Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is about the fourth debate on climate change that the ALP has instigated. They seem to persist in not listening to what we have to say about our position. Senator Wong has just repeated the ALP’s view that the government have done nothing about climate change and have refused to recognise climate change, completely ignoring the fact that one of the first actions of the Howard government when we came into office was to establish the Greenhouse Office, the first for any government in the world. So, in other words, right from the beginning of the tenure of the Howard government, the issues of greenhouse gas problems, climate change and the need to promote renewable energy have been recognised. Senator Wong and her colleagues can get up and claim the contrary, but the facts are there. The facts cannot be denied. The truth of the matter is quite the reverse of what Senator Wong is seeking to promote—that is, during the 13 years that the Labor government was in office, under Messrs Hawke and Keating, very little was done about the environment, and no recognition whatsoever was given to the issue of climate change. It is a fact that back in 1997 the Howard government were very perceptive in seeing that climate change was an issue and established, as I said, the world’s first greenhouse office.

It is a little bit boring to have to put forward the same facts time after time, but nevertheless that is what I plan to do. Senator Wong has said that the Prime Minister was a sceptic about climate change being caused by human activity. I think we were all a little bit sceptical about that. For example, I downloaded a page from the internet yesterday on the issue of climate change. There has been a very real and legitimate debate about the causes of climate change. It is a very simplistic thing to say, ‘Of course, this is due to human activity,’ but there is a lot of archaeological evidence that climate change is a cyclical thing and that it has gone on for many thousands of years. Only a couple of weekends ago, I heard a report on Radio National about some marine archaeologists who had examined coral deposits off the coast of Java. They found evidence that there had been cyclical climate changes for the 6,000 years that the coral had taken to accumulate.

Among the causes of climate change which I found on the web are natural causes, such as continental drift, the activity of volcanoes and, most importantly, the tilt of the earth’s axis. As the earth has rotated around the sun, at times there have been minor variations in the axis of the earth in relation to the sun which have caused changes in the temperature of the earth, because the earth’s orbit is somewhat elliptical, which means that the distance between the earth and the sun varies over the course of a year. If you extrapolate the axis changes of the earth’s orbit over a longer period of time, then you will get periods when the earth’s climate is colder—and those are ice ages—and periods when the earth’s climate is hotter. It is not at all impossible to hold the view that the present warming-up of the earth’s climate is due to axis changes in our orbit around the sun.

There is no doubt at all that, since the industrial revolution back in the 1700s, there has been a lot more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and there is no doubt that carbon dioxide is the most important of those gases. Methane is another important greenhouse gas. Over the history of the earth, both of those gases have been emitted in much larger quantities than they used to be, and there is no doubt that it is also a reasonable thesis that greenhouse gas is a cause of climate change.

Senator Wong referred to the United Nations group which reported last week and claimed that climate change was due to human activity. That might be the correct conclusion, but I think it should be recognised that this has been a legitimate debate over many years. It may be that the acceleration of climate change is due to human activity, and we certainly need to do something about it if it is the case that climate change is due to greenhouse gases. But it is quite wrong to say, as Senator Wong has said, that the Prime Minister has been a laggard in recognising that greenhouse gas might be an issue. Far from it: as I have said, since the very earliest days of taking office, the Prime Minister and his government have instituted programs to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases, climate change and emissions. The Prime Minister has stated quite clearly that he believes there is a connection between climate change and emissions. Senator Wong, we can draw no other conclusion than the fact that the Prime Minister is a climate realist. He realises that climate change is occurring. As I have said several times, right from the earliest days of his government, he has taken action to deal with climate change.

Let us look at what the coalition government has actually done on the issue of climate change. The coalition government has taken a leadership role at the international and national levels in response to the threat of climate change and, in fact, has invested something like $2 billion in programs to deal with climate change. This includes hundreds of millions of dollars on solar and wind energy—in other words, renewable energy—developing new technology to make cleaner and more efficient fossil fuels and ways to capture and store greenhouse gases to stop them entering the atmosphere. Examples of that approach include the Howard government’s $500 million low emissions technology demonstration fund, which aims to leverage around $1 billion from industry to develop technologies to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Then there is the $100 million Renewable Energy Development Initiative, which provides competitive grants to support the strategic development of renewable energy technologies. And—surprise, surprise, Senator Wong!—as a result of the programs of the Howard government, Australia is one of the few countries in the world that is on track to reach its internationally agreed targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

There are a lot of countries in the world that criticise Australia for not ratifying the Kyoto treaty and principally they are European countries such as Germany and France. The fact of the matter is that, of all the European Union countries, only about three meet their greenhouse targets without the use of nuclear energy. So Australian is up there with the three that are meeting greenhouse targets without resorting to nuclear energy. Australia’s record is proving there is a way forward that allows emission cuts and economic growth. As a result of our climate change strategies, we are forecast to save 85 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2010, while our economy is expected to double. That is the equivalent, Senator Wong might note, of taking every one of Australia’s 14 million cars, trucks and buses off the road and stopping all rail, air and shipping activity while still providing for major economic growth. That is quite an achievement. As a percentage of our total economy, this saving represents a fall of 43 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and 2010, while the Australian economy is doubling in size.

Australia, in fact, contributes only 1.46 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which when compared to China’s greenhouse gas emissions, for example, is an extremely small percentage globally. If Australia were to close down all its power stations tonight, the savings in greenhouse gas emissions would be replaced by the growth in China’s energy sector emissions in less than 12 months. However, the coalition government continues to take seriously the issue of climate change and its role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the global greenhouse gas signature.

It is true that Australia has not ratified the Kyoto protocol. We have not ratified it because, in fact, it is a flawed treaty which would contribute very little to the reduction of greenhouse gases around the world. As I said yesterday, Kyoto is a symbol of concern about the effect greenhouse gas is having on our climate. By signing onto the protocol Australia has recognised and acknowledged that greenhouse gases are an issue, just as we did when we set up the first greenhouse gas office of any government in the world. But we have not ratified the protocol because it is a meaningless treaty. It is not a treaty that is going to produce any reduction in greenhouse gases and it would, unfortunately, have a very adverse impact on the Australian economy because we would have to stop using our abundant resources of cheap coal to provide energy, which would mean higher energy costs and would cost jobs in coalmines that would close down and jobs in Australian industry because it would be paying more for power.

However, we are concerned that there be some sort of meaningful and workable international accord to deal with greenhouse gases. What the Australian government have done is sought to set up a global agreement which will include some of the big emitters around the world. Australia is in fact a joint signatory in the first global agreement between the United States, China, India, Japan and the Republic of Korea. This is called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The purpose of this agreement, which includes, as I said, some of the very largest emitters in the world, who are not signatories to Kyoto—China, India, Korea and the United States—is for these countries to work together to use technological solutions to bring about the kind of dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that the world, it seems, is going to need if we are to slow down the pace of climate change.

The countries in this Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate are nations which cover almost 50 per cent of the world’s population, 50 per cent of the world’s GDP and 50 per cent of the world’s energy use and global greenhouse gas emissions. We believe that cooperative, practical action by these major regional economies has the potential to have a significant impact on global greenhouse gas emissions, reduce the longer term effects of climate change and decelerate—slow down—climate change, which is a very important objective.

So it is really quite fallacious for Senator Wong to get up in the Senate and claim that the Howard government has not been concerned about climate change and is not doing anything about it. Let us look at what the coalition government has actually done on the issue of climate change.

The Howard government have worked very hard to address this problem and, in fact, were conscious of it and decided to do something about it long before many other countries around the world, as symbolised by the fact that we set up the world’s first greenhouse office. Apart from the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, Australia is also a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the Kyoto treaty. Even though we have not ratified the treaty, we are still meeting our greenhouse targets that would be set under that treaty.