Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In stark contrast to the previous speaker, I want to congratulate the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and the Australian Conservation Foundation for their tremendous energy and commitment to the future of our beautiful, unique and fragile world. Today the Australian Conservation Foundation is delivering a petition to members of parliament with the signatures of over 34,000 Australians, asking us not to drop the ball on climate change. Led by ACF climate change campaigner Abigail Jabines and community delegates around Australia, such as Victoria's Caroline Ingvarson, the petition calls on all members of parliament to protect Australia's climate laws and to vote against the repeal of our climate legislation.

I have also brought to parliament a safe climate road map prepared by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and endorsed by many young members of my electorate. A number of them came to my electorate office and urged me to support a strong renewable energy target. Indeed, it is absolutely scandalous that the Liberal Party could deceive the renewable energy industry and voters about its intentions concerning the renewable energy target the way it did last year. Environment Minister Hunt said on 27 February 2013:

We will be keeping the Renewable Energy Target. We have made that commitment. We have no plans or proposals to change it. We have no plans or intentions for change and we have offered bipartisan support to that, and we will maintain bipartisan support towards the 20 per cent target.

I repeat:

We will maintain bipartisan support towards the 20 per cent target.

Later, on 19 June, he said:

We agree on the national targets to reduce our emissions by five per cent by 2020. We also agree on the Renewable Energy Target and one of the things we do not want to do is to become a party where there's this wild sovereign risk where businesses take steps to their detriment on the basis of a pledge and a policy of government, and we are very clear that that is not where we want to be.

Good grief. If you ever wanted an Exhibit A of wild sovereign risk, it would be this government's treatment of the renewable energy industry. There was a time when ministers and shadow ministers would resign if their credibility had been damaged by things they had said or done, or simply by things that happened subsequent to their statements or actions. The things that have happened around climate change on this government's watch have completely and utterly stripped the environment minister of all credibility. He should do the honourable thing and resign.

It is not just the axing of the Climate Commission, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. It is not just the inquiry into the Renewable Energy Target or the shameful international position the government has taken, saying that no country can be expected to sacrifice resource revenue to tackle climate change. Is the Prime Minister not aware that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiarity of the environment? No environment, no economy.

It is worse than that: the Prime Minister appointed Maurice Newman as chairman of his Business Advisory Council. Mr Newman describes climate change as a 'scientific delusion'. He says Australia is 'hostage to climate change madness' and accuses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of dishonesty and deceit. And the Prime Minister makes this man his business adviser!

Is it a scientific delusion that, in Australia, average air temperatures have increased by 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1910? Is it a scientific delusion that, since the 1950s, every decade has been warmer than the one before? Is it a scientific delusion that 2013 was Australia's hottest year since records began more than a century ago? Given these facts, it would be crazy for governments and business not take the forecasts seriously. These forecasts include more heatwaves, more droughts and more bushfires. It would be imprudent and negligent for either government or business to ignore this. The tragedy of these kinds of disasters is avoidable. The renewable energy industry has the capacity—if only we helped it rather than trying to strangle it—to take us down a very different path. The CEO of the Clean Energy Council, David Green, said that solar PV is transitioning from being disruptive technology to being incumbent technology, displacing coal; generation will move from its traditional place at the point of supply to at or near the point of use. Climate change is happening now and our response needs to be on a scale, and of an urgency, that matches the problem.

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Maybe the member for Wills could move to Tasmania? It is a wonderful climate down there; a couple of degrees warmer has great benefits for the many aspects of life in Tasmania.

Tunbridge husband-and-wife farming couple, Richard and Emily Gardner, are among the leaders of a revolution underway in Tasmania that will cement my state's reputation as the most reliable source of food and fibre on a continent often challenged by harsh climatic conditions over many years. Early in August will be the opening and commissioning of the largest irrigation scheme in the state of Tasmania, the Midlands irrigation scheme, which will deliver 38,500 megalitres to over 55,500 hectares in the Midlands of Tasmania. To put that in perspective, that is an area greater than the Ord River scheme. It is a significant project by any scale.

Tasmania only has two per cent of the nation's land mass but, because of its unique maritime climate at the edge of the Southern Ocean, it has 30 per cent of Australia's total rainfall run-off. That is twice as much as the Murray-Darling Basin. Unfortunately, though, much of it falls in the wrong area with respect to agriculture, but this has been capitalised on in central and western parts of the state through hydro-electricity generation. People ask me why, then, in my home state—and particularly in my largely rural electorate of Lyons—I am working so hard on building irrigation schemes for a place where there is so much rain. The key for Tasmanian farmers is to capture the water to harness the rainfall run-off for later use, before it runs out to sea. Creating further water storages and irrigation for primary production unlocks the massive potential of Tasmania's food production and helps the transformation of traditional produce pursuits such as grazing into higher value outcomes.

Indeed, plans are well advanced to build five additional irrigation schemes across the state, which will have a combined construction and implementation cost of nearly half a billion dollars. These are in the Scottsdale region of the north-east in the electorate of Bass; the Swan River on the east coast in my electorate of Lyons; the Southern Highlands scheme, also in Lyons; the North Esk scheme in Lyons; and the Circular Head scheme up on the north-west coast in the electorate of Braddon. Two of these will be shovel-ready by the end of this year, with the three others not far behind. The five proposed new schemes will need funding totalling approximately $140 million from state and federal governments in addition to the $52 million that will be contributed through irrigators in investments in water entitlements, and an additional private investment on-farm in excess of $200 million for irrigation infrastructure, be it dams or delivery systems. In my electorate of Lyons the Central Highlands is one of the oldest and most sparsely populated areas in the state. Water from the Southern Highlands Irrigation Scheme will be used primarily for cropping, including for poppies—opiate production; cereals and pasture seeds; and irrigated grazing systems to produce prime lambs.

The other potential for huge economic growth is that traditional grazing properties can undergo dairy conversions to expand what is a really booming industry within the state of Tasmania. Recently we have also seen horticultural interests in the form of cherry orchards established in that area. A $28.5 million scheme has also been designed to deliver summer water to a region held back by a lack of reliable water—yes, it does happen in Tasmania. Due to drought, the Central Highlands was declared an exceptional circumstances zone from 2000 to 2002, and again from 2006 to 2008. In addition, two water supply emergency zones have been declared for the Southern Highlands by the state government since 2007.

This Southern Highlands project has an additional benefit of improving the reliability of drinking water supply in the town of Bothwell, which ran out of water during last year's most recent drought. Flow-on economic benefits for the area will include more than 30 full-time jobs in the area as well as 13 indirect jobs. The proposed Swan River scheme on Tasmania's east coast will support viticulture, grazing, irrigated cropping and walnut enterprises. These indeed are valuable investments in my home state, and I will be working very hard with the relevant ministers to seek the federal government's contribution.

Question agreed to.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 13 : 13