Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If we ever need any reminding of the need to move forward immediately and effectively, we only need to look at the recent Synthesis Report, which resulted from a major international scientific congress, entitled Climate change: global risks challenges and decisions, that the ANU organised with the University of Copenhagen in March. The report, known as the Copenhagen report, whose authors include Professor Will Steffen and Professor Lord Nicholas Stern concluded:

Recent observations show that greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections. Many key climate indicators are already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which contemporary society and economy have developed and thrived. These indicators include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, global ocean temperature, Arctic sea ice extent, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. With unabated emissions, many trends in climate will likely accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

The report also points out that climate change will:

… cause major societal and environmental disruptions through the rest of the century and beyond.

               …            …            …

Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change” regardless of how it is defined.

The report goes on to say:

Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions …

The most important point the report makes is:

INACTION IS INEXCUSABLE

Society already has many tools and approaches – economic, technological, behavioural, and managerial – to deal effectively with the climate change challenge.

This report, compiled by some of the world’s most eminent climate change scientists, must be a wake-up call to those opposite and must surely cause those in the coalition who are not captive to the climate change sceptics and deniers to stand up for the nation and stand up for the planet.

I want to turn briefly to the red herrings raised by the coalition deniers to justify inaction on climate change. These include the arguments: that action by Australia will simply be a gesture; that the Treasury modelling is flawed; that the CPRS will impose costs on the community; and that regional impacts have not been taken into account. Senator Joyce is the lead advocate of the gesture politics theory. This approach is similar to the argument being put forward by some of the biggest polluters in their special pleadings. It is reprehensible that the coalition chooses to perpetuate the falsehood that the government’s legislation would result in 23,500 direct jobs being lost across Australia’s mineral industry by 2020. It is an absolute disgrace that Senators Joyce and Boswell are using this falsehood to create confusion and concern amongst working families in the minerals industry.

The Minerals Council report that this nonsense is based on estimates that there will be approximately 23,500 fewer people employed in the Australian minerals industry due to the imposition of the proposed ETS than would otherwise have been the case under a reference case that predicts at least an additional 86,000 jobs in the industry by 2030. This means that under the government’s proposed ETS there will be around 60,000 more jobs in the minerals industry relative to today. That is 60,000 more jobs in the minerals industry with the ETS. That is the Minerals Council report. That is the report that you reject. That is the report that you are sceptics about. That is the report that you would deny—the actual Minerals Council report. But, in their public utterances on this, the Minerals Council and the coalition, particularly Senators Joyce and Boswell, have sought to put fear into the community by dishonestly characterising slightly slower growth in jobs as ‘jobs lost’. As government senators said in our report for the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy:

It is misleading to present potential future jobs that are not created in one sector of the economy as “jobs lost”. To do so not only offers a misleading picture of the effects of an ETS, but fails to take account of the fact that capital and employment moves between industries and regions all the time.

Many of the employment arguments put up by those who deny that climate change is caused by human activity—those who accept that climate change is happening but believe it is not a problem—and those who see that something needs to be done about climate change but not by them have tried to suggest that catastrophic job losses will result from the ETS. All of these arguments are at best ill-founded, at worst deliberate deceptions. There is ample evidence that an ETS, a renewable energy target and the range of measures contained in these bills will have no net effect on employment in Australia. Treasury modelling demonstrates there will continue to be robust growth in the Australian economy. I draw the Senate’s attention to a speech in the Great Hall by Australia’s Chief Scientist, who outlined the real trajectory for jobs—jobs for biologists and ecologists, jobs for astronomers and space scientists, jobs for physicists and electrical engineers, jobs for mechanical engineers, aerodynamicists and material scientists. These are the jobs of the future, yet all we have from the opposition is denial and scepticism. All we have from them is no hope for the future. (Time expired)