Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

This amendment goes to a point that Labor has been making time and time again: that we support an emissions trading scheme and that Australia needs an emissions trading scheme. It is something, however, that has been stonewalled by senators in this place and members in the other place. I want to make it clear what this amendment will do. It will move us to an emissions trading scheme; it will introduce a cap on the amount of carbon pollution that can be dumped into the atmosphere; and it will allow business to work out the most effective way to reduce this pollution.

If this amendment is not supported in this place, we will have the repeal of the Clean Energy Act passing into law, which will then remove Australia's legal cap on pollution and instead we will have the Emissions Reduction Fund, which is part of Direct Action, which will have no legislative cap on pollution and will have no mechanism to deal with pollution reduction. I want to make it really clear that, if this amendment is not supported in this Senate, Australia's pollution reductions targets will not be satisfied. If the government would like to explain how they think our reductions targets will be satisfied, I would be very interested to hear that.

As recently as the last Senate estimates, the government was asked why it was going ahead with the ERF when its own department at Senate estimates was not confident that they could confirm that this policy would reach its targets. I understand that when the department was asked how much of that five per cent target Direct Action would deliver, the department could not answer that question. We also had the Senate inquiry into Direct Action, which did not hear from a single expert ready to support the government's plan or show any kind of confidence in its capacity to reach its targets. So why is the coalition going ahead with its flawed ERF and why is it not supporting an emissions trading scheme which is not flawed and which is supported by economists, supported by scientists and supported across the globe, including by a Conservative lord in the UK parliament?

On top of that, we know that there are a number of coalition senators and members of parliament who support an emissions trading scheme. I am sure they are ducking for cover today, but we know that in 2007 both the Labor and Liberal parties supported an emissions trading scheme. In 2008 there was support for an emissions trading scheme. Then we had the debacle of the 2009, and now coalition senators are certainly not wanting to talk at all about their past position in support of an emissions trading scheme. So we know, Senator Cormann, what a lot of coalition senators really do believe and understand when it comes to climate change policy. We know that a number of you really do support an emissions trading scheme. We know that Tony Abbott clearly does not and that he wants to play politics with climate policy. Instead, what you have come up with is a political point-scoring—although I do not think it is scoring you many points but at least it is political—policy in the ERF which does not address reducing our emissions. Why then is the coalition going ahead with this flawed ERF policy when the Senate inquiry committee recommended against it and characterised it as fundamentally inadequate? On top of that, I want to ask in particular how you can justify using the land sector structure to cover all of the industries pertinent to this Emissions Reduction Fund?