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

There is not much more to be gotten out of this except to sum it up. The minister came back from Bali, with, as she says, one of the scenarios being 25 to 40 per cent—but, noticeably, that is the one that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including top Australian scientists, wanted to see brought into action—and decided to model from 25 per cent down, not up. The decision was made by government not to model the 40 per cent option. In other words, it decided to dismiss a vital option before it had the information about it. It is pretty vital because the minister herself in her presentation said that the 25 per cent would give a 50 per cent chance that the world would go on beyond two degrees of warming, with all the catastrophic consequences of that. She and this government are prepared to take that risk on behalf of the future generations who are going to have to put up with the options. It is playing dice on a huge scale in studied ignorance.

If the government had modelled 40 per cent and decided it was too expensive, that is one thing, but it made a decision beforehand, and one of the reasons it made that decision was that it did not want to upset the huge lobby from the polluters, and it inherently knew that. The minister smiles at that, but she has given no explanation for not modelling 40 per cent, except to say the government did not do it. You would expect in a contribution like this she would give reasons for it, but there are none. It is appalling procedure to dismiss such an important scientifically based, safer option for this country and the planet through the expedience of not looking at it, not studying it. It is a dereliction of duty.

There is not much more to be said about it. The minister can say, ‘That is a Greens option,’ and it certainly is, but more importantly than that it was a Bali option, it was and remains a global scientists option and it was a safe option. That is the important thing about it. It is a very much safer option, according to the minister’s own judgment—and that judgment is based on what the intergovernmental panel itself is saying. To settle for a 50 per cent chance that we would trip into catastrophic climate change and not model an option which would have made us much safer was a complete dereliction of duty. It was a political decision by the government overriding its obligation to look at what was a safer option for this nation.