Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance and Administration (Senator Minchin) to a question without notice asked by Senator Milne today relating to carbon dioxide emissions and deforestation.

I want first to make the point that any effort made by anyone anywhere to reduce deforestation is extremely welcome, but the hypocrisy of the government’s move today is breathtaking, especially given that, as I stand here now, there are at least 14 burns being lit in Tasmania which will increase carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere as a result of deforestation in Tasmania. Helicopters fly over with incendiaries and drop them onto forests that have been pushed up into rows. When these burn there are huge clouds of smoke over southern Tasmania, as there are today. There were 17 or so fires lit yesterday. Yet we have the government standing up here and talking about deforestation in developing countries. Yes, it is a terrible problem, but it is a terrible problem in Australia as well.

The effort to address deforestation globally has been going on for many years. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Montreal, a global initiative was launched in 2005 and there have been several meetings around the world since. Most recently, Australia hosted the workshop of SBSTA in Cairns in March to talk about how we advance in terms of avoided deforestation.

Australia put in a submission to the UNFCCC effort in February this year which talks about the need for more substantial negotiations regarding designing, agreeing and implementing an effective solution to deforestation. The SBSTA workshop that happened in March is feeding into another workshop in May and it will go to Bali, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting, and to the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol. They are looking both at market based mechanisms like emissions trading in the post-2012 period and at funds—non-market based mechanisms—to address this issue.

So Australia rushing out and pre-empting a global meeting process to score political points in an election year is disgraceful. That is what Australia did last year in Nairobi when the Prime Minister and Minister Campbell announced they were taking a new Kyoto to Nairobi. It almost derailed the discussions in Nairobi because people there thought that Australia was bringing new text. People asked: ‘Is Australia bringing new text? Are they trying to undermine the negotiations?’ I said, ‘Don’t take any notice; it’s just for public relations. It’s a press release; it’s meaningless.’ That was exactly the case. When the minister got up to make his speech there was one sentence in it about new Kyoto—seven words; that is what new Kyoto was worth.

That is what is happening here again. The world is moving to try and set up an effective mechanism to deal with deforestation and the Prime Minister, having had the benefit of that meeting in Cairns in March—a global workshop including 58 countries with submissions, many of them asking for a global fund to deal with deforestation—comes out and says: ‘Australia is leading the world. We’re going to take on this global initiative.’

I see in the statement of the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, to be tabled shortly, that he says we are going to be working with several countries in this regard. He talks about the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Indonesia and other international organisations. That is quite right because they are all involved in the SBSTA and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process. So by rushing out and claiming that we thought of this all by ourselves and we are setting up a global fund all you are doing is grandstanding and annoying everybody else trying to do something on deforestation.

Sir Nicholas Stern has said we need at least $10 billion to $15 billion every year to deal with deforestation. That requires a market mechanism—putting a price on saving forests to compete with the price on logging forests. That is what we need globally to deal with this issue, not a grandstanding Prime Minister pretending to the Australian population that we are leading the way when all he is doing is pre-empting an extremely valuable and complex global process for cheap political ends. At the same time he has given no in-principle support to our neighbour Papua New Guinea, which is trying to get up market mechanisms to protect forests in New Guinea. Surely that is what Australia and the world need.

Question agreed to.