Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You might well think it is amusing, but we are facing a global crisis with climate change and oil depletion. The ice sheet in Greenland is melting at three times the rate that scientists thought. The sea level rise is predicted to be half a metre by 2100 and they are now revising that upward. That is why I am saying you cannot solve this problem with the same thinking that created it.

Neither the government nor the Labor Party are prepared to recognise that we have to move to reduced fossil fuel use. We need to reduce fossil fuel use, not shift from one fossil fuel to another. We hear that coal to liquids is now the answer. The Centre for Low Emission Technology has said emphatically that, even if carbon capture and storage were 100 per cent successful, the emissions from tailpipes would be the same as from conventional oil. So what is the point in it? What is the point in investing millions or billions in liquids from coal as a transport fuel when you are going to be exacerbating the greenhouse effect? What’s more, they have said that coal to liquids becomes economical only when the oil price goes high enough. They say that it would cost the equivalent of $30 to $40 a tonne to sequester the carbon and avoid one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions. So the price of oil is going to be very high before gas to liquids becomes feasible, and the price at the bowser way higher than it is now. It is not a solution.

The Prime Minister did not mention once in his entire speech that we need to reduce our dependence on oil. And the best way of reducing our dependence on oil is to redesign our cities to maximise investment in public transport. No. 1, we should have used the surplus in this year’s budget to redesign our cities. The Greens said so at the time; we voted against the budget cuts, the tax cuts, in order to say that the money should have been invested in oil-proofing the country. But no, Treasurer Costello and Prime Minister Howard did not even recognise increased oil prices as a risk to the budget and to the Australian economy. Neither did they see the greenhouse effect, global warming, as a major risk to the economy. The Prime Minister says in his paper, ‘Oh, yes, Hurricane Katrina disrupted refinery supplies.’ He mentions the Alaskan technical problems. Why are they having technical problems in Alaska? It is because their oil is running out. The field is running out. They are injecting more and more water to push the oil out, and that is resulting in corrosion and sedimentation. That is the cause of the technical problems. The hurricane season is about to worsen because of global warming; what is the government’s solution? It is to exacerbate global warming and bring on more storms and more problems. That is not a solution.

We need rapid investment in alternative fuels. We need investment in public transport to reduce our dependence on oil. We need mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standards; the government votes again and again against mandatory fuel efficiency. We need these things right now. The Treasurer gave $52 million to the Ford company without tying it to vehicle fuel efficiency design. It would have been a simple initiative, but he was not prepared to do it.

In terms of alternative fuels, the greatest hope is lignocellulose; it is not using food crops for fuel crops or petroleum based fertilisers to grow fuel crops to put into ethanol. The greatest hope for ethanol is lignocellulose, and that is where the investment ought to be going today, not into coal to liquids. When we put it to ABARE that we cannot go down the road of coal to liquids because of climate change, what did they say? ‘You put climate change to one side.’ You cannot put climate change to one side.

The Prime Minister also talks about his various initiatives in terms of solar power. I would remind the Senate that Senator Brown many years ago brought in his sun bill, which was designed to take away the diesel fuel rebate and assist people in remote and rural areas to switch over to solar. Wouldn’t it have been a good thing if that had occurred at that time? Now the Prime Minister has suddenly discovered solar.

We also have Martin Ferguson speaking about nuclear power. Suddenly he is really interested in climate change when he wants to expand uranium mining, but when he wants to support the coal industry he is back to coal to liquids. You cannot have it both ways. Either you agree that the world needs technologies that reduce carbon and you act accordingly, or you do not take a consistent position on climate change, and I am afraid that is what is going on here.

The Prime Minister says that a carbon tax would cripple the industry. We had the oil industry in the hearing last week saying that they wanted transparent and finite evidence of subsidies. We are subsidising every one of those oil companies every day, with the ramifications of climate change. I put it to them: at what price should we be putting this climate impact and how long should we give you that subsidy? Every day the taxpayers of Australia subsidise the coal industry and the oil industry, and this package is yet more money for the coal industry and the oil industry. Almost all the money in the Prime Minister’s package is going to the coal industry for coal to liquids or to the oil industry. Their solution to the fact that we are running out of oil is to say, ‘Let us go and find more.’ I would suggest that the Prime Minister has got his head so far in the sand that he is looking for the oil himself, frankly. That is what the problem is here: they are using exactly the same thinking as they did previously. Why not do what Sweden has done and say, ‘We cannot afford dependence on foreign oil; let us go oil-free by 2020.’ They may not achieve it but at least they will move a long way down the track.

I would also like to remind the Treasurer and all those commentators on economics out there of the appalling news on the current account deficit. We had evidence in the oil inquiry last week from the companies themselves that the shortfall in terms of importing foreign oil could be in the range of $A12 billion to $A25 billion per annum by 2015. The difference between the $12 billion and the $25 billion depends on what you estimate the oil price to be. If you estimate the oil price to be $US50 a barrel, by 2015 the deficit in Australia will be $25 billion per year. Isn’t that a major shock to the Australian economy, and why didn’t Treasurer Costello identify that as a major shock coming down the line? By 2015 we will be importing more than 50 per cent—more like 60 per cent—of our oil. So, in the face of a hideous current account deficit problem facing us right now under the inflationary pressure of having to import foreign oil, does the Prime Minister use the words ‘public transport’ once? Not even once in his whole response. He does not talk about demand-side reduction.

There are two ways of looking at things. You can just assume ‘business as usual’ and try to dredge up more supply at greater cost, or you can say, ‘We can reduce demand by redesigning the way we live, investing in those technologies that will solve both the oil prices and climate change.’ If you are going to exacerbate climate change, you are going to make the global situation worse and it will cost a lot more in the longer term.

The Greens’ proposal is to start seeing oil depletion as real. Peak oil is real. Stop imagining that you just have to go out there and find more. Get your head out of the sand, Prime Minister, and oil-proof Australia, not come up with these short-term, knee-jerk reactions that will make climate change worse and expose us to more shocks in the economy. Let Peter Costello, the Treasurer of this country, focus on a $25 billion deficit each year—and it will go higher than that after 2015. It will go significantly higher in later years, say the oil companies themselves. It is a very sobering thought, very sobering for people pulling up to the petrol bowser today. Let us get off our dependence on oil. Let us do what Sweden has done. Let us aim for an oil-free Australia by 2020 and let us invest the surplus in public transport now. Take the GST off public transport and get this country focused on the real challenges for the future.

Question agreed to.