Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about one of the most fundamental issues of our time: climate change. Around the world, the effects of man-made climate change are occurring before our eyes. From the rapidly disappearing Arctic ice to the increased frequency and severity of floods and cyclones, the effects of man-made climate change are unfolding before us. There will perhaps be no greater threat posed to our way of life this century than from the effects of climate change. Urgent action is needed. No nation stands to lose more from the effects of climate change than Australia. It will hurt our economy and our environment, and it will hurt our children’s future.

In this week of Science Meets Parliament, I had the pleasure of discussing this issue of paramount importance with a number of experts from the CSIRO. Mr Stephen Crisp, a climate impacts scientist, detailed the current work being undertaken by his staff with regard to exploring the impact of climate change and climate variability on agricultural systems and ecological processes. His recent work includes collaboration with farmers on ways to improve farm climate risk management. Of course, this is vital to Western Australian farmers.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Dr Horst Zwingmann, a geochemist form Curtin University, which is located in my electorate of Swan. Dr Horst Zwingmann is a petroleum management expert. He, like Mr Crisp, acknowledges the importance of the issue of climate change and the need for greater action on ways to improve oil and gas exploration through the investigation and development of new technologies for recovering resources from existing reservoir deposits. He is a proponent of the need for this country to achieve capacity building in energy and climate research, whilst acknowledging the need to protect our economic future. His work on CO geosequestration and fault investigation can further improve the management and prevention of CO leakage from current and future reservoirs, thus decreasing the impact that fossil fuels have on climate change.

Finally, I wish to speak on an issue that is close to my electorate. Mr Tim Cowan, from the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research centre, spoke to me today of how 50 per cent of the rainfall decline experience in south-west Western Australia since the late 1960s is linked to rises in greenhouse gases. He demonstrated that the impact of global warming has decreased the average movement of high-pressure patterns into the south of Western Australia and therefore decreased the movement of rain delivering low-pressure systems.

Using climate models to identify what was happening, scientists concluded that increases in greenhouse gases can explain at least 50 per cent of the decline in rainfall trends. The other 50 per cent decline is explained by seasonal natural variations. If current trends continue, we will raise atmospheric CO concentrations to double pre-industrial levels during this century. To put that in some perspective, that will probably be enough to raise global temperatures by around two to four degrees centigrade. This is a future which we cannot allow to prevail.

How is it that, in its 11 years in power, this government has achieved so very little in addressing this crucial issue? As everybody is quite aware, most of the fossil fools who sit opposite do not really accept the reality of climate change; they only acknowledge that it is a problem because their focus groups have told them that their failure to act may cost them votes at this year’s election. How can the Australian public have any confidence whatsoever in a government whose ministers still refuse to accept that climate change is a fact? After 11 long years of foot dragging and denial, we need answers, not more hyperbole.

This is just another example of the coalition being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I thought they were being Neanderthals about broadband, but this government’s attitude to climate change really takes the cake. No action could be more reckless and outright irresponsible than to simply defer our problems to future generations. But that is precisely what this government is doing. However difficult the challenges of addressing climate change may be, we can no longer go on ignoring these problems.

Labor gets climate change. Labor accepts it as a reality and is committed to tackling it head on. We know that Kyoto is no silver bullet, but we believe it is a start in the right direction. We believe that only through setting an example to less developed nations can we hope to bring all countries into a global compact. What is needed is leadership and vision. This Saturday, the Rudd Labor opposition will host the first climate change summit in Australia. By bringing together some of the nation’s best business and science brains, the summit will begin to shape a national consensus on the best way forward for Australia over the next decade. Labor building the future; the coalition still living in the past. The Prime Minister and his party of cave dwellers are still walking with dinosaurs but, come the end of the year, they also will be extinct. (Time expired)