Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I have some sympathy for Senator Heffernan’s position. I note the angst in the way he has put it forward and I recognise his experience as a primary producer in the Murray-Darling Basin. The underlying tenet of his speech was that we need action to deal with the massive impact that climate change, which we have known about for decades, is having not just in the Murray-Darling Basin but right across the agricultural lands of Australia. The first piece of action, however, is the government saying, ‘We’re not going to support an inquiry proposed by Green Senators Siewert and Milne that looks at (a) the long-term impacts on Australian primary producers, rural communities and the environment, with reduced and increasingly variable rainfall, increased temperatures and higher evaporation rates as a result of climate change; and (b)—listen to this—potential adaptation strategies to mitigate these impacts to ensure the security of Australian food production and maintain the viability of rural communities.

Let us make this clear: there has been a need for action. There has been a need for what Senator Heffernan calls political will and courage. There has been a need for the recognition that the federal government, the most powerful authority in this nation, should take a lead. The angst from Senator Heffernan is because the government has patently failed to do so in the 11 years it has been in office. The patent failure goes right to the top; it begins at the top with Prime Minister Howard because he has turned his back on the scientific evidence. He has turned his back on the powers that he has, including the corporations powers, and he has repeatedly and serially offended the proposal that Senator Heffernan has just put forward that we need to harness the knowledge we have and come to the aid of people in rural and regional Australia.

Senator Heffernan and Senator Milne say, ‘Let’s harness that knowledge. Let’s get it together so that we can act on it,’ and we have an injunction from the Prime Minister’s office, because that is where the fate of these motions is sealed, saying ‘No, we won’t do that.’ Here we are, 11 years down the line, and Prime Minister Howard says, ‘I won’t support an inquiry. I will not support harnessing the knowledge,’ as Senator Heffernan says, ‘and therefore I pull the rug from under informed action.’

Glory be! This nation needs informed action, but we have got a Prime Minister with his head stuck in the sand, turning his back on the information available and therefore the prescription for deliberated action coming to the aid of rural Australia. If we do not come to the aid of rural Australia, the impact is going to be felt by all 23 million Australians. They will feel it in the supermarket, they will feel it in their bathrooms, they will feel it when they go to their refrigerators and, most of all, they will feel it when they think about how much worse it is going to be for their children and grandchildren.

This has been a decade of lost opportunities. This has been a decade of studied ignorance by the Prime Minister and his cabinet. This is a decade, as Senator Milne pointed out, capped off by a budget in May in which the Treasurer did not even mention climate change, let alone allocate the resources that are needed to help the obvious readjustment that is going to happen in Australia.

Senator Heffernan said, quite rightly, that obviously there is going to be the removal of a lot of activity in the Murray-Darling Basin. I would add to that, ‘Ditto elsewhere,’ particularly across the whole of southern and south-east Australia. Then he said, ‘We’ve got to look at the environment,’ and I totally agree. In a jocular fashion, Senator Heffernan said he would be a good Green. The fact is that his knowledge of the threat to and the damage being done to rural Australia by climate change would fit him out for that. But the Greens are calling for action based on knowledge, and poor Senator Heffernan is caught by the Prime Minister’s injunction, ‘We won’t have it through this parliament.’

The best we on the crossbench can do is put forward a motion like this which ends in action. The better thing to do would be for the government to go into action, but it has not, it is not and it will not. The best this Prime Minister can do is last Sunday call a summit for Tuesday morning—so that there is time to watch the Melbourne Cup on Tuesday afternoon—and announce some measures which temporarily make people feel better but which fall enormously short of the national obligation he has to recognise climate change and recognise that, despite his dismissal of the fact of climate change by saying, ‘I don’t listen to doom and gloom,’ for many people in the bush, doom and gloom is their reality at the moment, added to by the interest rate rise yesterday, by the rising Australian dollar and by falling productivity.

Prime Minister Howard, that is a lethal cocktail for so many farms and so many rural communities in Australia, and you have failed to act on it. In fact, you have made it worse by mismanagement of this nation, because good management comes from using the knowledge available to ensure you make the future better, not worse.

But the Prime Minister has patently failed and now we have what Senator Heffernan calls ‘this bloody drought’. With those three words, he sums up the anguish of the minority in government that recognises that inaction is now leading to enormous damage—to families, to farmlands, to the economy and to this nation’s future. Senator Heffernan said rather weakly, ‘We’ve had enough inquiries.’ If that is the case, where is the action plan? Where is the informed program by this government to meet the desperate need of people suffering this one-in-1,000-year drought, as it is being called, which everybody must fear, with climate change, is about to become normal? That is the prediction. It has been predicted for years that what was once a one-in-100-year drought is going to become commonplace and what was a one-in-1,000-year drought will come more often. And it is not just drought but also hailstorms, cyclones and other weather changes right across the field that are going to have an impact on the security of Australians into the future.

Senator Heffernan says that water has been catastrophically mismanaged by the states. This government, under the Constitution—with, for example, its corporations power—has long held the ability to prevent catastrophic mismanagement. But it has failed to do so. Now we have a mixed-up, muddled, inadequate Prime Minister who says, ‘We will have water trading—that’ll fix it; let’s have it across borders,’ and a parliamentary secretary for water, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, who says, ‘Let’s privatise it; that’ll fix it.’ Anybody who has read economics, and has in particular looked at, for example, the privatisation of Victoria’s transport systems and its outcomes, will recognise that good management is required, but so often privatisation, which insists on a profit on top of good management, simply leads to more expensive management, which is not necessarily good and can sometimes be quite harmful.

The same Prime Minister says, ‘I’m still not in the camp of those who are more worried about climate change, but I’ll have water trading,’ in this last, late, desperate stage because it sounds good and it might be an elixir—it is not; good management is—but he will not have carbon trading. He says, ‘I’ll let those people polluting the atmosphere do so for free,’ because he supports, as he said yesterday, dirty coal as the primary means of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity in this country, when we have to change from that. The whole wisdom of the world says we must switch from that course, and our Prime Minister says, ‘I’m right behind the old formula, and if there’s a backup it’s nuclear.’ In this sunny country, he repeatedly gets it wrong, saying that solar power cannot be the answer; renewable energy cannot be the answer. And he does not understand energy efficiency, which is linked to the fastest, biggest alternative source for energy production that this country has. The Prime Minister does not want carbon trading. Well, he is going to have to have it or he is going to have to place a carbon tax on those who pollute, because, with climate change, that is generating much worse problems for our farms, our towns and our huge urban cities. And these problems will be experienced by our children, who will look back aghast at the delinquency of the Howard government’s period in office.

Senator Heffernan said that we need to protect the environment. Well, that includes the wetlands. Just this morning Senator Siewert moved a motion that the state and federal governments guarantee the protection of the Ramsar-listed—that is the highest recognised listing in the world for the protection of bird-breeding wetlands—Gwydir wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin in New South Wales, and it was voted down.

Yesterday the Prime Minister indicated that he will drain the wetlands. He will block the water to them—with the catastrophic effect that has on the bird-breeding cycle in Australia—if necessary to ensure water for towns. There was no mention of the huge, largely foreign owned, cotton combines sucking water out of these same rivers. The Prime Minister gives them precedence over this nation’s heritage and, presumably, over towns’ water supplies that are so desperately threatened by this climate change and which we do have to ensure until the good rains come again, however temporary that might be.

Senator Heffernan says that the Chinese are sending water here at 28c a litre to undercut our markets. Do you know what? Our Prime Minister is currently negotiating another free trade agreement with China to guarantee that that can happen on a whole range of products—a whole lot of them—to remove all inhibitions to trade.

What he is not negotiating is a carbon tax on transport carrying these goods around the world so that the pollution that comes from long-haul air and sea transport bringing these goods so cheaply into Australia is properly paid for by those who do it. They are effectively being subsidised at the cost of our climate by the thinking of this Prime Minister when he meets President Hu or his successors in negotiating another free trade agreement. Ask farmers in rural Australia if they think that is going to help them through this crisis at the moment.

Senator Heffernan says that he has got a farmer friend who has got new processes in farming which make his farm eight times more productive than a neighbour’s, and we all know of such farming success stories in the face of terrible weather conditions, of terrible drought and a shortage of rain. Would it not be sensible to have an inquiry which was dedicated to action and which ensured that the neighbour was able to increase productivity on her or his farm eight times in the teeth of a drought? Do we just leave it to people to go backwards or do we make sure that they get knowledge and support so that they can change their farms to be productive in the face of changed weather conditions?

What Senator Siewert and Senator Milne are putting forward is a sensible proposal to gather the knowledge and then to go into action to develop an action plan. And Senator Heffernan comes in here and says, ‘No, we just need government action.’ The problem is that we will not get government action, because we do not have a Prime Minister who is able to face up to the awesome threat and reality of climate change and use the powers at his disposal through his government. They have got control of both houses of this place to bring in the enormous changes that this nation is going to have to have, not only to face climate change but also to get commercial, business, jobs and export advantages out of being a leader in the world in such things as environmental technology applied to the land as well as to energy production and water recycling, for example.

Germany and Japan lead the world. Why? Because Australia, through the Howard government, has either turned its back on such research or in some critical cases defunded it, while the Prime Minister pours hundreds of millions of dollars into coal. And so do state governments like the Bracks government, the Iemma government and the Queensland government when they ought to be getting behind sunrise industries—the industries of the future, the industries which are going to bring prosperity and a world lead in business to this country.

So I support this motion of course. It says: let us go for knowledge and, out of knowledge, let us go for action. It is deplorable that the government is going to use its numbers in this Senate today to again turn its back on knowledge and fail to act at a time when this nation needs both knowledge and an action government, not a government locked into the last century’s thinking.