Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Climate change is real. It is not conjecture. It is not a socialist fringe theory. It is not a global conspiracy dreamed up by academics so that they can get more dollars in research grants. It is the accepted scientific wisdom of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. Earlier this year the Climate Commission published an overview of the current and most up-to-date understanding of climate science and the implications of this knowledge for societal responses. In its report The critical decade, the Climate Commission concluded that there is a broad consensus amongst climate scientists that the earth is warming rapidly as a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases. In other words, climate change is real.

Faced with this challenge, there are two things that a major political party can do. They can bury their heads in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening—they can allow the polluters to go on polluting and putting our environment and our economy at risk—or they can take action. That is why the Gillard government is acting: it is the right thing to do. The only action the federal opposition took on climate change was to knife Malcolm Turnbull in the back when he reached agreement with the government to pass the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. In other words, Tony Abbott came to the leadership on a platform of not acting on climate change. As always, he put his narrow political interest ahead of the national interest. The Gillard Labor government—