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

What the parliamentary secretary is saying is that he does not have an answer. He can give figures about energy consumption—that is, a 100 per cent increase by 2030 and a 200 per cent increase by 2050—but even on a best-case scenario he cannot give figures about greenhouse gas production. We must assume that those figures will be of the same order, because he has said that those figures for energy consumption take into account energy efficiency so we can eliminate that from the mix. That is extraordinarily threatening to the future of this planet. That breaches the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. It breaches the call by thousands of scientists and hundreds of Nobel Prize winners, which predated the Howard government coming into office back in 1996, that we tackle climate change. It breaches any standard of sensible practice in dealing with the reality of climate change and the impact it is going to have on this nation of ours, Australia.

It just shows how captured by old power bases this government is. It knows what the energy requirements of the corporations are but it does not know about the greenhouse gas emissions. I think it does, actually. It has had the Greenhouse Office working on things like this for the last decade. The government knows what the phenomenal increase in greenhouse gas emissions is from the scenario being presented by Senator Colbeck here this morning, but it is too ashamed to give those figures to this committee—because they are too frightening and delinquent to contemplate for a government that will not go in for demand management and will not set energy efficiency targets. In turning down this amendment of Senator Milne’s, the government does not want to know what the energy efficiency capabilities in this country are.

This is studied ignorance and it is irresponsible. Not much more can be said about it. This is failing this nation. It is failing the people in Australia—the families, the businesses, the small towns and the cities. We are all going to have to live with the failure to act now. We have 10 years of it behind us, and here we have a government in full knowledge, if ever it had it, still failing to deliver on very simple tasks like equipping itself with the knowledge required to be able to make the best decisions 18 months down the track. Here we have the Howard government saying: ‘We don’t want to know. We will cut down an amendment from the Greens that would enable us to have the knowledge base to work on energy efficiency—the best alternative after demand management—in a carbon neutral fashion, tackling the huge problem of climate change.’ The government will have to live with that. But the Greens will continue to put forward positive amendments like this, even if the government and the opposition take a negative attitude towards them.

Question put:

That the amendment (Senator Milne’s) be agreed to.