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

Yes, I thank Senator Joyce for that, and I will come to him shortly. The whole point here is a debate about what the settings should be in terms of Australia’s contribution and whether Australia should take a leadership role or any role at all. The Nationals have contended that we should be doing nothing until China, India and other countries around the world act. They are followers and the Greens are leaders.

Let me go back to why we are dealing with a spectrum of targets here tonight and why the Greens have set ourselves a 25 to 40 per cent target. While we have sympathy for it, we are not going to support Senator Xenophon’s very thoughtful amendment, consequent on the one just lost which Senator Milne brought before the Senate.

There is a deep division amongst the coalition parties—which were just recently the government and then, one would have thought, the potential government of this nation. They are now divided right down the middle on the issue of climate change, and I do not believe that there is going to be any healing of that division in the years ahead. The speech by the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, tonight showed that he understands where the world is going. He is in tune with thinking people right across this country. He understands that there is need for action on climate change, and he has staked his leadership on it. As a result there has been a rebellion, and that rebellion comes out of a deep scepticism which is itself fuelled by fear of taking action and confronting the vested interests, who are the polluting industries who do not want to see any of these targets reached but who have had their hand out for massive compensation. They have got $16 billion through the government legislation and, through the coalition negotiations, another $8 billion or $9 billion on top of that. Were the target to be lifted to 15 per cent under this legislation, there would potentially be another $7 billion or $8 billion on top of that.

When you look at where the coalition is on this, it is dog’s breakfast. It has no idea of what it is doing. In fact, for a good period when we resumed after dinner there were no Liberals in the chamber at all. I have never seen that before. The Nationals were Her Majesty’s opposition in the Senate as the party tried to sort out how it is going to stick together when it has no consensus on what to do about climate change. We are in a rapidly changing world where we are confronted with problems the like of which we have never seen before, and at the forefront of those is climate change. As Senator Milne laid out earlier, we are confronted with a deep crisis for all of humanity and the capital based party, the coalition, is fractured because it cannot get its head around that or know how to act on it.

The Labor Party, which is caught in the same bind, has offered $16 billion in compensation and then, after negotiating with the opposition, has taken $5 billion off households and put that into further compensation to the big polluters, as if rewarding the big polluters is going to be an answer to climate change. If the rest of the world does that then we are going to see a massive transfer of wealth across to the very problem—that is, the polluting industries starving the solution, which is energy efficiency, renewable energy, reforestation and the other carbon take-up alternatives that we need to go to rapidly.

Let us have no doubt that we are seeing an earthquake in Australian politics due to climate change. We are seeing a massive split in the conservative party, which has had cohesion since the middle of last century. We are seeing a party riven because it was not prepared for an environmental challenge of this magnitude, and we are seeing a party which does not—