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

Senator Minchin, through you, Chair, no, that is not what is happening here tonight. Had that happened, the pressure of the Victorian government on the Labor Rudd government would have been counterbalanced by the forcible pressure from the Senate, but the opposition has blinked first. That means that the north-south pipeline gets the nod rather than the stopper that it should be getting here in the chamber tonight. That is why we will be voting to reject the House of Representatives amendments which, effectively, take away the Senate’s earlier condition that the north-south pipeline should not proceed.

The final point I want to make is about climate change. We now know that Senator Wong will be announcing a fortnight from today, or yesterday, the targets that the government will be setting in terms of climate change. I think these will be manifestly weak, like this legislation is, and short of the mark; otherwise, I believe the government would be making the announcement about those targets before Senator Wong goes to the global conference in Poznan.

This is high danger for the Murray-Darling Basin. We know that Professor Garnaut has said that it is going to be lost as we know it if the weaker targets that are involved in accepting a 550 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent pollution of the atmosphere are taken up. That means a 30 to 50 per cent reduction in flow on what we have now in the Murray-Darling system by mid-century. This is catastrophic. This is absolutely catastrophic. It will be traced back to tonight, to the government’s failure tonight, and to that announcement coming up before Christmas, unless it is an announcement to go for targets in the order of the Greens targets—that is, a 40 per cent reduction in 1990 levels by 2020 and carbon neutrality by mid-century. That is the challenge we have. It is a challenge that is being failed in this legislation and I think it is a challenge for which we are going to see the government fail between now and Christmas as far as those targets are concerned.