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

You asked me a question about the minister’s report, just in discussion, and that is the subject of your amendment (3). Climate change is, of course, an incredibly important issue. It is probably the issue that the Australian government’s environmental agencies and a range of other departments and agencies spend more time on than any other environmental matter. In fact, we are investing in excess of $2 billion on climate change measures. In terms of the climate change trigger issue—which will certainly be the subject of some Greens amendments, as I understand it, if not a Labor amendment—the issue really is: what is the most effective way to address climate change?

The point I make is that the climate change debate focuses—if it is focused where it counts—on two really important global challenges. Firstly, there is the challenge of providing substantially increased energy for the world. We know that, for example, there are many hundreds of millions of people in the world who do not have access to reticulated energy and do not get the benefit, as all of us do in this chamber, of being able to plug in an appliance, switch on a light, go to a refrigerator and get food that has been preserved because it has been kept cool, go to a hospital that has power provided to it or go to a workplace or an industrial facility that has power provided to it. So there are large numbers of people who do not have access to energy. We know that it is in the best interests of mankind and poverty alleviation in the developing world, and job security in the developed world, that there is an expansion of the energy used and produced in the world.

The International Energy Agency says that we will need to roughly double the amount of energy produced in the world in the next 30-odd years. However, we also know from science and particularly the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that, while we go down the path of producing substantially more energy, we will have to do so with substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions. We know that to just stabilise greenhouse gases where they are at the moment—and we know that that is already causing climate change at an unprecedented rate in human history—we will need to find abatement over the next 35 or 40 years of around seven billion tonnes per annum. To simplify and clarify the issues facing mankind, we need to double the amount of energy we produce and consume, and halve the amount of greenhouse gas emissions or produce that extra energy with no additional greenhouse gas emissions. So climate change is a substantial challenge, as is energy security.

The issue of a greenhouse trigger is important. It is one of the regulatory tools you could use. When the government looks at it, you have to ask yourself: what is the policy benefit of putting what is a very blunt instrument into federal law? We saw with the Anvil Hill decision in New South Wales this week—the decision of Justice Pain—that it has focused Australian attention on what the costs and benefits of such a crude regulatory tool might be. It would ensure that all greenhouse actions all of a sudden become subject to federal environmental assessment and approval.

In terms of assessment, I think the Left of politics—the Labor Party and the Greens—say, ‘You should know what the emissions are going to be.’ What they ignore is 10 years of diligent hard work by the Australian government’s Greenhouse Office in developing in this country a very high-quality, very thorough, very accurate Kyoto-compliant greenhouse gas measurement database and the establishment of a greenhouse measurement tool—we need someone from the Greenhouse Office to get the acronym. We have a database which can collect information on greenhouse gas emissions from across Australia—from government and industry—and have it published for the world to see. We have the best measurement systems, not only in industrial facilities in Australia. We have established these measurement facilities through the Greenhouse Challenge program and its successor program, the Greenhouse Challenge Plus program.

Also, through the extension of the government’s energy efficiency measures, through the energy efficiencies opportunity legislation, we have made it mandatory for the top roughly 250 energy users in Australia to do energy efficiency audits and to publish those audits and plans. The concept of saying that we need to now require a whole new raft of assessment and approval for every greenhouse gas emitting industry across Australia would be massive duplication with no benefit in achieving what I talked about in the first part of this speech—balancing the needs of Australia and the world to produce more energy for poverty alleviation and job security with the need to do that with substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions.

There is fundamental philosophical policy difference on this between the Left of politics—Labor and the Greens—and the coalition. People such as Martin Ferguson, though, give credit to the government for taking practical actions—for example, working with our AP6 partners on practical measures for developing a more informed debate about the role that nuclear power can play and developing an informed debate about clean coal and carbon capture and storage technologies. Some Labor members engage in that debate in a constructive way. But most Labor people say to the public that we can somehow solve the problem if we amend the law by putting a greenhouse trigger in it and sign the Kyoto protocol. Of course, anyone who has spent some time looking at the challenges posed by greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and the need to balance energy provision and greenhouse gas abatement would know that the problem will not be solved by simply putting another few paragraphs into the federal law—legislating the problem away—or by signing an international treaty. That treaty, I might say, would, during its first commitment phase, see greenhouse gas emissions rise by 40 per cent. The world—including all the major economies—has recognised that the Kyoto protocol is ineffective at creating effective global action.

Labor’s two policies—which, I think, are supported by the Greens—are effectively to address climate change by legislative action and by signing the Kyoto protocol. They are saying they will just pass a bit of law through the federal parliament. What will that do? I do not want to verbal the Greens. Senator Milne puts a lot more thought into this issue than the Labor Party do. At least she is absolutely consistent in her position, whereas the Labor Party have deeply conflicted positions on the role that coal technologies and nuclear technologies can play. When it suits them, Labor try to narrowcast their message to Greens constituencies by saying they are anti-nuclear and anti clean coal. When they want to talk to industry or other parts of the country, they send Martin Ferguson. He says to the forestry industry that Labor like forestry, and he says that Labor like uranium mining and coal. If they want to send the other message, they send Peter Garrett to say that they are anti clean coal and anti-nuclear and they think they can solve the problem by building wind turbines.

Labor will not get away with that for long. You could perhaps do a bit of narrowcasting 100 years ago when the media was not all-pervasive and instantaneous. But you cannot get away with sending Peter Garrett to one corner of the country to sell one environmental message and Martin Ferguson to another part of the country to sell another message on the same day. Sooner or later, you will be called to account. Sooner or later, you will have to come up with a policy that will address the substantial issues of providing the world with clean energy for poverty alleviation in the developing world and job security in the developed world, and doing so with reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

The people of Australia will not put up with a political party that pretends you can meet this historic intergenerational policy challenge by signing some law through the parliament and signing the Kyoto protocol. It is a challenge that requires a multitrillion dollar investment, a sophisticated approach at a national level and a sensible management approach—the sort of approach that the Howard-Costello team brings to this massive challenge for Australia. The Labor Party thinks you can look the Australian people in the eye and tell them that you can wish the problem away by passing some law through the parliament and signing the Kyoto protocol.

The problem is far bigger than that. It is a challenge that requires serious, well-funded, well thought-through solutions—not sloganeering, chanting and wishing. That is why we reject these amendments. We reject the notion of effectively putting into Australian law what I would call the ‘anticoal amendment’. This would apply the Anvil Hill treatment to every coal mine, power station and industrial facility across Australia—and I know that the Greens motivation is to close down the coal industry.

I want to put one very important fact before the chamber on this occasion. I will limit my future interventions to be far shorter, but I want to cover this ground because it goes to the very core of climate change at the moment. Coal is portrayed by the Left of politics as a dirty, grubby, horrible fuel, although many of the people who are employed in the coal industry—there are some 5,000 of them across Australia—are historically Labor voters. I doubt that they will vote Labor in the future, because Labor and the Greens together could close that industry down.

Whether you like it or not, whether you want to demonise it or not, coal is the baseload fuel supply for Australia and it supplies around 80 per cent of baseload energy for the world. You can wish that away and pretend that it will go away, but the International Energy Agency has said that the amount of coal used, as a proportion of other energy sources, will go up over the next 25 years. The amount of coal that is burned will increase from roughly four billion tonnes to 7½ billion tonnes in that time.

You can try and wish that way, you can hope it is not true, you can write a letter to President Hu in China and say, ‘We think you should stop burning coal,’ and you can have Justice Pain across the country saying, ‘No, we are going to shut the Anvil coalmine,’ but the reality is that if you are serious about climate change you are going to have a serious policy that deals with the carbon emissions from burning coal, not a policy that says, ‘Let’s do away with coal mines.’ It is more sophisticated, it is harder and it requires more hard work to do that, but I say to the Australian Labor Party and the Greens: get serious about climate change by having a policy that addresses the reality that coal will be a part of our lives for the foreseeable future and that the technological challenge and the investment challenge is to capture the carbon, to clean the coal and to make it a clean energy source, not a dirty energy source, for the future. Recognise the fact that, if Justice Pain, the Labor Party and the Greens had their way and you closed down every coalmine in Australia, the amount of coal burned across the planet would roughly double in the next 30 years regardless. It will not make any difference. It might make you feel good to put 5,000 people out of work and close down that industry, but it will not save the world from climate change.