Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We can go back through the Hansard and have a look.

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN: I am not sure what you said then, Senator Macdonald, but I will just ask senators again to come to order.

As I said earlier, regardless of the fact that carbon pollution has an effect on the entire planet, Australia itself is at acute risk. If it is only Australia that those opposite care about in relation to this issue then at least for the sake of Australia they should be supporting the bills in front of them, because Australia, the Great Barrier Reef and the ecosystems in this hot and dry continent are at grave risk if we do not act. I support that by again going back to Professor Will Steffen, the director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, who has provided on umpteen occasions a lot of peer reviewed evidence as to why we need to be acting on climate change and why we need to be giving incentive to those large polluters to change their current practices to, in effect, change our economy, the same as has already been done in the EU and a number of other parts of the world.

I refer those senators opposite to the Climate Commission's website because it talks about carbon pricing being not a new concept but something that has been in place in parts of the world for a number of years. In fact, in the US, when they were dealing with acid rain back in the mid-1990s, they introduced a price on acid rain pollution, which was passed in 1995, to reduce sulfur dioxide pollution from power plants. The pollution dropped by three million tonnes by 2002. That is a clear example of how putting a price on pollution does actually work and how it has already worked in another part of the world. This is not a new thing. The opposition are making it a bigger deal than it really is. Yes, it is a major piece of reform for this nation, but it is something that so many parts of the world are acting on and getting on with. Why? It is because they believe in the science. I think the stumbling block here comes back to the fact that those senators opposite do not believe in the science and they do not believe in what those peer reviewed science reports are telling us.

If we were to go back through some of the things that Senator Macdonald has said, that seems to be fairly much the case. I know he said earlier that he does believe in climate change, but I do not know what that actually means. I think it means that he just believes the climate changes and we all keep rolling along. He does not believe that human input has something to do with—