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

Six metres, says the previous speaker by interjection, and I note that he laughs at that. But he is the same senator from the coalition who laughed at me 13 years ago in this place when I predicted sea level rises of the sort that we are now having to talk about.

The problem here is the government’s target level for greenhouse gas emission reductions—from the country, Australia, which is the biggest per capita polluter on the planet—of five per cent over 2000 levels by 2020, four per cent if you take the Kyoto baseline of 1990. Measure that against, for example, Scotland’s legislated aim of a 42 per cent reduction, or Costa Rica, which has led the world for many years in environmental and social thinking, which wants a 100 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030. The previous speaker, representing a strongly held feeling in this parliament, said that we must not act before the rest of the world. I disagree. We are the wealthiest country on earth per capita in resources and we have the biggest coastline per capita of all the wealthy countries on earth. We have the most to lose. These reports show that there are 700,000 vulnerable properties on the eastern seaboard alone. And these properties are being affected. We had a storm from the south in Tasmania within the last month of which old-timers said they had not seen the like in 60 years. It sank boats and washed others up on the shore. But the erosion along the coastline which came from that storm surge was massive. Near my own house a boulder of five to 10 tonnes, with a large tree, fell from the cliff line and washed into the beach from this storm surge. The tree and the boulder had been there for many decades. You can say that this is a once in so often storm, but that needs to be added on top of what Senator Macdonald agreed was an 18-centimetre sea level rise in recent years.

The portents are very clear for all of us. People like the Greens mayor Jan Barham and her council at Byron Bay have been trying to warn about this and even to plan for it, and what they have received in return is sniping and uninformed invective from, for example, the editorialist of the Australian that we will live to see seas go down, a marker of the head-in-the-sand inability to deal with the problem of climate change which marks this era. The government’s proposal for a five per cent, increasing to 25 per cent if there is global agreement, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is completely inconsistent with the threat and the damage which climate change is already bringing to the Australian coastline.

We have just heard a debate with vilification against people who are moving countries because they are threatened. Look at Bangladesh, where 80 per cent of disputes in the courts are now over erosion of land, a country with a massively increasing population, very much of it less than 10 metres above sea level and very vulnerable to increasing storms and floods as the glaciers in the Himalayas melt and their water comes down the Ganges and other rivers. According to the United Nations, we face the prospect of 150 million displaced people—Bangladesh will supply many of them—by midcentury, and many of those people are going to come to Australia. That migration will make the current pressure on our seashores from so-called boat people look like nothing at all, and yet it is inherently being built into the future of this planet by the inaction of the Rudd Labor government and by the inaction of the Turnbull opposition. On top of this, in this country, now the world’s biggest coal exporter by a very big margin, Queensland Premier Bligh, with Senator Wong and Prime Minister Rudd, wants to put billions of dollars into infrastructure to accelerate the export of coal to be burnt elsewhere in the world, which will accelerate the problem of global warming in an age when people at Mildura, where there were plans for a large solar plant to produce renewable electricity without threatening the globe, have been unable to get the finance. It is a government which is failing to act on the simple, reasonable face of the facts.

There is now a House of Representatives report about the astonishing impact of climate change on Australia. With it comes the impact on the spread of diseases. With it comes the impact on the ability to produce food, which is diminished greatly; we have seen that in the Murray-Darling Basin. With it comes the loss of our ski fields and the glaciers which feed water to 1.5 billion people in South-East Asia to our north. For months of the year, very little water will run down their rivers. Those glaciers have fed those rivers throughout all of recorded human history. Yet the blinkers are on because of the power of the polluting industries over the two parties in this parliament. The power of the polluting industries goes against the nous of the majority of Australians, who want greater action on climate change and want to see some security, through government action, brought back to people living on the coastlines, and to Australians generally, for the future of this nation.