Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The problem with the submissions from both the parties here is that they have narrowed their view to who is best in terms of announcing programs and then carrying them through, counting dollar returns. But we live in a world where social and environmental effects have to be taken into account, where there should be triple bottom line accounting and not single bottom line accounting.

Let me give an example of that. We now have predictions that by mid-century the Great Barrier Reef is likely to be 95 per cent dead. With it will go 33,000 jobs and billions of dollars of tourism income. There is no accounting for that in the failure of government policy and programs which is occurring at the moment and contributing to that outcome. By that I refer to the indictable history of the Howard government in neglecting its policies which have not only not addressed climate change—and therefore the direct impact on the Great Barrier Reef, which is coming down the line—but worsened it. This is the government that refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol. This is the government which has put huge amounts of taxpayers’ dollars, hundreds of millions, into the coal industry in pursuit of technologies—which are far from being proven and which even the industry says will not be available for a decade or more—while it continues to foster the burning of coal, the expansion of coalmines and the export of coal. Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter and we contribute two per cent to the global warming problem through greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, brought out that startling report last year which says that climate change is in effect the biggest market failure in human history. But here we have a government and an opposition which are not prepared to address that market failure. They want to continue to promote Australia as the biggest exporter of coal in an age when we do not have technologies which do anything other than convert that coal into a massive, million-tonne pollutant of the earth’s atmosphere, leading to an enormous economic, social and environmental deficit for the next generation and the generation after that. There is a total failure to account, outside narrow economic confines, for the impost on coming generations. If you look at the Stern report figures, just that two per cent of coal being exported out of this country converts to something like $186 billion damage per annum—