Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I have a lot of different views to the previous speaker, Senator Milne, on this issue. But one thing I do agree with her on is that the approach of the current government has been hypocritical at best and dishonest at worst. It was all about winning votes last November in the election with the rhetoric on climate change—the ill-thought-through plans, the lack of real consideration of the impact on Australia and the lack of understanding of what the rest of the world was going to do. I am afraid that the Minister for Climate Change and Water continues to stumble from one problem to another as she attempts to try and match up the action to the rhetoric that has been spouted by the Labor Party for some time. I hear now from the government all these great programs about deforestation. I just want to remind the Senate that earlier this year the new government came in flush with success and knocked off two programs that the previous government had that dealt with deforestation in Indonesia and in the Solomons, as I recall. They cut those programs, which were actually doing something positive to stop deforestation in some of the most sensitive parts of the world, without even a murmur.

This whole global climate change debate has been fraught with inconsistencies. One thing about this government that concerns me very greatly goes back to the attitudes that prevailed in the Hawke-Keating times, when if you did not agree with everything that the government said on a subject then you were somehow a lesser person. You were somehow racist, sexist or any other pejorative that came around. Today in question time, I asked the minister a question. It was a very, very simple question, and I tried to get an answer from her at estimates as well. I accept that climate change is happening. I am no scientist, but I read the papers and I do accept it. I do acknowledge that there are as many qualified scientists who disagree as there are who agree. It is confusing for those of us without a scientific background, but, on balance, I accept that it is happening. I simply asked the minister to tell us what impact Australia’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme—given that we emit less than 1.4 per cent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions—might have on the changing climate of the world. That is what it is all about. Forget about the rhetoric and forget about what scientists are saying. We accept that our climate is changing. If Australia does what the rhetoric says we are going to do, what impact will that have on the changing climate of the world?

Every time I have raised that with the minister I have got the finger-pointing and the accusations of being a sceptic and all other sorts of things. You simply ask a question and, because it does not happen to meet with the minister’s view on life and because the minister takes it as an affront that anyone should question anything she says on climate change, you suddenly get the shouting and the finger-pointing and you are made to feel that you have just spoken about motherhood. With respect to my colleagues sitting opposite, I say to ministers that just because people have a different view does not mean that they are any less Australian. My questions to the minister, on this particular subject at least, are always polite. Just tell me the answer! But I get the shouting, the accusations and the finger-pointing and never of course do I get an answer.

One day I would like her to answer it because I think a lot of Australians are interested in what impact anything we do in Australia will have if China, India, America and, increasingly, Poland and Italy and lots of other countries do nothing. I know it will destroy our industries. I know it will destroy our mining areas. But I want to know what impact it will have on the climate change that is happening to the world. That is the bottom line; that is what it is all about. So I ask the minister, who I note does not wait around to hear these debates—she scuttles off; obviously she is very busy—