Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Having recently been given the privilege of serving as Assistant Minister to the Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction, I thought it opportune to outline the approach I'll be bringing to this role and how excited I am to fulfil it as part of getting Australia to carbon neutrality by 2050.

When members get elevated to these important offices, they obviously bring in some of their experience, and I've always taken a very long term interest in climate change policy. For instance, many years ago, when I was working in the space of intellectual property policy, I became particularly exercised by and interested in the attempts by the Greens, amongst others, to try and undermine investment and innovation in low-carbon technology, always understanding that technology was going to be the pathway for us to decouple economic growth from a dependence on fossil fuels and other carbon emissions. It took me particularly to the Copenhagen conference in 2009, where I heard firsthand from many green activist groups how they wanted to get rid of intellectual property on low-carbon technology and the terrifying impacts that would have for getting the world to a carbon-neutral future.

As a result of the discussions in this parliament related to an emissions trading scheme and carbon tax, I then went off and learned about carbon accounting at Swinburne University. Later, because I became interested in the science of climate change, I went and did postgraduate studies at Murdoch University, which were partly interrupted by my time as Australia's Human Rights Commissioner, but they did give me valuable insight into the science underpinning climate change. More recently, I went off to Cambridge and studied 'business to net zero' because it gave me insight into the challenges that businesses face and how we've got to be working with them. But, when you go through and unpack the issues, particularly through the 'business to net zero' approach, it outlined firstly the scale of the challenge that the world faces but, secondly, that what we need is a model based on cooperative leadership, working with industry, households and of course government, to be able to drive change and improve the health and welfare of our communities as well as our environmental legacy. What it backed up, more than anything else—and when you take the issue seriously—is that you need to understand that, critically, technology is going to be the solution to getting a decoupling. Compared with the approach of the Greens, who look to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through deindustrialisation, or the approach of Labor, who want to reduce them through a Malthusian constraint on the economy through taxes, a technology based approach takes the issue seriously, because there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution but one that is built on pillars and a cooperative approach.

Finally, nearly a decade ago now, in a book I edited, Turning left or right: values in modern politics, I wrote a chapter specifically on what the Liberal solution should be for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and it was to back in technology which drove economic growth. Frankly, we'd cut emissions even if we— (Time expired)