Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of the answers given by Senators Abetz and Minchin to questions relating to climate change. The answers provided by Senator Abetz to my question, and to those questions put by the ALP today, were consistent. Senator Abetz trots out the tired old answers to this question, saying that we have to look beyond Kyoto, that Kyoto has been a failure, that we need to move on, that we are going to meet our targets anyway but we have to move on. He talks about the emissions trading system in the EU as being a total failure. I understand the Prime Minister also answered questions and said, ‘This is all about job losses; we’re not going to move on anything which would economically damage the community,’ and so on.

The whole point of Sir Nicholas Stern’s message to us today at the National Press Club, and I understand he is meeting with the Prime Minister today as well, is that if we do not take urgent action—not just a bit here or there, a few grants handed out for clean coal, a bit of this and that, a renewable energy target that is less than 0.5 per cent of the total by 2010—if we do not do more than we have done, if we do not make deep structural changes to the way we do business, then we are not going to deliver on the massive cuts that are required. And, moreover, we can do this. We can have massive cuts in greenhouse emissions and still have jobs growth and economic growth, live the lifestyle that we enjoy and have a thriving economy. That is the message that the government seems not to be hearing.

So we have moved away from what might have been called a precautionary principle approach, where the conservationists were on one side and industry was on the other, and they were arguing about this. That has finished now. What we have is economic modelling that shows that if we do not do anything our economy is going to suffer. So this is now a question of how risky this government is being by not addressing climate change.

Of course we had the same old arguments too about Australia generating just over one per cent of global greenhouse emissions—again, a furphy. We are actually the 10th largest emitter—and I am not talking per capita; we all know we are the highest there. The overall emissions from this country are the 10th highest in the world. That is just behind Britain, which has three times our population; 60 million people live in Britain, and their emissions are only just higher than ours.

So the message from Sir Nicholas Stern was: all developed countries need to collaborate, need to be part of this effort, need to sign up to Kyoto. It is an embarrassment that we have not done that. It is late in the piece, but it is not too late. That is my message to the Prime Minister. And I know that is going to be the message that Sir Nicholas Stern will be giving to the Prime Minister himself today.

It is critically important that no countries duck out of this. That is what Australia has done: we have ducked out of Kyoto. We were there for many years, while Senator Hill was our environment minister, but since that time we have found reasons to undermine Kyoto and to step back from it, claiming it is ineffectual. Well, it is not ineffectual; in fact, it is very effectual. The fact that the government thinks it is important to largely stick with the Kyoto commitments indicates that, to my mind. But of course, we are not going to stick with them. By 2012 we will have overshot our Kyoto commitments by about six million tonnes. We never hear about that from Senator Abetz. We keep hearing about how it is a finished process, that it is out the window and we have to look for something else.

Yes, let us look for something else. Let us go beyond 2012. Let us have some targets. Let us have some targets for 2020. And let us make sure that they include the very easy to do targets. For instance, we should be looking for a one per cent energy efficiency target. Let us stop wasting energy. If we can avoid doing that, we can avoid putting in new coal-fired power stations. We would also manage—and I have said this many times in this place—to reduce wholesale electricity costs by 20 per cent. And I point out again that this is the lowest cost-effective greenhouse gas abatement measure that can be undertaken. But we never hear that from Senator Abetz. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.