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

I rise today to take note of various ministers’ answers in relation to climate change and nuclear energy. I want to begin by saying that it is time this whole parliament started to take climate change very seriously. It is no good continually grandstanding and playing games because this is the crisis of the century. The government has no consistent policy, no thought-out policy, to respond to climate change. It is mixing up two issues—energy security and climate change—and as a result we have got a plethora of policies all over the place with ministers contradicting one another left, right and centre.

Let us start with the Prime Minister. Less than two months ago he said that he was sceptical about the more gloomy predictions for climate change. No, we were not going to have an emissions trading scheme. It would break the economy and drive Australia into the doldrums. It would make us uncompetitive. Then shortly afterwards he said that we were going to have an emissions trading scheme. In fact we were having a task force to look into it. The very day that the nuclear draft report came down the Prime Minister was out reassuring the coal industry—having said only a week before that we were going to look into emissions trading—that a price on carbon would be some time off and they need not worry.

What is going on here? We have got totally inconsistent policy left, right and centre. On the one hand you give the coal industry as much as you possibly can by way of government funding for carbon capture and storage and reassure the coal industry that you will not be having a price on carbon any time soon. Then suddenly you find out that the Business Council of Australia is going to support an emissions trading system so you rush out and say, ‘Let us have a task force to look into it and include you people, but nobody else,’ because the Prime Minister could not afford to be left isolated by the Business Council of Australia going out ahead of him.

Then on climate change matters suddenly we have the idea that nuclear is going to save the day in spite of the fact that the chairman of the task force said quite clearly that this is a strategy for some 50 years into the future—for 2050. That being the case, perhaps the minister for the environment or the finance minister can explain to the business community in Australia why they have lobbed into the middle of the business community the biggest grenade of insecurity and uncertainty. This is a government that has gone to election after election on the basis that it is the best economic manager and now in Australia nobody is prepared to invest at the moment in any of the energy areas because they simply have got no consistent signal out of the government as to where it is going to go. Would you invest in renewable energy right now not knowing whether you are going to have emissions trading or not and not knowing how a price was going to be set? Would you invest in nuclear when the private sector has said quite clearly that there will be no investment in nuclear without bipartisan support, and clearly there is not?

We have also got a situation where Minister Macfarlane reassured the business community and the Australian community that there would be no government subsidies involved in nuclear, and a week later he changed his mind. Now we will have government subsidies in nuclear. In fact the chairman of the task force said that not only would it require a price on carbon but it would require ongoing government subsidies. Then we were told that this is the way of the future for jobs. In that very task force report it said that the entry to enrichment, for example, is so difficult that Australian companies would not benefit; it would be multinational companies mainly based in France, the UK and the US that would benefit. So we are all over the shop on this.

The other thing that the chairman of the nuclear task force pointed out was that Australia does not need nuclear for energy security. So, Senator Minchin, your citing of Tony Blair in relation to energy security has got nothing to do with climate change. Prime Minister Blair has said that it is going to cost £70 billion for them to continue to refurbish and go down the track of decommissioning their old nuclear power plants, and you cannot even put a price on decommissioning Lucas Heights. In the budget this very year you refused to put a price on decommissioning Lucas Heights. Now we are told by the nuclear task force that the price of decommissioning is going to be factored into the price of power. The government is all over the shop on energy policy and has thrown total insecurity into the energy market. If ever there was irresponsible economics, it is from this government. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.