Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] My question is to the Prime Minister. In response to last night's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the Prime Minister claimed today:

We need more technology and no-one will be matching our ambition for a technology-driven solution.

If that's true, why did the Prime Minister claim that electric vehicles would 'end the weekend'?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll ask the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction to add to my answer, but the claim made by the questioner is false, and I will ask the minister—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

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

Members on my left! I'm just going to say, before I call the Manager of Opposition Business, I find it very difficult to see how this could be a point of order on relevance. If the Manager of Opposition Business and, clearly, members behind him are taking issue with what the Prime Minister said, there's no standing order that covers that. But I'll hear from the Manager of Opposition Business.

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

Mr Speaker, I was wanting to be helpful, to give the Prime Minister the quote where he said it would 'end the weekend'.

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

You can seek to table something later on, if you wish to.

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

I thank the member for McMahon for his question. The report that we saw come out last night underscores the importance of our work in Australia to reduce emissions in Australia and to support the reduction of emissions right around the world. This will be achieved through practical solutions that allow Australia and other countries throughout the world to reduce their emissions whilst maintaining strong economies, investment and growth. The secret to that is technology, not taxes, because technology allows us to break the trade-off between economy and environment. We can have both a healthy environment and a healthy economy through the deployment of, development of and investment in technology.

Our approach is working. We beat our Kyoto 2020 targets by 459 million tonnes—almost a year's worth of emissions. Central to that is the hard work of our farmers. Central to that is one in four Australians with solar panels on their roofs. Central to that is manufacturing energy efficiencies and changes in the way we're manufacturing products in this country to bring down our energy costs and bring down emissions at the same time.

We are on track to meet and beat our 2030 targets. Indeed, in the last two years alone we've improved our performance versus our 2030 targets by the equivalent of taking every car in Australia off the road for 15 years. That's 14.5 million tonnes. We didn't have to take cars off the road to do that. Indeed, our investments across low-energy technologies commitments come to $20 billion over the coming decade. That will be matched with private sector investment, totalling up $80 billion of investment. Included in that is $1.4 billion to help increase the uptake of low- and zero-emissions vehicle technologies, as part of our Future Fuels Strategy.

We believe in choice. Central to this are the decisions made by Australians to choose technologies that are the right technologies for them. We're getting on with the job. It's technology, not taxes.

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

Is the Manager of Opposition Business seeking to table a document?

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

Yes. I seek to table the transcript of the Prime Minister's press conference on 7 April 2019 where he referred to—

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

Is leave granted?

Leave not granted.