Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

Mr President, I think you are quite right: the best treatment for Senator Brown is to ignore him; that is what he deserves. The economic management of this country has been second to none and I think that has generally been recognised.

In relation to the greenhouse situation, as I was able to indicate to Senator George Campbell in a previous answer, 10 years ago we got started on this with the establishment of the Australian Greenhouse Office. In more recent times, Sir Nicholas Stern also said: ‘So what we should be looking for is all countries getting involved and thinking through how we go’—listen to this—‘beyond Kyoto.’ The problem is the Democrats, the Greens and the Australian Labor Party are still stuck on Kyoto. The Sir Nicholas Sterns of this world, and everybody else who is genuinely engaged in this issue, are saying, ‘Get beyond Kyoto, we’ve got to move on.’ There were genuine problems now recognised by people like Sir Nicholas Stern, because, if Kyoto were the answer, why would he want us to move beyond Kyoto? There would be no need to.

The reason we need to move beyond Kyoto is very simple—that is, it did not engage China, India and other major greenhouse emitters. Therefore, we as a government said quite honestly and quite appropriately, ‘There is no sense in us signing up to targets if that makes no difference’. However, and this is a very important issue, what galls me is that there are certain governments running around at the moment alleging somehow that they have some moral superiority because they have signed up to Kyoto whilst failing absolutely in meeting the targets to which they signed up. Whereas we, I believe, have a greater degree of moral superiority in this debate, given that we have not signed up to Kyoto but will be one of the handful of countries that will actually meet or go very close to meeting the Kyoto targets.