Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

It is not. If you throw away the value of agriculture in this country—as we seem to be doing as a result of that—then coal is not going to be much use to us. Quite frankly, coal is not going to be much use to China and those other countries that will go way ahead of Australia in finding alternative ways of generating electricity for their needs.

But I think most of all it is because the government have an antipathy towards anything which is long term and sustainable. It is the old ‘dig it up, ship it out’ mentality, which does not look at the future of this country in any serious way. They cannot bear to countenance the idea of moving from coal to renewable energy. Instead of going from coal to renewable, we have to go to clean coal, which is expensive, not yet here, experimental and some say even dangerous. Then it is: ‘Okay, that’s proving difficult. Let’s go to nuclear.’ Again, it is expensive, dangerous and leaves terrible waste that will be radioactive for thousands of years. We cannot actually bear to look at geothermal—and when I say ‘we’ I mean the government. The government cannot bear to turn their mind to the most obvious solutions to climate change, and they are wind, solar, geothermal, biomass—alternative forms of energy production.

The government are somehow stuck in this mould saying: ‘We’re not going to go there. We’re not going to cross the line. We’ve got to stick with what we know: the fossil fuel industry.’ Of course, in doing that, in funding clean coal, in putting millions of dollars into those so-called clean coal initiatives, we can claim to be doing something. In talking about nuclear power, we can claim to be going down that path and putting off the inevitable problem of siting reactors. The attitude is: ‘Put it off for another day. We don’t need to worry about it. As long as we’re talking about it, people will think we’re doing something.’ That does not work.

The Stern report came out a couple of weeks ago. I thought the Prime Minister’s response was typical of this antipathetic attitude. He said that we should not be mesmerised by Stern. Why should we not be mesmerised by Stern? I think the whole country was moved by Stern—mind you, having said that, Stern did not in fact say anything terribly different. It was certainly up to date, but it did not say anything that was terribly different from the report of the inquiry that was conducted by the Senate six years ago. I chaired that inquiry. Government members were on that inquiry. We heard from the scientists. We heard from the climatologists. We heard from the people who said: ‘This is real. The threat to the globe from climate change is real.’ I think there were 106 recommendations from that committee report, and they still have not been implemented—none of them. I am not even sure that the government has responded to that very significant piece of work, that very substantial document, that very thorough, comprehensive working-over of the issues for Australia.

Sir Nicholas Stern said, in his typically polite way, that he would not dream of telling Australia or any country what to do. But then he said:

... I do think it would be good if all countries were involved in the Kyoto Protocol.

Al Gore’s film that we all saw, An Inconvenient Truth, was described by various ministers as entertainment. I found it anything but entertaining; in fact, it was frightening. It put in very simple terms the problem that has been described by scientists for some decades now but in a way that could be understood. It was clear; it was supported by very real examples and graphic images of melting icecaps and a range of clear demonstrations that climate change is with us. Al Gore described the United States and Australia as ‘the Bonnie and Clyde’ of the global climate crisis for failing to ratify the Kyoto protocol.

The government has even wound back earlier efforts made in the nineties. The Australian Greenhouse Office was lauded as a world first. We were the first country in the world to set up a whole department independent of other departments so that it answered only to the Prime Minister and the minister for the environment. It was to set the path for Australia. Since that time, the AGO has become a shadow of its former self. It has now been subsumed into other departments. Its CEO left in disgust and has since said that its work was nobbled by other departments and that it was not allowed to do what it was set up for.

The carbon accounting CRC was defunded. Again, it was lauded as a great step forward. ‘This is the way we will help the world in counting carbon, whether it is geosequestration, whether it is carbon tied up in forests. This will be a way forward to actually count the carbon that is out there.’ That CRC has been defunded. I do not know whether it is doing any work at all now, but my guess is that it is not.

I have a couple of other comments to make on Australia’s position. The chief economist of the British government backed Carbon Trust, Michael Grubb, said that the Howard government’s stance on climate change was:

... so clearly not a position which can lead to any credible solutions.

He said that coming to Australia:

... feels like going back in time because so little generally seems to have been done on the ground here.

Former CSIRO chief of atmospheric research, Graeme Pearman, said there were ‘great expectations a decade ago’ that Australia would lead the world in responding to climate change. Instead, he says it has taken a drought to persuade most politicians from the major parties and the public to take it seriously. Former President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, has urged Australia and the United States to sign the Kyoto protocol, while cautioning the Australian government not to go down the path of nuclear power. So it seems that Australia has been isolated along with America in all of this, and it is not a good outcome for this country.

Mr Hockey said the other day that a billion dollars would be provided for drought assistance this year and that that was over and above the $1.2 billion that had already been committed, and no doubt there will be more money needed as this drought drags on through what is likely to be a hot summer with little rain.

The Climate Institute looked into the question of farmers, farming and the Kyoto protocol, and concluded that Australian farmers were missing out. They said that the Kyoto protocol and a national emissions trading system, if it was in place today, could:

...provide Australian farmers with an income of $1.8 billion over the period 2008-2012, due to the emissions saved by limited land clearing.

What we know is that our generous targets also included generous considerations for land clearing. The latest data shows that we got a credit of 73 per cent from 1990 levels on land clearing. So our farmers have in fact delivered the results that the government so commonly and loudly professes as being its great success story on climate change. Farmers have been responsible for virtually the entire share of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions reductions. But their efforts, worth around $2 billion, have not been recognised or financially rewarded by the government, except in drought handouts. The Climate Institute states:

By reducing land clearing, farmers have already reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 75 million tonnes since 1990. By 2010, the savings are projected to be about 83 million tonnes. This level of emissions reductions is equivalent to eliminating the total annual emissions of New Zealand or Ireland. Over the same period, emissions from energy and transport have and continue to sky rocket—

stationary energy by 43 per cent on 1990 levels—

... total energy sector to emissions are projected to be 45% above 1990 levels by 2010.

According to the Climate Institute:

In short, the farmers have been carrying the greenhouse reduction efforts in an inequitable relationship to other greenhouse gas polluting sectors in Australia.

So the federal government cannot claim any credit for those emissions savings. Regarding the area over which it has jurisdiction, the government has chosen not to exercise any influence and that has meant massive increases in emissions in the areas of transport, stationary energy and the like.

I want to finish by saying that this is nothing new for the Democrats. We have been on this issue for a long time. In fact, when we looked back at our records, we found that we kicked off the greenhouse debate in the Senate back in 1988 with a private senators’ bill on ozone protection. So my colleagues back then were already talking about greenhouse. We also initiated and chaired two Senate reports on climate change: one that I mentioned earlier and another in 1991 called Rescue the future: Reducing the impact of the greenhouse effect. The one in 1999 was called The heat is on: Australia’s greenhouse future, which was tabled in 2001 with, as I said, recommendations—106 of which have yet to be put in place.

We also pushed for the environment committee to respond to the government’s energy white paper, which was supposed to set a strategy for Australia’s future energy development. It is interesting that within a couple of years of that strategy being put forward the government suddenly did an about turn and decided we were heading down the nuclear power path—so much for a strategy for the future.

In 2005, we considered the white paper in a report entitled Lurching forward, looking back and found that the plan outline did not go far enough and lacked a viable time frame for success. The report found that the energy white paper did not contain effective planning for Australia’s future energy supply, greenhouse emissions reductions or alternative renewable energy development. It argued that energy related emissions were increasing at an alarming rate and yet there were no clear policies in the EWP that would rein in emissions. There are no clear policies within AP6 either. And there are no clear policies for Kyoto. (Time expired)