Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That was the point. I said the minister did not give an annex 1 country average. The point that I am making is that if you put in Australia’s targets for annex 1 countries—5 to 25—then you are guaranteeing exceeding 450 parts per million and exceeding two degrees. I want to know when we are going to get some honesty about the targets and what the science says. We have the Prime Minister and the minister saying to the people of Australia: ‘The Great Barrier Reef is in trouble. The Murray-Darling is in trouble. Sea level rise is a problem.’ I totally agree with all those things. But what is being proposed is not action adequate to prevent those outcomes. If the annex 1 countries around the world lock in five to 25, that will breach that figure. They will deliver the very outcomes we do not want. That is why it is completely wrong to say: ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good. Start somewhere.’ It should be, in fact, making the necessary the enemy of the expedient.

The critical fact here is that we have to save the climate. We cannot go into an overshoot scenario, which is what is being implied by what the government are saying with its target range. It is implying that there is some sort of linear response—that you can go out to 2020 and then you can get on a trajectory. It does not recognise that, unless you get the cuts within the time frame and within the tipping points, you are going to be beyond the tipping points and after that there is no return. That is the thing. That is what I worry about while lying awake at night. Once the Arctic Sea ice is gone there is no return. Once you have ocean acidification there is no return. No amount of seawalls are going to alter anything. We are already losing species. It is predicted that a third of all species are on a trajectory to extinction by 2050. We are losing them as we speak if we look around the country.