Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think it is important in this debate to acknowledge that there are some things that are agreed on by both sides of this chamber. One of them is that there is an agreement that we should abolish the carbon tax. But, while the fixed price on carbon should end by 30 June next year, it should end with a transition to a floating carbon price. Labor believe that we must support the most effective and least costly way of reducing carbon pollution.

The scientific consensus on climate change—that global warming is occurring and human activity is a contributing factor—has been settled. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was released on 27 September last year. It states the inescapable scientific facts: 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal and, since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.' The fact that in 2014 we in this chamber still have to, in part, have a debate about whether or not climate change is real is an indictment of this chamber and an indictment of the debate that this nation has been having on this issue in the past few years. Observed changes have included more extreme weather events, more warm days and nights and greater frequency of heatwaves. The report concludes it extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by human activity.

The reality of climate change is fundamentally changing our strategic view of the world. In his contribution in the other place, the member for Isaacs pointed out that the Pentagon has identified climate change as one of the greatest security challenges we will face in coming decades. Addressing an international security forum in November last year, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that climate change was heightening global instability. The new arctic strategy he announced was dealing with what he described as a new frontier, opened up by the rapidly-changing conditions in that region.

We have to see this Climate Change Authority (Abolition) Bill through the prism of this government's approach to science and evidence based policy, and it has been extremely poor. There is an absence of a science minister, as Senator Brown referred to in her speech. There are flags of cuts to organisations such as the CSIRO and there are more cuts coming—unfortunately, we expect, in the area of science and research—as part of the still secret Commission of Audit process. In under a fortnight's time a report will be delivered to the government but the government are yet to give us a detailed timetable on when it will be released to the public, and they are ruling nothing in or out. I worry it will contain another attack on the science community and the science infrastructure of this nation.

Let us take a step back and look at the function of the Climate Change Authority. It provides independent expert advice on Australia's emissions-reduction targets and the scope for emissions reductions in Australia. As an independent body based on a similar advisory committee in the UK, it is intended to ensure that climate change policy is directed by evidence and facts rather than political opportunism. It was intended to take the politics out of the debate. Its advice, based not only on scientific evidence but also on economic evidence, is presented to government to inform its decision making.

The UK Committee on Climate Change outlines four strategic priorities:

These principles are shared with the Climate Change Authority and underpin evidence based policy on climate change. We all know that an evidence based approach is the cornerstone of good public policy. If the government do not have objective, factually accurate, rigorous information available when making a decision, then what are they basing their judgements on?

There are plenty of self-interested stakeholders out there, especially those who would benefit from government inaction. Caving into these pressures is not the mark of strong leadership. It is easy to ignore facts when they do not suit your argument, but selectively dismissing evidence is not leadership. The Prime Minister, on 31 July 2011, said: 'I agree it's very wrong to attack scientists, and no-one on the coalition side is doing that.'

Ignoring the evidence on climate change and abolishing independent expert advice to government is an attack. It is an attack on science, on good public policy and on the truth. Scrapping the Climate Change Authority means worse advice to government and amounts to the government looking to be wilfully and, in my view, negligently ignorant of expert scientific evidence on climate change. Responses to climate change have been highly politicised in recent years. That makes it all the more vital to have an agency independent of government that is responsible for advising on this policy area. In July 2011, Malcolm Turnbull said: 'We cannot afford to allow the science to become a partisan issue' and I agree with him, and this is why these bills should not pass.

The broader suite of bills that the Senate will consider is designed to tear apart the entire framework for delivering a cap-and-trade mechanism for reducing carbon emissions in Australia. They will also undermine the solid evidence base on which government decisions will be made. The Renewable Energy Target, when it was initially discussed by former Prime Minister Howard, was seen as a bipartisan pathway. Only a market based approach can guarantee that the Renewable Energy Target can be achieved. What worries me is that, contrary to positions that those opposite have held at different points in time, recent performance and the recent path the coalition has chosen to take are concerning. At the 2007 election—and some of this gets forgotten—the coalition supported putting a price on carbon emissions. The former Prime Minister, John Howard, commissioned a significant report, chaired by Peter Shergold, recommending that Australia support an emissions trading scheme. Releasing the report of John Howard's emissions trading task force, Mr Shergold said:

Australia should commit to an emissions target...ahead of any comprehensive global response, and it should do that with an emissions trading scheme based upon cap and trade.

The Shergold report also found that 'picking winners will increase the costs we impose on ourselves'. An ETS—an emissions trading scheme—gives incentives for constant business innovation by allowing the market to determine best practice. It empowers the corporate sector to make decisions that improve outcomes for the environment, minimising government bureaucracy and setting rules rather than taking a command-and-control approach. You would think concepts like these would be at the core of the Liberal Party's philosophy when it comes to environmental policy. But instead of rewarding ongoing efficiency, they will do exactly what Shergold cautioned against, and that is pick winners.

The direction the government is heading at the moment is effectively to create one giant slush fund for those the coalition think should be looked after in this process. Different speakers from the other side have slammed the use of slush funds for environmental projects in the past; they believe that only projects that are too risky for the market to fund should be funded. What hypocrisy that such a fund would be the core of their entire carbon policy. The Emissions Reduction Fund, which the coalition describes as the 'centrepiece' of its Direct Action policy, is still in development. One Coalition MP described Direct Action as 'like a school project'. At the moment they keep saying there is an ongoing process of consultation based on a green paper, but what do we actually know about Direct Action? Not much, because this green paper process replaces the policy that they published in 2010. We know what it will be called; we know how much it is going to cost—$2.8 billion over four years. But what we do not know is how it is going work and what worries me is neither does the government.

That is why they still have key questions unanswered in their green paper: They are questions like: how do we work out whether emissions reductions are genuine? How are emissions reductions calculated? How do we run an efficient tender process that actually subsidises the lowest-cost emissions reductions? How do we apply and enforce a safeguard mechanism against baselines being exceeded? What should the governance arrangements for the Clean Energy Regulator be? Are any processes available for this to be reviewed? It seems to me that some of these questions are very basic, and the lack of detail that has been provided by the government—outside a few slogans and documents that they themselves are now insisting they need to review—is very worrying.

The series of bills we have been debating will abolish the entire framework for managing emissions reductions, while nothing will replace it until the coalition sort out an alternative. Frankly, for the Australian public, on an issue as serious as climate change, this is just not good enough.

The government have allocated a budget without even detailing their own policy. The member for Isaacs said in the other place:

Those opposite pretend that the abolition of the fixed price on carbon will lead to lower electricity costs. They pretend that taxpayers will somehow be better off; they pretend that this legislation is somehow business friendly; and they pretend that their policy can achieve the same environmental outcomes as Labor's. Nothing could be further from the truth. The coalition's policy is a hoax on the Australian electorate.

The government are seeking to repeal the carbon pricing mechanism without even coming up with a genuine alternative. Good public policy on climate change has fallen victim to the political and campaign interests of the coalition.

At the end of the day, the coalition's decision to repeal the carbon pricing mechanism was not about finding a solution to the climate change challenges that face this nation; neither was it about finding a solution to improve the economic and social framework for emissions reduction. It was about getting through an election campaign. These facts are clear now that we are on the other side and see no detail of the policy. How can we expect the government to achieve anywhere near their emissions-reduction target of five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 when they themselves cannot even outline the details of their policy? Even without knowing the detail, we know that the coalition are going the wrong way on the fundamental design and framework of their policy.

The government are proposing to replace a policy that is working with a policy that experts say will not work. The Shergold report said that not choosing an ETS would 'impose a far heavier burden on economic activity' and that the cost of measures such as Direct Action would be 'enormous'. The Shergold report was commissioned by John Howard. Geoff Carmody—a co-founder of Access Economics, a former Treasury official and one of the three people hand-picked to verify the coalition's policy costing figures before the last election—agrees with Shergold. He has written:

In general, ‘direct action’ options tend to be the least cost-effective. That is, they deliver the lowest emissions abatement for a given cost, or the same emissions abatement at the highest cost.

A Fairfax survey of 35 economists which was published on 28 October last year found that 86 per cent favoured an emissions trading scheme while only two supported the Direct Action approach. Justin Wolfers of the Brookings Institution and the University of Michigan describes Direct Action as producing 'more economic disruption for a lesser environmental pay-off'. On a floating carbon price versus a system of picking winners, Rob Henderson, a National Australia Bank senior economist says:

If I had to make a choice between pricing carbon and having bureaucrats allocating permits, then I’m going to go for the market mechanism every time.

This view is shared by BT's Chris Caton, who said that any economist who did not favour an emissions trading approach 'should hand his degree back'.

We know that by pricing carbon we will empower the market to create incentives for business to shift to a new, cleaner standard of practice which will reduce our negative impact on the environment. Labor supports the abolition of the fixed carbon price, but our support for abolishing the carbon tax must depend on Australia's moving soon to an emissions trading scheme—a market based mechanism which rewards innovation and adaptation, discourages inefficient and environmentally damaging practice and helps us meet our emissions-reduction targets. We in the Labor Party are willing to work across the aisle to develop an emissions trading scheme that provides the best environmental outcomes at the lowest cost. That is why these bills should not be supported—emissions reduction is too important, and good public policy cannot be allowed to fall victim to partisan politics.