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

If you do not get on board with it, you will be a left-behind rust bucket. I know that is where Senator Macdonald wants to be. That is where his comfort zone is—as a left-behind rust bucket. But the rest of us would like to see investment in education, innovation and cleverness.

Today, we heard the government trying to argue that companies had been driven offshore. That is wrong. There are big solar companies not making investments in Australia, because of the uncertainty the Abbott government has created about carbon policy. We are losing mega-investment, because there is no certainty that Australia is on the right track with climate change. If it were, we would be attracting more investment. Trillions of dollars are in the sidelines. The Investor Group on Climate Change has given evidence to that effect. That is why we need to keep our renewable energy target—and keep it at 41 gigawatt hours—but it needs to go beyond 2016. That is why the Greens are committed to 100 per cent renewable energy as quickly as possible and to at least 90 per cent by 2030.

If you put together 100 per cent renewable energy and a 40 to 60 per cent trajectory, you are putting together a really exciting plan for Australia. You are talking about redesigning our cities, thinking about the way we live—a huge investment in, retrospectively, looking at building renovations, the built environment, the urban environment, changing the way we do agriculture and looking at research and development, to see how we need to change in order to sustain ourselves into the future.

They are the kinds of exciting things that young people want to be involved in. And they are the one group—the best and brightest—we will drive out of this country, because you want to abandon carbon pricing. They will go overseas, as they did during the Howard years. We lost some of our best and brightest in solar technology at that time, because they realised that there was no hope in Australia. They went overseas. They have come home to Australia and are working in these fields. But they will go again. They want to be part of the future.

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

They do not want to be stuck in a rust-bucket economy like Senator Macdonald does. They do not want to be in that place. They want to be where innovation takes place. I feel incredibly disappointed that this Senate appears to want to destroy an emissions trading scheme that is in place right now, and that the Senate wants to abandon carbon pricing and leave us with nothing in terms of a market mechanism that provides the cheapest and most effective abatement of greenhouse gas emissions.

To give hope to those young people who were outside today, who are no doubt despairing at the thought of this government abandoning carbon pricing and serious efforts on climate change, I say: 'This will galvanise a whole generation. You are not alone.' Around the world people are moving, and they want a 2015 treaty. That means people under the leadership of Present Obama, in the United States, are moving. People are moving in the United Kingdom, Europe and China—everywhere you look around the planet, except for Canada and Australia, which are in the rust-bucket category. They are over there in the umbrella group and they will do everything they can to rip down action on global warming at Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's summit, in Lima, at the end of the year and into next year.

By imagining you are getting the climate-change issue off the agenda now, you are making it front and centre for the 2016 federal election campaign. Australians will not tolerate that kind of climate denial. That is why I am moving a second reading amendment in this debate. I want to make sure that we recognise the world is on track for four degrees of warming.

We are calling on the government to adopt 40 to 60 per cent below 2000 levels by 2030. I will move a second reading amendment because I want young people, future generations, to know that in this parliament every single one of us knew what was at stake, every single one of us knew we were on track for four to six degrees of warming and every single one of us knew what the consequences were, but only a few of us were prepared to act on it, including the Greens, who took a leadership role at that time and continued to do so. When the votes are taken, future generations will have the names to look back at of the people who sold out Australia—because they are selling us out in a global context. It is the opportunity cost to this nation, not only the physical cost of global warming and not only the trauma of global warming— (Time expired)