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

As for shutting down manufacturing, as Senator Williams talks about, let me tell you: hollowing out the manufacturing sector is the legacy of the Howard and Costello years. Hollowing out the manufacturing sector and undermining investment in further education are the legacies of those years. In 2006, there was the opportunity at the height of the boom to actually invest in education and in transitioning the economy. And what did they do? They gave it out in tax cuts, left, right and centre—manna from heaven. Remember the debate? Rivers of gold; manna from heaven—they gave it out in tax cuts to people, instead of investing in public transport, in education and in the kind of infrastructure that the future demanded.

But now we are in a situation where Senator Abetz tells Australians that there is a carbon tax. There is not. We have legislation in this parliament which is an emissions trading scheme. That is what is the law in Australia as I stand here and speak. It is operating as a fixed price for three years and then transitioning to flexible pricing as of 1 July next year. So it is a lie to say to the Australian people that we do not have an emissions trading scheme. We do. The architecture is passed. Everything is in place. The Climate Change Authority was set up to recommend to the parliament the level that we should set for ambition, and, when that recommendation was made, the parliament was supposed to put that into the legislation to enable flexible pricing. The linking with the European Union has already been done. The expectation is that we will be at flexible pricing, linked to the European Union, next year. We could actually go to it now if we chose to do so. But the fact of the matter is: we already have an emissions trading scheme.

As to this notion that it is a blot on jobs: well, contrary to what Senator Abetz says, in the news today we hear that Californian company SolarReserve's CEO, Kevin Smith, has said that it will not be investing in Australia because of the wind-back of climate framework policy. Around Australia today, we have a huge rollout of renewable energy and jobs because people can see that this is where the innovation is, this is where rural development is, this is where rural jobs are, around Australia. Communities are embracing renewable energy, putting solar panels on their roofs and doing what they can with energy efficiency.

It may come as a shock to the coalition to learn it, but most people are actually anxious about the future because of global warming. If you had picked up the paper over the weekend you would have seen that Kiribati, a country in the Pacific, has just bought land in Fiji so that it can transfer its entire population. What does that say to this parliament? These are our Pacific island neighbours who are already impacted on by sea level rise and by saltwater incursion. They have young people sitting there in their country knowing that it is rapidly reaching a point where they can no longer live in that country. As to Tuvalu, as early as 2006, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, up got their leader and said to the global community: 'Who will take my people?' Is Australia going to start recognising that we are driving environmental refugees around the world because of extreme weather events, because of sea level rise, because of storm surge and because of saltwater incursion? These are the issues that we should be talking about, particularly here in this Senate.

There is a need for everybody in the Senate—and, I would say, especially the new senators—to understand the architecture of the legislation and how it works. Did the new senators, for example, know that there has been a schedule added to one of the bills—schedule 5 added to the main bill—which removes the funding substantially from ARENA, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency? This parliament set up the Australian Renewable Energy Agency so that there would be a continuum between early-stage research and pilot-stage rollout of projects through to commercialisation under the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. They were a package. And the idea was that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation profits would flow back into the Renewable Energy Agency and fund early-stage research. So it became a circular thing, where the community was not having to pay for the early-stage research—in fact the rollout and profit from those projects was.

Does anyone here actually understand that, by repealing these bills, the government has chosen to forgo $18 billion in revenue over the forward estimates? The Prime Minister is saying to the people of Australia that he will not take it out of the pockets of the big polluters; he will in fact take it out of the pockets of the community in co-payments for going to the doctor; he will take it out of the pockets of the community and pensioners; he will take it out of the pockets of the community when it comes to health and education. Whilst people have talked about the co-payments, not a lot has yet been said about the millions being taken out of health and education to the states.

Speaking of the states, how many people here realise that Tasmania has had a major windfall gain because of our emissions trading scheme? Hydro Tasmania has made substantial amounts of money—$70 million is going into the Hydro because of carbon pricing, and that goes into the state budget by way of a dividend paid into the state budget. Stopping that means that Tasmania—which is already under the pump economically, which people realise—will have fewer nurses, police and teachers.