Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (Abolition) Bill 2013 [No. 2] again. We are standing here today at a tipping point in the politics of global warming. It is long overdue and in fact it may well be arriving far too late, but at least it is here.

The global climate science community is watching the fingerprints of another El Nino cycle forming across the Pacific, and Australia just recorded its warmest year since instrumental records began. What happens if we swing back into another El Nino is really anybody's guess. Global warming is no longer a matter of theoretical conjecture for the future; it is a matter of life and death today. And the signs are everywhere.

I want to just pick three different examples of the various ways in which this issue touches everyone. The Center for Climate and Security is a non-profit policy institute in the United States and it has on its distinguished board mainly retired military and national security professionals from the United States. They do excellent work on the impacts of global warming on US security policy. I will just read into the record one representative quote. CCS Advisory Board member Rear Admiral David W Titley, retired from the United States Navy, points out:

Compared to many other threats the Department of Defense faces, we know a lot about both the timing and the magnitude of climate change. As today’s testimonies make clear—the time for action is now.

The United States military might view global warming through the prism of the security challenge and of how they need to change US military posture—and we might have a very interesting conversation about the degree to which Australian military doctrine lags probably a decade behind some of the thinking going on in the United States—but, nonetheless, this body is not, you would have thought, a likely candidate for being part of the global socialist conspiracy that some in this country seem to believe that global warming is.

From the worlds of commerce and finance, a correspondent with Senator Milne this week who works in currency markets in the city of London wrote:

Where a conservative government would seek to repeal an institution that is, from my research, successful in acting as a commercial entity and turning a profit means it can only be a pure anti-climate change act.

We might pause to consider those words for a moment. Again, it is not exactly someone coming from the margins.

The third example is from local government. I, Senator Rachel Siewert from WA and a number of other WA MPs from across the political spectrum breakfasted yesterday with mayors, CEOs, councillors and staff from the Western Australian local government sector and I had the good fortune to sit and spend a bit of time with Mayor Tracey Roberts from the city of Wanneroo. I had not really put two and two together that one of the fastest growing areas of local government expenditure is adapting to coastal erosion as infrastructure, coastal housing, parks, roads and power conduits are eaten away by coastal erosion.

These are three indicators from across the world and across very different areas of our community that show just how deeply entrenched and ongoing this problem is. What is bearing down on us is utterly forbidding. I refer to the most recent State of Our Cities report before the government abolished the Major Cities Unit that was doing such useful work on documenting Australian cities. We are one of the most urbanised societies in the world and must make real attempts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, amongst other things. The last State of Our Cities report before the Abbott government bowled that entity over said that heat deaths would double by 2050 in all Australian cities and quadruple in Perth and Brisbane. That is people within our lifetime dying as a result of the increased heat strokes and heat impacts from heatwaves in Australian cities. That is something we could do something about, but of course this government seems determined to blindfold itself from the challenges bearing down on us. We appear to be now looking not at a metre sea level rise by the end of this century but potentially three metres of unavoidable sea level rise if the West Antarctic ice sheet continues to collapse. That does not happen necessarily within our lifetimes but it is a relentless accelerating problem that we are leaving for our kids and grandkids to content with. I do not imagine they would thank this present generation for walking them into that future with our eyes open even though we knew that is what we were committing them to. I believe now the evidence is sufficiently strong that we can say with confidence that we live in the age of dangerous climate change, and the choice that we face is whether to press over the edge and commit ourselves to catastrophic climate change.

Renewable energy obviously is one important part of the answer. During the brief, rapidly shrinking window of agency that we have to prevent the very worst impacts where things are basically irreversible and nothing we do really matters and it is simply a question of bracing for impact, renewable energy is obviously a very big part of the answer. Particularly in a fossil and carbon intensive economy like Australia's, it helps in decoupling economic development from growth in fossil fuel combustion. Renewable energy as a relatively new part of the energy sector needs assistance. It needs assistance in research and development, in industry development and in education and training, and we should not treat that as though it is some kind of aberration from the economic development of industrialised economies.

The coal industry was built entirely by taxpayer endeavour. In my home state the Swan River colony effectively took one of its great growth spurts on the construction of the East Perth power station, of course at taxpayer expense. How else was that economy going to develop? Similarly the gas industry decades later benefited—in the public interest, you can argue, if you are setting aside climate change issues—from billions, not millions, of dollars of taxpayers' investment in the development of the Burrup and the Dampier to Bunbury natural gas pipeline. Again it was done for the purposes of state economic development with taxpayers' expense. Now the very same players and the same industries have benefited from such largess, you could argue in the public interest, are determined to slam the door on the renewable energy sector, condemning subsidies and assistance quite clearly to prevent a fast-moving competitor from eating up their market share.

Of course renewable energy needs industry development assistance while it gets on its feet. That is how the Chinese government built the largest PV fabrication plants in the world. That is how the German government, with the use of a feed-in tariff legislated and negotiated by the German Greens, built a photovoltaics industry out of nothing. You put the supports in the place and when the industry matures you take that supports away, and that is precisely what we are seeing occur in Europe now that the industry is mature. Australia is benefiting from that industrial development, much of it led by Australian research and ingenuity at the University of New South Wales and elsewhere. Those people then distributed that through solar PV companies in China, Europe and North America, leading to some of the greatest innovations in the world, and Australians then gets the benefit of that in the form of very low cost photovoltaics.

Regarding the form of industry assistance that has come about, let us pay some bipartisan credit here. It was John Howard's government that introduced the Renewable Energy Target. It was only two per cent at the time but it did get the industry on its feet. It was the Rudd government, with the legislative support of the Australian Greens, that expanded that target out to 20 per cent. That is effectively bootstrapping an industry into existence. The Renewable Energy Target is one of the most important industry supports to mature and diversify the renewable energy sector and it is extraordinary that the Australian government has chosen to install Mr Dick Warburton, who is under something of a cloud as a result of his involvement—