to start again and build a whole new coal-fired power plant. It's not going to happen, because it's cheaper to have other alternatives. The whole world is going that way. If we want to be on that path, if we want to be part of the solution, if we want to own the prosperity that responding to climate change can bring, we need certainty for business to respond.

And business is well and truly telling us. In a recent survey of business, 92 per cent of respondents—Australian business and industry leaders—agreed that Scott Morrison's current national climate and energy policy is insufficient to drive emissions targets needed to meet the Paris targets by 2030. They overwhelmingly agreed that current climate and energy policies are inadequate, and 82 per cent of business leaders agreed that Australia should set an economy-wide net-zero emissions target for 2050, in line with Labor policy. That's 82 per cent of businesses surveyed that are agreeing.

Get on board, government. How many more years are you going to do this boom and bust, where, no matter what policy comes up, somebody on the Liberal Party side tears it down? If we come up with a policy, you're not prepared to even talk about it. We heard it from the previous speaker. We can see what the next election is going to be. It's going to be scare campaigns again; there's going to be no action. We've got a government that is actually going to go to an election campaign with no policy on climate change—none. Ten years after John Howard—11 years after John Howard actually—we've got a Liberal government that will go to an election campaign with no policy on climate change, no serious energy policy and no policy that provides consistency for business to do what business does well, which is find solutions. Get on board, guys.

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