Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I am not. The turmoil that the Labor Party is going through is not a fun process. We have been through it in the past. Whoever is the leader in the future, the Labor Party needs to answer this question. You cannot, as the Greens and I both accuse you of, narrowcast your message and walk both sides of the street on this issue. You cannot say, ‘We’re strong on climate change. We’re going to put a trigger in the federal law. We’re going to have a private member’s bill.’ It is good stuff to wave around the Waverley Council and Newcastle City Council, whistling to your friends in the green movement, trying to get Green preferences. The real question is: if you are going to put this provision in the federal law, will you use it?

This is a terrific debate to have. You have to deal with the facts. If you are serious about climate change you have to look at the real world. I had a terrific meeting with Dr Llewellyn from the United Kingdom fusion project. Europe, America, India and China are getting together to develop this new fusion technology to produce energy, fundamentally from hydrogen. It is a $5 billion investment. It is an international collaboration, and he is saying: ‘It may not work. It’s a multibillion dollar investment but it’s got the potential to provide baseload power with no emissions.’ He also said: ‘All we’ve got at the moment is coal and nuclear power. We’ve got to solve the climate change problem or we have to make this investment in fusion. It’ll take 10 years. We’re going to build this massive plant, and America, China, India and the European Union are investing. It’s a massive project to develop a whole new power source. It requires a nuclear process, and I think Australia should be involved. It would be very good to get Australia involved.’ But if you applied the Greens logic, which is ‘Geosequestration is not proved and it’ll take 10 or 15 years to prove it up’, you would not waste your time.

You have to invest in all of these different technologies, and carbon capture and storage is one of them. We know that there has to be an expansion in nuclear power, we know there has to be an expansion of solar energy and we know we have to be pushing for geothermal. We need to do all of those things, and the government in Australia is investing very heavily in each one of those technologies in a technologically neutral way.

We also have to address the situation, say, if Senator Milne did become the environment minister. The Labor Party really need to answer this question. I think they should do it today. This is a test for Labor—and I put a press release out saying it was a test for Mr Beazley a few days ago. It really is. If you are going to put a trigger in the law—this is a simple question, and I think the Greens and I would like to have this answered—and it tells you that a coalmine like Anvil is going to produce millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide when they burn the coal, what will you do when you have to make that assessment? If you say, ‘Have a carbon market,’ that is not the answer. Senator Milne knows that. You do not need a trigger in the federal law to have a carbon market. We have the OSCAR web based carbon collection system that we have developed in Australia—I got the acronym right.

We know—and Justice Pain knows—how many megatonnes of carbon will come from the Anvil mine. We know what the answer is facility by facility, mine by mine, because we have the best tools anywhere in the world, developed by the Australian government’s Greenhouse Office. We know all that. We do not need to go through these assessment processes. If you are going to have a trigger, the question for Labor is: when you know that a facility is going to produce greenhouse gases, what box will you tick on the approvals brief that you get when you are minister? You will get a brief like the one I am holding, coincidentally. It will say ‘agreed’ or ‘not agreed’.

I have a decision right before me, as we talk, to approve a road, coincidentally—a very good road, by the way. It will have an assessment in it. I think Senator Siewert probably knows what the road is. It will say, ‘This mine will produce X million tonnes of greenhouse gas.’ It will have ‘agreed’ or ‘not agreed’. This gets to the nub of Senator Bartlett’s point—and the Greens have been honest enough to say that, if they knew that the Anvil mine was going to produce that amount of greenhouse gas, they would say, ‘No. It is morally imperative not to approve it.’

The question for Mr Albanese, Mr Beazley, Mr Rudd and Senator Lundy, here today representing them all, is: when Labor knows that you have got multiple millions of tonnes of carbon coming from a coalmine, what will you put a circle around—‘approved’ or ‘not approved’? Having a trigger and assessing every single industrial facility across the country is only one thing. It is yet another layer of red tape, another layer of bureaucracy. It does not help the environment one iota. It does not save a single tonne of carbon. It just employs a lot more people in Canberra to do a lot more assessments.

You talk about the moral and ethical issues in this. You could in fact make yourself feel moral and ethical and not just close down Anvil Hill, Sonoma in Queensland and every new coalmine proposed; you could close down all of the operations that mine 301 million tonnes of coal in Australia this year. Regarding the rate of expansion of coalmining in the world, estimated by ABARE and in the World Energy Outlook of the IEA, as I said yesterday in the parliament, we have mined as a world around 4,980 million tonnes of coal this past year, 2005, and the world is expected to mine 7,557 million tonnes of it in only 20 years time.

The expansion in the world’s coalmining will entirely eliminate all of the coalmines in Australia in only three years. It shows you how ludicrous it is to shut down coalmining in Australia or shut down a single coalmine in Australia. I might have to say this every day that I am in this job: if you are serious about climate change, you cannot kid the world that closing coalmines is a solution. You have to recognise the fact that around 80 per cent of the world’s energy will come from coal even in 20 years time. That might be really hard for Senator Milne to appreciate. She might desperately prefer for the whole world to shift across to solar in that time or to another energy source. I know we are going to have to provide substantially more energy from renewable sources in the next 20 years. We are going to have to substantially improve all of the technologies we use to reduce emissions in that period.

But I also know that if 80 per cent of the problem is caused by burning fossil fuels then to not address a substantial amount of your effort towards stopping carbon emissions from that fossil fuel means that you are effectively giving up on the problem. I think I have a particularly hard political case. It would be a lot easier to be in the Labor Party or the Greens and to say: ‘Coal is horrible. The coal industry is making too much profit; they’re all corrupt, immoral and unethical people’—I do not think Senator Milne is really saying that—but a chunk of coal is pretty dirty stuff. You can say to the Australian people, ‘This is really dirty stuff that is causing pollution; let’s stop it, let’s shut down the mines.’ I think it is a hell of a lot easier to make a case if you are a Labor or a Green politician. I have the difficult job, and the government has the difficult job, of telling the truth to the Australian people and saying, ‘If you’re serious about energy and climate change, cleaning up coal has to be part of the answer.’ It is a difficult case to make and I have to make that case.

Senator Milne was talking about the strides that Germany is making towards renewables. Even the European Union’s use of coal will go up at the same time. They will go from 176 million tonnes to 185 million tonnes during that same period. So they will invest in more renewables; Australia will invest in more renewables. I really want the Labor Party to answer this question. It is their amendment that we are talking about. You are going to get a new trigger if you get your way. If you get your numbers on the vote on this amendment and you get the trigger, I want to know what a future Beazley or Rudd government will do when the brief comes to you for the Anvil mine, or any other future coalmine, which says it will put millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Or answer Senator Bartlett’s question: why would you put the trigger in if you are not going to use it? That is a fundamental question for the Labor Party to answer today before they vote on this legislation.

I do not think it is fair to Australian companies, investors or the Australian government to misrepresent the position of government or industry in relation to investments in renewables. Senator Milne knows, because I have given her chapter and verse on what we are investing in renewables. I believe the Australian government has invested around $6 million in the Origin Energy SLIVER cell project. I have raised the issue of Origin sending it offshore. Origin has said, ‘No, there is absolutely no plan to send it offshore. We plan to develop it here in Australia.’ I have raised it with Grant King, the head of Origin. He said, ‘No, we’re doing it here. We’re very appreciative of the federal government grant.’ I said, ‘Do you need any more money to keep it here?’ He said, ‘No, we’re very appreciative of the grant. We’re investing in the solar project up in Newcastle to develop solar concentrators.’

The Chinese gentleman you referred to has made a fortune in China because he has cornered the silicon market. The best solar technology going into China at the moment is Australian. It is being made at Homebush Bay by BP Solar. They are producing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of solar cells. They are leading the world, using Australian people and Australian executives. To date, the biggest solar facility built in China was built by BP Solar. So, if you are going to go around the world, please give some credit where it is due. Australians do very well in this area. Can we do better? I would love us to do better. I want more money to go into it. But do not talk Australia down. We are doing so well in so many areas.

In Nairobi my team helped lead the world towards a review of the Kyoto protocol. We could not have worked harder in all of the forums in Nairobi. Senator Milne went over there and put Australia down all the time. The team we had over there included Howard Bamsey, leading the international dialogue on future action, and Ambassador Adams. We worked hard, 18 hours a day, trying to move the world to a robust, timely review of the Kyoto protocol—working with our friends from Europe and the developing world and chairing the umbrella group. In the umbrella group we worked with Russia, Canada, Iceland, Norway and the United States, trying to get sensible outcomes, moving the world to a comprehensive agreement in the post-Kyoto period.

Aussies working hard, doing the work to move the world towards a sensible situation, never get recognised. We are held in very high regard because we work and work, yet you have an Australian senator who goes to Nairobi, puts that effort down and misrepresents it. I regard it as quite un-Australian, but it is also quite inaccurate. I think Senator Milne should have a good think about whether she wants to continue with her game of putting down the efforts of Australia and the efforts of people from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, my own department and the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources, which, year after year, work so hard to get a substantial international agreement that will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and not see them increase, as they have under the first commitment stage of the Kyoto protocol.