Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I pay great tribute to my honourable colleague here, who is actually doing something about lowering emissions. When you burn ethanol, CO2 goes up into the atmosphere. It's exactly the same as if you burn petrol; CO2 goes up into the atmosphere, but there's one hell of a difference. Sugar cane, or the grain, pulls it back down again, so it's going up and down instead of going up and staying there. But she's doing it to save lives. A Californian study, which went over 16 years, led every country on earth to move to ethanol to save lives. If you double the emission level, you double the number of people who die of heart and lung disease. The only person in this place who seems to be worried about it seems to be the honourable member.

Morris Iemma said: 'I cannot go another day with the death of people who simply don't have to die on my conscience.' That's why every country on earth, as far as I can make out, is on five per cent. In Brazil it's 49 per cent, and the price of petrol in Brazil is $1.29. Wouldn't it be lovely for us to have petrol at $1.29? Dick Honan was selling it in New South Wales for something like 25 or 30 per cent lower than all of his competitors when he was allowed to put ethanol in the tank, but now he's not allowed to put any more than a very minuscule amount in. The only countries on earth, it appears, that are not using ethanol are ourselves, New Zealand and countries in Africa.

If the honourable member is listened to, then the patron saint of environmentalists, Al Gore—and I recommend the book. I'm an anti-green myself, but I think that anyone who reads the book will get a good scientific hold on what the problem is, how serious it is and what needs to be done.

Dr Katharina Fabricius of the Australian Institute of Marine Science is considered to be one of the best environmentalists in the world. She said that, if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you increase the carbon dioxide in the ocean, and this tends to change the pH level; it becomes more acidic. She asked, 'You know what a shell is?' I said: 'It's calcium carbonate. That's a base, an alkaline.' She said, 'If we increase the acidity of the ocean, what happens to the shellfish?' I said: 'Does that matter? They're not the bottom of the food chain.' She said, 'They are.' She said that you need a magnifying glass to see most of them.

You might question climate change, but you can't question the effect on the ocean. The unassailable scientific argument is there, so we need to pull back. This meagre, measly piece of rubbish that we're talking about tonight imposes an extra burden upon industries for no good purpose, whereas what we on the crossbench are advocating will almost completely eradicate transportation emissions and reduce our emissions by 20 per cent in the space of four or five years. Over 20 per cent—23 or 24 per cent—of our emissions can be reduced, but we're not going down that pathway; we're going to fool around at the edges. We've fooled around at the edges over 15 years now, and we've reduced it by 16 percent, arguably. That is assuming that when you put the solar on the roof there is no cost in CO2.

As I've explained previously, on many occasions, you burn up an awful lot of CO2 in producing that solar panel, which, in any event, has to be replaced after 20 years. If you're not cleaning it every eight or nine days—think of how many times you clean your windscreen. Once a week? Once a fortnight at least? That's what you have to do with solar panels. Does anyone in Australia climb up on the roof and clean their solar panels? No. Our instructions, when we put the first system in in Australia, was: every eight or nine days you need to clean the solar panels to get them to work properly. As fair-minded, objectively minded people who come from all points of the political spectrum, we can agree to make it better, but the major parties don't— (Time expired)

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