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

I rise tonight to take note of the Australia state of the environment report 2006. I want to build on a couple of things that have been said. The first is that it is an absolute disgrace that the government has not got in place a data monitoring and collection system such that you can actually ask people to comment on the state of the environment. I put it on the record that the government says it has spent $10.3 billion between 2001 and 2005 on the environment, and yet we have a situation where we absolutely do not know what the state of the environment is. Australia is not equipped with the national capacity to monitor and assess the condition of the environment on an ongoing basis—what an indictment of the government and the environment minister.

So what we have is a glossy, coffee table production of out-of-date science. On climate change, the report gives climate change progressions in figure 21—it is a 2001 document. What use is that to us in 2006? Climate change has accelerated at a great rate since then. It is appalling. And, what’s more, it is clear that the whole section and all the work on climate change was written as an apology for the Howard government’s position that they did not believe in climate change, that the Prime Minister was a sceptic of climate change and that he did not believe in extreme predictions of climate change. In fact, the report was clearly written at a time when the excuse of the Howard government was that the science was undecided about whether we were having climate variability or climate change.

But of course in the last two months things have rapidly altered. Out came the Stern report. Out came the world’s scientists. The Howard government was completely isolated, and has had to admit that climate change is real. But it was too late for this document, and so we get embarrassing statements—for example, about the drought. The report poses the questions: how much is current variability due to climate change? How much is it natural variability? It goes on to talk about our need to increase our climate literacy. Well, we absolutely do, and the reason that Australians are not as climate literate as they might be is that for a decade the Howard government has not put in place appropriate policies.

An example of the report’s out-of-date science, apart from the climate predictions, is the statement that, ‘A possible impact on climate change is a change in how often coral-bleaching events occur relating to the Great Barrier Reef.’ But the latest science says that it is already too late for the world’s coral reefs. Why are Australian scientists not reporting on that in this particular report? Why are they not saying what the world’s scientists are saying, which is that coral reefs are beyond the threshold of dangerous climate change and from here on in it is decline? They are saying that we have to take the pressure off the reefs by getting rid of pollution and other pressures on the reefs and trying to make them as resilient as possible. But the fact is that acidification of the oceans as a result of the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed has already weakened the corals. The coral bleaching is real. Ocean temperatures are hot. The reefs do not recover if the bleaching events occur more frequently than five years apart. It is already too late. I am disgusted with this report. What it does is play to the notion that we are not sure whether the drought is just climate variability or whether it is climate change.

That whole notional view gives a lie to what is going on with climate science and it gives false hope to people in rural Australia, particularly in marginal areas, that suddenly the drought is going to break, everything is going to be all right again and we are going to go back to how it was. That is completely wrong and frankly I am sick and tired of anecdotal half-measures being equivalent to statements by the world’s leading scientists who write the IPCC reports. Uncle Bill up the road’s view of what the climate is doing is an equivalent response to that of the world’s leading scientists, and that is not good enough.

I want to talk about Minister Campbell’s wedges. He talks about Princeton University and says, ‘We have to have nuclear and we have to have carbon capture and storage because they are the seven wedges required.’ That is wrong. Princeton University gives 15 wedges on its diagram, seven of which need to be employed to achieve deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. It is a complete misrepresentation of the science to suggest that they argue either nuclear or carbon capture or both are essential. They do not. And before anybody reports on Senator Campbell’s statement of his seven wedges, they should look at the academic research. It is the minister’s attitude that underpins what is wrong with this report. It does not give us a view of the environment and it cannot name one single area where the environment has improved. (Time expired)