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

I rise to speak on Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009, Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2008-2009. I do so because I do not think they adequately reflect the urgency of climate change. Tomorrow I will be lodging a petition with over 1,000 signatures collected by Women for Urgent Action on the Climate Crisis. That petition calls on the government to take 12 steps: (1) sign the Kyoto protocol and cooperate with UN initiatives; (2) set mandatory targets to effectively reduce emissions; (3) regulate for deep cuts in all sectors through energy efficiency; (4) provide incentives for a massive take-up in renewable energy; (5) halt public funding and tax benefits to fossil fuel and other polluting industries; (6) phase out coal-fired power stations; (7) protect native forests and vegetations as carbon sinks and tackle environmental repair; (8) accelerate national measures to return water use to sustainable levels of extraction and increase long-term water and food security for all; (9) provide incentives for efficient water use; and, finally, invest in public transport, not more freeways.

I have absolutely no doubt that these women speak for millions of others who want government action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Kyoto has certainly been ratified, but other action, including funding, is very slow and in some circumstances is taking us backwards. A week ago Australia’s key climate scientists met in Canberra, and their message is that the situation is dire. Humanity faces dangerous runaway climate change. Professor Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Dr Geoff Davies, Dr Andrew Glikson and Sebastian Clark, of the 2008 Manning Clark House conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, summarised the findings of that conference: global warming is accelerating, and the Arctic summer sea ice is expected to melt entirely within five years, decades earlier than predicted by the 2007 Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report. Scientists judge the risks to humanity of dangerous climate warming to be high. The loss of the Great Barrier Reef now seems likely. Extreme weather events such as storm surges, adding to rising sea levels and threatening coastal cities, will become more frequent. There is a real danger that we will soon reach critical tipping points and that the future will be taken out of our hands. The melting Arctic sea ice could be the first such tipping point. Beyond two degrees of warming seems inevitable, unless greenhouse gas reduction targets are tightened. We risk huge human and societal costs and perhaps even the effective end of industrial civilisation.

We need to cease our assault on our own life support systems and those of millions of species. Global warming is one of many symptoms of that assault. Peak oil, global warming and long-term sustainability pressures all require that we reduce energy needs and switch to renewable energy sources. Many credible studies show that Australia can quickly and cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions by dramatic improvements in energy efficiency and by increasing our investment in solar, wind and other renewable sources.

The need for action is extremely urgent, and our window of opportunity for avoiding severe impacts is rapidly closing, yet the obstacles to change are not technical or economic; they are political and social. We know democratic societies have responded successfully to dire and immediate threats, as was demonstrated in World War II. This is the last call for an effective response to global warming. We cannot wait until 2020 for future technology that will rescue the coal industry by capturing carbon and pumping it underground. The sum of $500 million is being spent on so-called clean coal but, of the 34 coal-fired power stations in this country, 22 are older than 20 years, four are older than 40 years, and the older they are the less able they are to capture carbon.

Large-scale solar concentrated technologies have not been made part of the Asia-Pacific partnership low-emissions technology study because, according to the response I received from the Minister for Climate Change and Water recently, there is insufficient publicly available data. The $500 million for commercialisation of renewable energy has to wait until the financial year 2009-10.

I want to argue tonight that we should not be waiting for more reports on what the economy can afford to do. But I get the feeling that this government would perhaps prefer to defer all of those decisions indefinitely. It was great that the government ratified Kyoto, and it may just scrape through our generous target by 2012, but other countries have already commenced emissions trading. Other countries have already lifted their renewable energy targets and have mandated energy efficiency. The Australian Greenhouse Office developed an emissions-trading framework almost a decade ago, and the previous government had one out for discussion. If reports are accurate, this government is seriously contemplating exemptions for coal-fired power and energy intensive industry, which would make the system totally worthless.

There have certainly been no moves on energy efficiency, despite the great scope that exists. Australia lags behind the rest of the world because our huge stocks of coal have made governments complacent. Coal and gas have been cheap because there has been no price on carbon, and they are stacked with government subsidies. Emissions from transport are huge and growing, yet transport economists are seriously still suggesting that we have more expensive road systems, tunnels, freeways and the like. The Prime Minister says he will put a blowtorch to OPEC so that they release more oil and, alarmingly, the Minister for Resources and Energy says that developing countries should now be showing constraint in their own oil demands. I really wonder how either the Prime Minister or the minister for energy can look at themselves in the mirror in the morning, having said such absurd things.

We have known for more than a decade that peak oil will increase prices as will, inevitably, carbon pricing but we have no energy efficiency standards for cars. We have the worst gas guzzlers coming into this country tax free. Rail is losing freight to road, even though it is 10 times more efficient. In these appropriations we do have a budget for reducing congestion. Let me tell you that nothing will reduce congestion like high petrol prices, but the problem is that that will strand people who live in the outer suburbs of our cities and in country areas who have no other choice than to use a car when it comes to going to work or to school. We have a national bike plan, which has only made the most modest progress in getting people onto their bikes to commute to work or to school every day. We have electric cars and motorbikes here, but the government has shown absolutely no interest in them, and indeed the new Camry hybrid props up that great but foolish Australian dream of everybody having a huge car.

Here in the parliament we have a pilot scheme with two Prius Comcars. What exactly is to be learned from a pilot for a car that we know uses less than half the amount of petrol of a car an equivalent size, let alone huge Holdens and Fords? If a handful of senators have legs that are too long or bums that are too wide, then let us switch over just half the fleet or 75 per cent of the fleet. Why we need a pilot to tell us that these cars are more fuel efficient I cannot imagine.

I say the same thing about Solar Cities: we do not need pilots to show us what to do. This, in my view, is a very old government trick: have a few cheap pilots underway and some people will think this is a genuine initiative that will be replicated more widely. I don’t think so. Pilot schemes typically do not get evaluated and they certainly do not get replicated, even when they are successful.

The government, as we know, has neutered the household PV system with means testing. The government said that that scheme was ‘heating up’. It was funding just over 500 grants every month. If that rate were to be kept up for the next 10 years then a mere one per cent of existing households would have PVs.

I remind the Senate that in 10 years time we will be getting very close to 2020, when we are supposed to have some sort of target, although I will come to that in a moment. What we do know about 2020 at the very least is that big percentage shifts are going to be required in emissions abatement. But without decent feed-in tariffs—and the government said nothing about that—photovoltaic systems will never get beyond that very low level of penetration. The government says it will increase the renewable energy target but not until next year. My question to the government is: why would you want to wait? The industry is ready to go because the previous low target was essentially met in 2006.

The last budget had nothing for public transport. A mere $192 million was provided for the national rail network and a massive $3.2 billion for roads. So rail gets a mere six per cent of total transport funding. Infrastructure Australia, as we know from when we dealt with the bill a few weeks ago, has no clear obligation to consider greenhouse in framing its advice on roads, buildings, power stations or any of the other major infrastructure in this country. So desalination projects are going up everywhere despite adding hugely to the demand for electricity.

The government has repeatedly rejected our efforts to put a greenhouse trigger into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and to impose emissions standards on coal-fired power stations. So you can put up one of the worst polluters on the planet tomorrow. We resurrected Hazelwood—again, one of the worst polluters we have—and we have brown coal in Victoria.

The government says it has a target for 2050 but is reluctant to come out with one for 2020. I have often found this to be a completely ludicrous situation. For one thing, no-one currently in the parliament, let alone the government, will be around by 2050 to justify what is essentially an arbitrary and doubtlessly all-too-low target. Even if it is based on a two-degree warming from pre-industrial levels, catastrophic climate change and unpredictable feedback processes could take the planet to the brink of habitability. A target of 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 is not only possible; it is essential, and the emissions trading must reflect that.

The Democrats over the years, and certainly in my time in this place, have put up dozens of bills and amendments on energy efficiency, renewable targets, triggers for the EPBC and power station emission standards. I have personally asked hundreds of questions in this place on greenhouse. I have made dozens of speeches. I have put up countless motions. I have initiated a major inquiry, and that was almost a decade ago. I negotiated $400 million in greenhouse abatement with the last government, as well as two extensions of the PV rebate system. The list goes on, including remote photovoltaic systems in rural communities that previously used diesel to generate their power, the Green Vehicle Guide and many, many more.

I had to nag the government to actually use its own Green Vehicle Guide on the list of vehicles available to senators and members. I had to beg them to allow our offices to go onto green power. I often ask myself why this whole issue needs to be so difficult, why governments have to be dragged kicking and screaming even when the cost is miniscule. So I urge the government to act and to act quickly.

Greenpeace came to see me just the other day. They have prepared a very credible plan that they call Energy [r]evolution. That plan shows that making the necessary transformation in how we use energy is achievable and it provides a wealth of opportunities to stimulate economic growth and to ensure social stability. It shows how renewable energy could be 40 per cent of all electricity provided by 2020, that energy efficiency could cut energy consumption by 16 per cent, that coal-fired power could be phased out entirely by 2030, that waste heat could be captured and that electric, more fuel efficient cars could be on Australia’s roads, displacing petrol and diesel vehicles.

It can be done. The problems are political; they are not technological. They are about vested interests; they are not about the common good. The Greenpeace report finds that the 14,000 jobs that would be lost in the coal sector by phasing out coal altogether could be replaced easily by 26,000 new jobs in renewable energy and gas generation. I see today that the coal union has come out and urged the government not to delay the increase in the mandated renewable energy target. It makes sense—who would want to work in coal when the option could be renewables? I seek leave to table the Greenpeace report.

Leave granted.

I urge the government to read this report very carefully, to stop ducking for cover when things get difficult and to take these bold decisions: Australians like those who signed the petition which I will table tomorrow—over a thousand of them—are with you on this issue. So there is no need to be afraid; there is no need to worry that Australians do not believe that something urgent must be done on climate change. This is essential and our future depends on it.