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

I see he is leaving the chamber. At least he is retreating! The retreating Senator O’Brien supports a Gunns pulp mill which will have a forest furnace attached to it, which will burn 500,000 tonnes of forest wood per annum, next to a pulp mill which at the outset is going to have 80 per cent of its resource stock of native forests. In other words, they are going to create a massive factory to burn the carbon banks or chemically break up the carbon banks now sitting there in the Tasmanian valleys and mountains holding back climate change and they are going to promote the transformation of those great saving forests into an added hit on the global climate change phenomenon.

The Rudd opposition have to come to grips with the destruction of Australian forests if they are going to be seen as responsible on climate change. This simply cannot be allowed to proceed. It is not good enough to support an APEC move to reforest or to prevent the destruction of 20 million hectares of forest outside Australia while promoting the destruction through that pulp mill of 200,000 hectares of native forest here in Australia. I would have thought an opposition would have very quickly taken up what the public knows to be true: that there is a need for us to protect these great living carbon banks in Australia in the age of climate change emergency that we are now in.

The second factor here is the burning of coal. We know that that is having the most prodigious impact on the global climate. Australia is the biggest coal-exporting country in the world. When I made a call earlier this year that in the next three years of government we should look at how we are going to reduce the impact on climate change of burning vast amounts of coal, some sectors of the press went into orbit about it and misrepresented what I said. We Greens say that we must move to energy efficiency and to renewable energy. It is not as if we are talking about an unreality here. If Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in California, can set short-term goals—which the Greens, here in Australia, want to see in Australia—why can’t the Rudd opposition do that, let alone the Howard government? Why is it that these two great parties cannot meet the challenge of climate change?

I congratulate the Labor Party on supporting the Greens’ move for an inquiry to help give us the sensible information upon which this parliament can make better decisions, and I hope the government will, on this occasion, change its mind block on climate change—its obfuscation, as Senator Milne put it—of the last decade. We will test here this morning whether Mr Howard—now that he has confirmed his leadership of the government into the next election—is up to it. He can do that with a single act: by supporting this call for a Senate inquiry into the impact of climate change on Australia’s coasts, its cities, its concentrated areas of population and its magnificent environments. There can be no excuse that warrants saying no to this motion.