Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is again to the Prime Minister. I refer to the Prime Minister’s remarkable comments on the Today show this morning when he said, in relation to Sir Nicholas Stern: ‘Many of the things he’s talking about are already our policies.’ Prime Minister, isn’t it a fact that Stern says: ‘Ratify the Kyoto protocol’? The government says no; Labor says yes. Stern says, ‘Cut greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent by 2050’. The government says no; Labor says yes. Stern says, ‘Establish an emissions trading scheme.’ The government says no; Labor says yes. Prime Minister, after 11 long years in office, when will the government get fair dinkum about acting on climate change?

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The policies that I particularly referred to on the Today program and that we hold in common with Stern are those relating to nuclear power and clean coal technology.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The opposition reacts negatively to that but the truth is that if you want to run power stations in a modern economy there are really only two ways you can do it. You do it by fossil fuels or you do it by nuclear power. That is the view not of John Howard; that is the view of Jim Peacock, the Chief Scientist of Australia. I will take my advice on scientific matters from the Australian Chief Scientist before I will take it from the Leader of the Opposition.

This is at the heart of this debate: you cannot run power stations on renewables. Yet the Leader of the Opposition and those who sit behind him believe that you can. The only way that you can run power stations in Australia, and therefore provide electricity for a modern economy, is to run them on fossil fuels. If you believe in reducing the greenhouse gas content of fossil fuel usage you must clean up the use of coal. And as you clean up the use of coal you make its use more expensive, and that is where nuclear power comes into the equation.

That is the irreducible common-sense minimum of this debate about the future of greenhouse gas emissions in a country such as Australia. We can have all the flamboyance and all the rhetoric under the sun but, if we are to sustain our standard of living and if we are to remain a modern economy, we need to run power stations. And you cannot run power stations on solar or wind power. You can only run them on fossil fuels or on nuclear power. They are the two most reliable, logical ways of running power stations.

So let me say to the Leader of the Opposition that there are areas where I do not agree with Stern, and I do not think I ever will. I think one of the things that Australians should understand about this climate change debate is that some of the prescriptions that come from Europeans come from a European perspective. They do not come from an Australian perspective. Nations that do not have vast reserves of fossil fuel have a different view about this matter than nations that do. Australia is in a very unusual position: we have a small population but we have been blessed by providence with large reserves of fossil fuel. We should play to our natural advantages and I am simply not going to agree to prescriptions that are going to damage the future of the Australian economy, and I am not going to agree to prescriptions that are going to cost the jobs of Australian coalminers.

We have no intention of turning our backs on the coalminers of Australia. We do not have the view about coalmining that is held by the shadow spokesman on environment matters, the member for Kingsford Smith. And so far as Kyoto is concerned, the reason the Australian government has not signed Kyoto is that if we had entered into the Kyoto protocols in their present terms it would potentially have put this country at a competitive disadvantage. I note, incidentally, that unlike many of the countries that have ratified the Kyoto protocol, this country is on track to meet its Kyoto target, unlike many of the countries that presume to lecture Australia on what she should be doing.