Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction. Will the minister update the House on the Morrison government's progress on reaching Australia's emissions reduction targets?

Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Curtin for her question. I acknowledge that as a former vice chancellor of Notre Dame University in WA she knows the extraordinary role that technology can play in solving hard problems. One of those, of course, is bringing down emissions whilst maintaining a strong economy, and that's exactly what we're committed to doing as part of our comeback from the pandemic. We have strong targets, we have an enviable track record and we have a clear plan. And, when we make commitments, we keep them. Our commitment is clear: lower prices, keeping the lights on and bringing down emissions. I can confirm to the House that our plan is working, because the Kyoto era came to an end on 30 June this year, and we now know, from a report that was put out yesterday, that we beat our Kyoto-era targets by 459 million tonnes. That's almost a year's worth of emissions.

When we came into government the deficit to reach that target was 755 million tonnes. What an extraordinary turnaround. And, whilst others have walked away from their commitments, whilst others have done that, we've rolled up our sleeves and got on with the job. Now, thanks to significant reductions in electricity, in agriculture and in the land sector we've absolutely smashed our targets. In fact, this year, the year just past, our emissions were 519 million tonnes. That was 20 per cent lower than the forecast for this year when those opposite left government, and that was with a carbon tax. They had a carbon tax!

Australia's experience has been that when new technologies become commercially competitive Australians will adopt them. We know that's how to bring down emissions, and we're seeing that with renewables right now. We've seen $30 billion of investments in renewables since 2017. It's the same rate this year as last year, and we're deploying them 10 times faster than the global average and four times faster than the US, the UK, Europe and Japan.

Not all countries can boast our level of success. We've brought down emissions 16.6 per cent since 2005, the baseline year for Paris, and countries like Canada and New Zealand have barely budged. We're down 16.6 per cent in that time. We're getting on with the job of bringing down emissions by deploying technology, not taxation, because, if it's not technology, it is taxation. We're getting on with the job, with real and practical action, to bring down emissions as we come back from the pandemic.