John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At a community forum in Perth the Leader of the Opposition evidently put forward the completely discredited proposition that the science that describes the processes driving climate change 'was not settled' and further stated 'Whether carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven'. Once again, in an unguarded moment, the Leader of the Opposition allowed his strongly held belief that 'climate change is crap' to leak out from his usual deceptive facade of claiming that he either understands the seriousness of the issue or intends to do something about it.

On the following day, no doubt following a frenzy of phone calls from his unsettled but more enlightened colleagues, the Leader of the Opposition suddenly discovered that, as he said on Adelaide radio, 'Climate change is real' and 'Humanity is making a contribution' and, furthermore, 'It's important to have a strong and effective policy to bring emissions down and that is what we're doing.'

It would appear that the positions of the opposition leader on climate change and its causes now flip-flop on a daily basis, with him on one day saying that climate change is 'crap' and on the next day saying that 'Climate change is real'. I ask tonight: would the Leader of the Opposition please tell us which one of these positions represents the truth as he sees it?

The latest version of the opposition's confused policy on climate change that the Leader of the Opposition likes to refer to can be found in documentary form on the Liberal Party's website entitled The Coalition's Direct Action Plan. This rambling document is a grab bag of promises and unworkable proposals that contains no discussion of the science of climate change or of the purpose behind the opposition's muddled measures for emission reductions. Curiously, while the opposition has been claiming that Australia should not be leading the world in measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, this document has a list of major economies that have already introduced carbon taxes and emission trading schemes.

The list includes France, which has carbon taxes and an emissions trading scheme; Germany, which has carbon taxes and an emissions trading scheme; Italy, which has carbon taxes and an emissions trading scheme; the United Kingdom, which has carbon taxes and an emissions trading scheme; Japan, which has carbon taxes and an emissions trading scheme; Canada, which has carbon taxes; Mexico, which has carbon taxes; Turkey, which has carbon taxes; the United States, which has emissions trading for power stations and carbon taxes in some states; and South Africa, which according to the coalition's direct action plan is also considering the introduction of a carbon tax despite the country's position as the world's third largest coal exporter. This list, including errors or omissions, is taken from the current coalition policy document that outlines its proposed measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. By the way, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the assistance of the opposition, the table to which I am referring is on page 9 of their document.

In reading his own policy, the Leader of the Opposition may discover that, instead of Australia leading the world in introducing measures to reduce emissions, as he claims, this country is—thanks to the opposition's destructive obstruction and deception—actually behind many other parts of the world in implementing effective responses to global warming. I suggest that the problem that the Leader of the Opposition and the other deniers have with comprehending the links between carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, global warming and resulting climate change is that they fail to discriminate between belief and measurements.

I further suggest that the division between the deniers and the scientists is another manifestation of CP Snow's famous Two Cultures, the breakdown in communication between the sciences and the humanities that still forms a major hindrance in the solving of many of the world's problems. To quote Snow:

So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

No more is this evident than in the position of the climate change deniers and their supporters in the opposition.

My motion that climate change is real and human induced was voted on in this House in February of this year. It was supported by this government. The Leader of the Opposition wants to talk about the economy. I make the point that if you do not look after the environment you have no economy. (Time expired)