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

I rise today to oppose the Abbott government's attempt, through the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 and related bills, to remove and destroy the emissions trading scheme that is currently law in Australia.

We are living in a climate emergency. You would not know that if you looked around the Senate chamber at this time, when there are about seven people here. But we are living in a climate emergency and we are at this point even unsure as to whether we have already gone beyond the tipping points of many of the major indicators, from which there will be no return.

Let me just start with the situation as it is, as I stand here. Just last week, 10 million scallops died off Vancouver Island because of ocean acidification. In low-PH water, scallops cannot form shells. This is consistent with research from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC in Hobart, where they have said exactly the same thing: you get to certain point of ocean acidification and those creatures which need shells cannot form them, and so you have wipe-out. That goes to the microscopic creatures and down to krill. Imagine what will happen if krill cannot reproduce. You are going to see a collapse in the marine food chain. This is already happening, and the 10 million scallops off Vancouver Island is just one example.

We are seeing extreme weather events around the world. There has been horrendous flooding in the United Kingdom and the big freeze in North America, described as the 'Arctic vortex'. We are seeing droughts, fires and heatwaves here in Australia such that there is a recognition that, to be able to continue to grow food, you are going to have to move where you grow some sorts of food and you are going to have to change the manner in which you grow it. But you have to take into account the significant shifts in the climate and you are going to have to take into account what the scientists and the Bureau of Meteorology are already saying, whether it is in Perth, in Tasmania or even in south-eastern Australia generally: we are going to see higher levels of extremely hot days, fire-danger days; we have to recognise that more people are going to die because of heatwaves; and not only do we now have to militate against things getting worse but also there will be huge costs in adapting to it.

In terms of food production, right around the world we are seeing the impacts of global warming. In 2008, we had, essentially, a food scarcity crisis because of climate change. Because of drought around the world and because of fire, the price of grain went up and so we had huge price rises, particularly in the Middle East, an importer of grain, and as a result the Arab Spring. The first riots in the Arab Spring were food riots. That is the reality for us.

In news just this weekend, coffee prices out of Brazil have reached a 16-month high because of drought, and the assumption is that they are going to have to shift where they grow coffee, that it is no longer going to be viable in the future. Countries like Brazil are recognising that, whereas here in Australia we have a government which rejects the science of global warming and says to farmers, 'We'll just give you the money. You don't have to change what you're doing; you just do that and it'll all come back to normal.' We are actually beyond normal. We are living in a hotter, wetter world, and things have permanently changed everywhere.

I come back to ocean acidification and what it is already doing to coral reefs. Warmer temperatures are bleaching coral reefs. We have ocean acidification weakening those reefs in the front of extreme weather events which smash them. We are seeing deterioration in our coral reefs right around the world. A survey out just last week said we have lost most of the big fish from our reefs around Australia partly, of course, because of overfishing but also partly because of climate change impacts. We are seeing species extinction. We are seeing invasive species spreading into areas where they never before were able to survive, destroying ecosystems. The east coast of Tasmania is a classic case, where the sea urchin is destroying the kelp beds, for example. We are losing, in Queensland, the white lemuroid ringtail possum; it is probably heading for extinction because it cannot survive extreme hot weather events. In Tasmania, the cider gum on the central plateau cannot go any higher. We are going to see the extinction of a third of all species we know because of global warming. That is the terrifying assessment from the world's leading biologists.

That is the extent of the challenge before us. That is why we have to have an emissions trading scheme—because this task has to be scaled up. Five per cent is patent nonsense in terms of what needs to happen. Australia needs to start paying its fair share now in the global climate task. I am glad that the Climate Change Authority has brought out its report saying that Australia, at a minimum, needs to reduce emissions by 15 per cent plus four per cent, 19 per cent, by 2020. I would have liked to see it much higher than that; nevertheless, that is where the authority has come out. But it also said we have to get on a trajectory for 40 to 60 per cent by 2030 and get ourselves carbon neutral by 2050. We are not going to do that unless we have a market mechanism which enables us to scale up the response to the challenge. And that is why what the Abbott government is doing is so reprehensible. It is the first responsibility of government to protect its people. The Abbott government is actually making Australians more vulnerable—and the economy extremely vulnerable—and setting us back decades because of its refusal to accept the science of global warming.

As for where we are in a global sense, the world is recognising that we are losing the battle. The scientists said we had to have global emissions peak and start coming down by 2015. The world failed us in Copenhagen; there is no doubt about that. We should have come to a treaty there which recognised the task of getting those emissions turned around and coming down by 2015, but it has not happened. That is why I say we risk having already gone beyond tipping points. But now the world is starting to get serious. We have the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, calling a summit in September this year and saying he wants nations to put on the table their 2020 target but also their post-2020 target. We have the world coming into the Lima talks later this year, framing up the move towards a 2015 global treaty. People are recognising that there is a limited carbon budget that the world has to address, and Australia only has a very limited share of that global carbon budget, because it takes into account heritage and legacy issues and it also takes into account the maximum of what is expendable. That is the context in which Australia needs to be considering the task.

Around the world, emissions trading has been recognised as the way that we are going to be able to address this most efficiently. There are broad-based emissions trading schemes in the European Union and in California. China is trialling emissions trading in seven large cities and provinces and has made clear its intention to introduce national emissions pricing in the form of emissions trading. South Korea is preparing a national emissions trading scheme. All around the world, countries are working together and separately to develop emissions trading schemes, because they are scalable. They are able to give the incentives, if you like, or the clear policy direction to companies and to the community to say that our task is to reduce emissions.

When you have a task to reduce emissions, if you go with an emissions trading scheme then you have something that is legislated and participation is compulsory, whereas Direct Action is voluntary. With an emissions trading scheme, you have an incentive to find more abatement options, because the polluters are paying and the polluters will work hard to find other options to reduce their emissions, whereas if it is voluntary there is no incentive. With an emissions trading scheme, you do not have to go through the complex and difficult task of setting baselines or benchmarks; you just tell the market what the cap is and they go and find a way of meeting that cap. Abatement costs can pass through, so you can have more abatement reduction. Around Australia at the moment, there is a reduction in electricity demand, and that has come from a growing awareness that coal fired power is a big polluter. The price of pollution is what the polluters have to pay. At the moment the community is being subsidised, if you like, or assisted to be able to deal with that, with the tax-free threshold and other assistance packages, but it has drawn people's awareness to how to reduce their emissions, and more abatement options open up. In terms of funding, the policy can be made cost-neutral to industry and the government. In fact, you can get a situation where future policy certainty is guaranteed because budgets can be set into the future on the back of what is expected.

But instead of that we have a government in Australia saying that they do not want a market-based mechanism, they are only going to go with five per cent and they are only putting $1½ billion into it. We are out of step internationally in terms of our responsibility and in terms of the level of the task. Frankly, driving expansion of coalmines and coal seam gas at a time when we need to reduce emissions is madness and should stop. There is no way the Bowen or Galilee basins should be opened up to coal. The biggest increase in emissions at the moment is through fugitive emissions, and that is coal and coal seam gas. We are also not counting the emissions that occur from burning our coal in other countries. We need to take responsibility in Australia—and do not bother telling us that Australia is not a major problem. We are a major problem. We are one of 12 countries who make up 70 per cent of global emissions.

Fifty per cent of Australia's emissions domestically come from 12 polluters only, and they are overwhelmingly in the coal fired generation sector. The carbon price is working to reduce emissions in that sector. It is a lie for people to get up and say that the carbon price is not working; the carbon price does not cover all sectors at the moment, but it does cover electricity and it does cover coal fired generation. That is why it is working, because a price on coal fired pollution works. We need to get out of coal fired pollution as quickly as possible and into 100 per cent renewable energy. The government is determined to get rid of emissions trading and attack the renewable energy target. The only conclusion that you can draw from that is its intention to prop up coal fired power generators against the competition that is coming in from renewables and against the future. It is a ridiculous policy which is totally irresponsible in the long term.

When you look at how we got to the position we are at in our emissions trading scheme, I just want to put on the record that the Greens right back from 2007 on supported the Bali road map, which said that Australia as developed economy had to reduce its emissions between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020. That was in 2007. The Labor government at that time determined on a five per cent emission reduction target. It was not even in the ballpark. The scheme that was developed at that time had a cap at 25 per cent, instead of a foundation, a base, at 25 per cent. That political argument meant that there could not be a resolution of what the appropriate emissions reduction target should be in the face of the climate crisis. As a result we came up with a clean energy package which legislated an emissions trading scheme. So let us stop pretending it is a tax. What is legislated is an emissions trading scheme. It was determined that there would be a fixed-price period during which time the new institution, the Climate Change Authority, would determine an appropriate target. The target would then be recommended to the parliament and the parliament would absorb that target into the legislation and it would go to flexible pricing in 2015 with a link to the European Union.

If you are serious about addressing climate change, you do not want to abandon a carbon price that drives change. A price of $23 or $24 is not high enough to drive the kind of change into renewables you need, which is why the Greens secured the $10 billion with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to supplement the carbon price to drive the investment into renewable energy. That is why the Greens will not be supporting Labor's amendment to try to go to emissions trading on 1 July 2014. Apart from anything else, if you are interested in actually driving change then you would want to wait until the European Union's attempt to fix their scheme started to kick in. I am pleased to say that the European Union has dealt one blow at least to the low price in the European Union by agreeing to backloading. They have agreed to take 400 million units out of their emissions trading scheme and backload it and they want to make that 900 million by 2016 to drive up the price.

The test for the Labor Party here would be if the European price was now $60, would they be keen to go to flexible pricing in 2014? Probably not. The issue for the Greens is: we have to behave with integrity in terms of the challenge of the task ahead. It is critical we stick with what we have got. We have policy certainty. We have got a very good policy framework, recognised by the International Energy Agency as template legislation for the rest of the world. No-one can understand why Australia would abandon a polluter-pays principle for a government corporate welfare principle—a payout of taxpayer dollars to the polluters as opposed to raising from the polluters to be able to make the changes we need to be able to mitigate against increased emissions and to move to the low-carbon economy.

I want to go to the low-carbon economy for a moment, because abandoning carbon pricing is abandoning the very things the government says it wants. It says it wants to have increased productivity. It says it wants increased jobs. But the government, by abandoning emissions trading, is turning Australia into a rust bucket economy. A rust bucket economy is what will happen if you abandon carbon pricing, because everywhere else in the world gets the signal and knows what has to happen. Where are the research and development dollars going? Where is the innovation going? Where are the incentives going? All into the new technologies. Frankly, if you want to drive the manufacturing industry out of Australia, as was put to us in the Senate inquiry last week, the best thing you can do is get rid of carbon pricing, because those companies will go elsewhere in the world where they can pick up the research and development dollars and incentives to upgrade their equipment and their products that they are selling into the market.

So what we are going to do is prop up coal fired power and old and inefficient technologies. We have already seen the end of the Clean Technology Food and Foundries Investment Program, where more than $470 million was not spent. We have food processors around Australia crying out for higher levels of efficiency. Those programs were putting that efficiency in there. If you wanted to actually see Australia in the longer term be competitive, the best thing you could do is get ahead of the curve. You would embrace carbon pricing, you would increase the level of ambition and you would drive Australian community, industry and business generally to get with it and find ways of reducing emissions, leading the world and selling the intellectual property as well as the product. Instead of that, we are going to be so far behind the eight ball. We are not going to slow down the momentum of the rest of the world, but the rest of the world will pass us by. People will look back and say they cannot believe it. We had it happen once with solar, where our best brains left the country. We do not want it to happen again when it comes to addressing the shift to a low-carbon economy in the face of a climate emergency.

I say again, the Abbott government is acting against the best interests of Australians. We are a continent most vulnerable to global warming, but we are an economy and a society which is already suffering and will suffer a lot more by a short-sighted, silly policy of paying the polluters—corporate welfare to coal fired generation—when our whole framework should be innovative and futuristic.