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

As Senator Milne has said, we will support the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change (Kyoto Protocol Ratification) Bill 2006 [No. 2], but it is in fact the same bill that Senator Lundy and I put to the chamber two or three years ago. It passed then because there was not a government majority in the Senate. The bill simply called for ratification of the Kyoto protocol. This bill will no doubt be blocked, if it gets to a vote on this occasion, by the combined numbers of the government in majority in the Senate. This just shows that, instead of advancing to tackle climate change, because of the Howard government’s failure on this matter—failure of thinking, failure of strategy, failure of planning and failure in having a long-term view—this parliament is going backwards so that a proposal like this will now not get through the Senate, even though it did a couple of years ago.

That having been said, I am very pleased that today Senator Milne brought a comprehensive climate change strategy bill—the Climate Change Action Bill 2006into the chamber, because a strategy is required that really does grapple with Australia’s appalling performance under the Howard government as one of the world’s biggest per capita polluters and the intention of the Howard government to stay right in line with the coal industry and, as Senator Crossin just indicated, the nuclear industry, to the detriment of the best options, by far, for this nation to be taking. The first option is energy efficiency, which the unlearned brains of the senators opposite seem unable to grapple with, which could provide up to 30 per cent of the electricity required by this nation in the future. Energy efficiency simply means everything from turning lights off when you leave a room to properly cladding hot water pipes, making sure that heavy industry is not wasting power and that heat from heavy industry is converted into energy use and is not simply wasted into the atmosphere.

The second option is of course renewable energy—solar energy. I have just taken delivery of a new round of ‘solar, not nuclear’ stickers which sum up the options. The Greens say solar energy, the government says nuclear energy and there is an enormous gap between the two. I resisted the temptation in deference to President Bush to run the sticker saying, ‘solular, not nucular’. I have kept it to the proper pronunciation so that it would not confuse people further. I know President Bush is very easily confused on these matters.

The problem with the bill is that it does not tackle the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from this country with targets and dates. I heard Senator Milne flag an amendment for the committee stage, if we ever get to it—and that is unlikely in the week or so of parliamentary sittings we have left—to tackle the most expeditious way of reversing the huge amount of greenhouse gases being produced unnecessarily in this country, and that is to end old-growth logging.

In his report a couple of weeks ago, Sir Nicholas Stern, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, created a new wave of alarm about the catastrophic social, environmental and economic problems that climate change is bringing ever closer to the whole planet. He made it clear that the first thing we should be doing is ending the destruction of forests around the planet. In doing so, we could cause a reduction in greenhouse gases greater than if we stopped all the transport systems in the world. It can be done in a wealthy country like this one simply by the government motivating itself to do so. We have enough wood available in our wonderful nation from the 1.5 million hectares of plantations to supply all the wood needs of this country—paper, building materials and so on. We simply do not have to keep destroying native forests, which causes a massive loss of biosphere and is to the extraordinary detriment of the atmosphere.

For me it is criminal behaviour. It is a crime against nature for Labor and Liberal governments in this country to be continuing to authorise the destruction of native forests. Not only is it an assault on the water catchments, leading to the new plantations taking up prodigious amounts of water and therefore depriving downstream users of that water, but it releases enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Let me explain that a little because the science is not known to members of government, including the two, only, who are opposite in the chamber at the moment. An old-growth forest continues to absorb—