Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In thinking about how to construct this speech, I thought about my two young boys, who happen to be here at the moment. I thought about what I would tell them, when they are old enough to understand, about why a parliament of the 21st century—armed with the knowledge that we have, knowing what we know about the science of climate change—retreated on climate change. Knowing what we know about what it means for our environment—the Great Barrier Reef, the loss of a great many species, the melting of the ice sheets in the Antarctic—how is it that we could have taken this sort of action? Knowing what it means for their health—with an increased frequency of extreme weather, droughts, floods and bushfires—and knowing that the world they inherit will be very different from the world we currently live in, why did we do what no other country around the world has done? When we had the opportunity to take action, when the time came to get on the front foot and tackle this challenge head on, we retreated. How do I explain that to my two boys?

I think it is important that we go back a little to look at how we got here. Climate change is an issue we have known about for decades. In fact, it was first put on the map by conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who recognised just what sort of challenge it presented to future generations. It is an issue around which we have accumulated a growing body of knowledge. It is an issue where the mainstream scientific consensus is all heading in one direction.

People have a view that science is about these 'eureka' moments where we stumble on an answer to a problem that, up until that point, we have been unable to solve. Well, that is not how most science develops. It is a continual process of trial and error. It is researching a hypothesis. It is putting out information to your peers in the scientific community and having them critique that information. It is an iterative process, and we emerge with a scientific consensus on the back of that process. And the scientific consensus at the moment is very, very clear: we have an alarming problem, we need to act and we need to act quickly if we are going to be able to halt some of the most extreme consequences of climate change.

There is that knowledge, and there is that increasing awareness from politicians from across the political spectrum—and we need to recognise that it is a uniquely Australian problem that this is being seen through the prism of partisan politics. In fact, right around the world, it is not a left-right issue; it is an issue of knowledge versus those people who refuse to accept the scientific wisdom of the time. That is what this issue is about. My children will want to know: 'How was it that, at a time when that knowledge was so strong, the parliament refused to act?'

At the start of the last decade, we saw a growing momentum here in Australia for change. We were coming off the back of one of the worst droughts in our history. There was growing awareness around the world. Al Gore came to town and presented his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. We saw marches on the streets. We saw young people become engaged. And we saw both sides of politics take to an election a proposal for an emissions trading scheme—that is, a scheme to price pollution, to put a price on an activity that we are all paying for and, using classic market principles, say, 'If you are going to produce a good or service, and the cost of producing that good or service is borne by the taxpayer, then we should make sure that we internalise that cost so that you are responsible for that pollution and there is an incentive to reduce it.' That is a pretty basic principle in mainstream economics. Both the Howard government and the Rudd opposition at the time took that proposal to the Australian people.

Over the next few years, we saw a dismantling of that bipartisan consensus, and that has led us to where we are today. We saw a conservative opposition become dominated by anti-science, anti-enlightenment individuals prepared to mount an ideological crusade in the face of all the mounting evidence in front of them. We saw a Leader of the Opposition whose pragmatism knew no bounds—a self-confessed weathervane when it came to climate change—gain control of the opposition on the back of opposing concrete action on climate change. We then saw a Prime Minister who, up until that point, had recognised that this was the great global challenge of our era—what he described, quite rightly, as a moral challenge—and who had negotiated an emissions trading scheme with the opposition then walk away from that commitment and refuse to negotiate on that scheme with the Greens. On the back of that decision, we effectively dismantled the bipartisan consensus that existed here and in many other countries across the world.

From that point on, we saw the politicisation of an issue that is beyond politics. We saw a government promise a citizens' assembly on an issue that required government leadership. We saw a Prime Minister and an opposition leader refuse to stand up to the growing challenge that faces us. On the back of that election, we saw new voices elected to both houses of parliament and we finally got going with action on climate change. We saw the establishment of the climate change committee that came up with some of the world's most ambitious and important action to tackle climate change. We saw a fixed price on carbon, moving to an ETS—and, if this parliament accepted it, we would now have an emissions trading scheme in a short period of time, tied in with international carbon markets. We saw the establishment of a renewable energy bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation—a bank that provides up-front investment for the industries of the future—and we are seeing, right across the country, the wind industry, the solar industry and other new, emerging renewable industries take advantage of that and provide the added benefit of ensuring a return for this country. We saw the establishment of the Climate Change Authority and the Climate Commission, effectively a reserve bank providing independent advice on targets and the most up-to-date science and ensuring that governments were provided with that information outside of the partisan nature of this debate—all important, necessary things but underpinned by the very notion that we have a price on pollution.

Unfortunately, we have now seen a new parliament and a new Senate which are prepared to undo some of those great reforms. How is it that we go from having some of the world's most significant, most ambitious climate change legislation to being the only country anywhere in the world to wind back effective action on climate change in the face of growing evidence of how serious this problem is?

If you look at the tobacco industry and how it took decades for us to finally confront the reality that tobacco was a cause of lung cancer, you can see some parallels in the climate change debate. Fringe scientists—people such as Bob Carter—have been held up as evidence that somehow the scientific consensus is wrong. The mainstream press, when presented with a scientific argument, feel the need to present a counterargument. That is not balance; that is false balance. The role of the press is to get to the truth, not to present two sides of an argument as though each side has equal legitimacy. It is truth that we are after, not some notion of false balance. And that is where we have arrived with the climate change debate.

Of course, we saw the role of politics front and centre. Back in the tobacco days, it was the conservative side of politics which saw this as some part of a global conspiracy to control people's freedoms and behaviours—that the link between lung cancer and tobacco was a myth and that those of us on the progressive side of politics were using it as a vehicle to restrict people's freedoms. That was the argument that was being trotted out 50 years ago. It was trotted out 50 years after the Surgeon General conclusively stated that tobacco causes lung cancer. Yet we had those same elements, those same conservative forces, implying that this was a part of some progressive crusade to restrict people's freedoms. And we are seeing that played out again with the climate change debate. That in the face of science, reason and logic this is somehow all part of some global conspiracy, that we are all in it together—the scientific community, the health community, economists and of course those of us on this side of politics—and that we have entered into some sort of grand bargain because we can think of nothing other than to restrict people's freedoms and liberties. What nonsense! What poppycock! Where have we come to when we are in an environment where science—which is all we have got, the best tool that we have—is being subjugated to a narrow, brutal, conservative and ideological agenda?

In the years to come, my children will look at this issue and at what this parliament has done and they will see those parallels between the climate change debate, the deniers and those people who stood up and took a stand when we needed to take a stand.

An incident having occurred in the gallery