Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I suggest that the senator is being quite churlish here. I was informed immediately after question time, as I walked back to my office, by one of my staff members that my office had been contacted. I thought it was during question time, but I then corrected myself and said ‘before question time’. We were contacted before question time by a staff member from Senator Allison’s office who said, as is the normal courtesy, that a question was overdue and that it would be raised. That staff member was given an explanation that the question was long and complex. I think if you had the patience to listen to Senator Allison’s immediate contribution you would understand that it was a long and complex question about one of the most important policies before this government—and that is our response to the greenhouse challenge that this country is faced with. We have around $2 billion worth of programs—probably dozens of programs, not to exaggerate—all aimed at addressing the challenge of providing a reliable energy supply to Australia and the world and to do so with significant reductions to greenhouse gases.

So we informed Senator Allison’s staff that we had received from the department the draft response but that it had only been received in my office some 10 days after the date for tabling. All of this information was given to Senator Allison’s staff. It may be that Senator Allison’s staff did not pass the message on to her. But it was very carefully relayed to Senator Allison’s staff that my office had just received those draft responses and that we obviously wanted to give them the sort of diligence that Senator Allison has called for here. All of that was explained to her office, and my staff thought that that was the end of the matter. They thought that we had given a legitimate, sensible and honest explanation and that that would be the end of the matter. As soon as I knew that Senator Allison was on her feet I returned to the chamber. So I think to make an allegation that I have some sort of contempt or arrogance not to address this issue in the parliament is very churlish, unfair and unjustified.

The accusation that we do not take this subject seriously really flies in the face of the facts. Under the leadership of John Howard and the initial leadership of former environment minister Robert Hill, this government has put in place a range of programs over the past decade that are unrivalled in most parts of the world. The government has put in place a comprehensive program to address how you supply energy and transportation to Australia and to the world in a way that brings down our greenhouse gas signature. I will make a couple of points that need to be made repeatedly in this debate. Firstly, Australia has been incredibly successful in meeting this challenge. We will by about 2011, depending on Australia’s economic growth over the next couple of years, have doubled the size of the Australian economy from its size in 1990, which is the year the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has chosen to make a benchmark year for emissions. So the Kyoto targets that around 35 per cent of the world, including Australia, have set for themselves use 1990 as a base year.

In that period of time, Mr Deputy President—and a Queenslander would understand this better than most people, and certainly more than a Victorian Democrat senator—Australia’s economy has roughly doubled, and Queensland and Western Australia have led that phenomenal growth which has underpinned so much of the living standard security that people have enjoyed during the nineties and this decade. We have doubled the size of the economy, yet we are on track to achieve a greenhouse signature that is only eight per cent above our 1990 level. Image that: we have doubled the size of the cake economically, doubled the size of industrial production, doubled the output from the economy and massively improved the number of jobs but increased our greenhouse signature by but eight per cent. Is that any sort of signal that we should be complacent? Of course it is not. What we do know is that in the next 10, 20 or 30 years, with good economic management, a good industrial sector, a good productive sector and all of the people of Australia working as hard as they do, we would like to see the economy expand again.

The International Energy Agency predicts that the use of energy in the world will roughly double by 2030, and we know that Australia will probably see a similar sort of expansion in its energy requirements. We also know, as Senator Allison has said, that the Australian government is making a magnificent contribution to the science that is building—a contribution that all Australians and all of the Australian science sector should be proud of. We are committing in excess of $30 million to building that science—to understanding the impacts of human induced climate change, what carbon and methane do when they accumulate in the atmosphere at the sorts of levels that we have seen over the last 100 or so years, what will happen if they keep accumulating at the rate they are accumulating at, what the impacts will be on the climate and what the impacts will be on Australia. We know from all of that science, to which Australian scientists make an extraordinary contribution, kicking way above their weight as a country and scientific community, that we will need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 50 to 60 per cent by 2060.

Senator Allison’s question goes to these vital issues. She asks that we respond in detail. Of course, that is exactly what my office will do. But she challenged me in her contribution to answer the question and she said that the government was not serious about renewables. We have hundreds and hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars going into direct investment in research and development of renewables, on wind, on solar, and on solar thermal. I recently opened for the CSIRO their solar centre in Newcastle. This is world-leading technology and development on solar thermal which could see a hybrid technology between solar thermal and gas, increasing the energy coefficient of the gas by around 30 per cent and therefore creating the sort of breakthrough the world needs to store renewable energy—one of the problems that the world needs to get to the nub of—by storing it in an existing fossil fuel. It is what I would call a hybrid technology. The government is pursuing world-leading energy efficiency measures. The energy efficiency legislation that passed through this parliament mandating efficiency measures for major companies and major emitters is world-leading legislation, and we have a range of other efficiency measures.

The questions that Senator Allison asks me to provide answers to her office on will in fact cover this, but we will make the point, when we answer the question with the detail and diligence and the honesty that she should expect from the government and from me on these issues, that the solution to the dual policy dilemma of stabilising and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and of providing reliable energy to Australians so that we can have job security is a multitrack and multifaceted approach. We also need to supply energy to the world so that those in developing countries who do not enjoy our living standards can at least aspire to them, and that too will be part of that multitrack, multifaceted approach.

People on the Left—and the Democrats I think could be accused of this—will tell you that you can do it all without addressing the coal issue; that you can get rid of coal, move away from fossil fuels and just go for renewables and energy efficiency. That is a very dangerous proposition because it is false and it will lead people down the wrong path. It cannot be done. All of the expert advice around the world coalesces around the fact that you need to use all of the available technologies, invest in all of them, and bring them all on as quickly as possible if you are to reach that dual goal: energy reliability and security and lower greenhouse gas emissions. I may seek to incorporate this graph in Hansard, if Hansard has got full colour, because I think that this one stabilisation triangle graph from Princeton University tells the picture better than any thousand words I can ever put down. It shows on the left-hand axis where you have got rising levels of—