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

I remind the minister that she said ‘I will be sitting on the same side with Senator Fielding and Senator Joyce.’ That is quite right. It is the same as the fact that she will be sitting on the same side with Senator Fielding and Senator Joyce in rejecting the words ‘must consider a 350 parts per million target’. She did sit there in rejecting the 25 to 40 per cent range that the Bali roadmap suggested. She also sat with them in rejecting the Greens gross national feed-in tariff for renewable electricity. She has sat with them on every single action the Greens have taken in terms of stopping the logging of the greatest carbon stores in the Southern Hemisphere. The Greens have been moving time and time again by way of amendment, by way of private member’s bills and by way of every which way to get action on climate change.

This exposes the problem here for the government. They say that action on climate change equals the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and that is what is completely and utterly wrong. Action on climate change is a whole-of-government approach and it does not exist in the Rudd government. You have Minister Ferguson out there wanting to liquefy coal as a transport fuel. How outrageous is that in a greenhouse world? You have him giving extra exploration permits to the company that is responsible for the largest oil leak off the Australian coastline in Western Australia. You have no mandatory vehicle fuel-efficiency targets, which the Greens argued for until we were blue in the face. That has been rejected by the government, by Senator Fielding, by Senator Joyce and by the entire coalition.

The Greens have argued for a massive investment in public transport. In the stimulus package the Greens got $40 million for cycleways around Australia and an undertaking from the Treasurer that we will get more money for cycleways, because they are essential. It is the Greens that moved for the retrofitting of all Australia’s homes with full insulation, double glazing and solar hot water. It is the Greens bill on energy efficiency for commercial building that has been picked up by the Rand Corporation in the US and identified as the best legislation in Europe and Australia in terms of responding to energy efficiency. So do not let us have a complete and utter nonsense statement that action on climate change is represented by the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and therefore the Greens are opposed to action on climate change.

The Greens want appropriate action on climate change. Let me put it to you this way, Madam Temporary Chair: if you have a cancer patient in front of you and you say, ‘I’m going to give you an aspirin and you take that for six months and you’re not to take any other treatment—that will do the trick’, that person will probably get themselves into a position where their disease is so advanced there is nothing you can do about it and you realise it is beyond repair. That is the point for the planet—what the government is doing is proposing an aspirin when we have an emergency that requires emergency action. If you say, ‘You may only take this aspirin, we do not intend doing anything else and you cannot do anything else till 2020’, then you are guaranteeing failure.

That is the point here—the minister is ruling out protecting Australia’s forests, dead flat; gone are all of the opportunities for carbon stores. She has voted against a gross national feed-in tariff that would bring on geothermal, solar thermal and wave power; that would see renewable energy come into its own. She has refused to fix up the renewable energy target. When I moved to bring it back here it was rejected by the government—sitting with, I might add, Senator Fielding and Senator Joyce. Apparently that is untenable, but she sat with them in relation to the renewable energy target and now we have a scenario where half of that target will be met by solar hot water, heat pumps and the multiplier on photovoltaics, and you will not have the expansion in renewable energy that everybody thought you would have—and, what is more, we will lose jobs.

The Greens again pointed out the problems with the Green Loans Program. We have a government that is not prepared to act on transport. What have they done in this scheme? They have put transport in and then taken it out again; put it in and then neutralised the price signal. That is not action on climate change. Let me look at coal-fired power. They have given the industry $7.3 billion on a five per cent reduction below 2000 levels and refused to tell this parliament how much more they will get if we go to a 15 per cent reduction or even to a 25 per cent reduction. If you extrapolate the figures you are talking mega-dollars. As many of the analysts have said, this provides Australian coal-fired power with a surety out to 2020. Why does that matter? It matters because 50 per cent of emissions in Australia come from the electricity sector and we are talking about coal-fired power. On the very same day that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was introduced into the House of Representatives, was the Prime Minister there talking about the climate emergency? No, he was not. He was in the Hunter Valley turning the first sod on the coal railway and new port so that we can expand coal exports by three times.

So, Minister, before you come in here and try to suggest that your scheme represents action on climate change, explain why you are supporting a trebling of coal exports; explain why you went and did a deal with the coalition that guarantees coal compensation when there is not one skerrick of economic argument to support it—not one. Not one economist would put their name to a document in any shape or form that argues it was a reasonable thing to give those free permits to the coal-fired power stations. Minister, I heard you ask earlier, in response to Senator Joyce, what is wrong with polluters paying for their pollution; why should they pollute for free? Well, absolutely, and so why are we giving free permits to coal-fired generators when there is not one skerrick of argument for it? We are giving them $7.3 billion and that is taking money out of household compensation that has been adjusted downwards to completely compensate for the increase. As I said, this is for only a five per cent reduction, which is the only thing the government realistically has on the table. The minister’s legislation says the minister may take into account 450 parts per million. I say the minister must take into account a trajectory of 350 parts per million.

This again comes back to the Copenhagen talks. People say Australia must have this legislation before Copenhagen. As Sir Nicholas Stern, Kofi Annan, David King and the Greens say—all of us on the record as supporters of action on climate change—it is better not to lock in something bad; it is better to give ourselves time to agree on something good. Copenhagen needs to agree to ambitious targets, and those targets have to represent the science and be real. That is why developed countries need to have 40 per cent emission reductions by 2020 below 1990 levels on the table in Copenhagen to give enough headroom for the developing countries to expand. The minister acknowledges the principle that developing countries need the headroom to expand. Yes they do, and in order for that to happen we have to take the deeper cuts—we in the developed countries who are historically responsible for the emissions, who have the capacity to take the cuts and in whose interests it is to take them as well, not just in a climate sense but also in an economic sense. It will drive the new manufacturing, the new jobs. By locking in the old economy there is a huge opportunity cost to Australia that rips out the potential for manufacturing in the whole of the new green jobs economy that we were all so excited about developing but which will not develop, will not occur, under the minister’s legislation.

On the issue of the science, again I put to the minister: will she concede that scientists—including James Hansen and Graham Pearman—are all now saying that 350 parts per million is what we should be aiming for to reduce the risk of going beyond two degrees and therefore catastrophic climate change? If so, isn’t it true that she has taken a politically expedient position—not a courageous position and not a position on the action that is required—that will undermine an agreement in Copenhagen? Why will it undermine it? It is exactly because of what I said on the Commonwealth communique of the weekend. If you have the developing countries saying, ‘We want 1.5 degrees and 350 parts per million,’ and the developed countries saying, ‘We are not going to do that because we are not prepared to commit to those cuts,’ you are very unlikely to get a global treaty. Secondly, if you do not have specific amounts of money on the table for the developing countries for mitigation and adaptation, you are also undermining Copenhagen.

Australia has taken both of those positions. We have not set what money we are going to put on the table for the developing countries. Minister Wong sat with Senator Fielding and Senator Joyce in voting down part of the object clause that said we had an obligation to pay money to those developing countries. We did not put a figure on the table. President Sarkozy and Gordon Brown have put money on the table. Prime Minister Rudd is happy to say, ‘Yes, there should be a fast start-up fund,’ but will not say what Australia is putting on the table with regard to its fair share, will not say how we are going to fund our fair share of a fast start-up or long-term financing and will not say whether that is in addition to our overseas aid and Millennium Development Goals money. We have to say, and put it on the table right now, that it is additional to that.

This is the pointy end of the business now. Copenhagen will not get a treaty unless the developed countries get real about the level of emissions cuts and about the money on the table. If we lock in this scheme before Copenhagen, Australia will undermine the capacity to get a global treaty with targets that give us a chance of reducing our risk to below 50 per cent of going beyond the two degrees. That is the reality of this. You cannot dodge the science. As I said before, I am not sure which is worse: people who deny climate change or people who use the crisis rhetoric of climate change but refuse to take the crisis action that will deliver the outcomes.