Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order on addressing people by their correct title. The Minister for the Environment has a particularly grand title and it should be honoured in this parliament.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. I say to the Manager of Opposition Business and explain to the House that I do give great latitude to the Manager of Opposition Business and to the Leader of the House given the positions they hold, but I do not want to see a repeat of that.

Mrs McNamara interjecting—

The member for Dobell will cease interjecting.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment. Will the minister please update the House on how the government is tackling climate change without pushing up the cost of electricity for consumers? Is the minister aware of any alternative plan?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do want to thank the member for Petrie for his question. I say to the Manager of Opposition Business, I confess I do not have any skiing medals. I do not have any medals for being the best skier. My point is that we are practical environmentalists on this side. We want to do real things to reduce emissions. When we look at what has happened in recent times around the world, we see firstly that on our watch the government has contributed in a very significant way to the success of the Montreal protocol and the creation of the road map which came from that. That is a saving of potentially 90 billion tonnes of emissions between now and 2050. The 2020 Kyoto rules were settled in the Australian offices at the Paris talks. The 2030 agreement was contributed to in a very significant way by the work of the foreign minister and others.

Domestically what we found is that we have achieved almost 93 million tonnes of emissions reductions through the Emissions Reduction Fund. We have seven million tonnes of soil carbon, over seven million tonnes of Savannah management—a large proportion of which is Indigenous groups doing work on Indigenous land to reduce bushfire, to improve the quality of land and at the same time to generate genuine long-term income for themselves. It is a great combination of Indigenous groups working their land, receiving income and doing the right thing by the environment.

At the same time, we have done all of this whilst reducing the pressure on family electricity bills by the largest amount in Australian history. By comparison, what is it that that our friends on the other side have done and what are they proposing? When they tried to tackle this question, they drove up electricity prices. They offered 5½ billion dollars to Victoria's brown coal power stations not to close down, not to clean up but to continue operating—$250 million to Loy Yang and Hazelwood, and $250 million to Yallourn.

What are they now proposing? They are not only putting the squeeze on families by hurting their house prices, but they now want to increase the cost of living. So it is the time for the Leader of the Opposition to come clean on how much he will increase household electricity prices by. This actually matters to families. That is what they talk about around the kitchen table. When those opposite were in government, Treasury modelled their current policy as showing a 78 per cent increase in wholesale electricity prices. So under us, electricity prices— (Time expired)