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

I rise in opposition to this Carbon Farming Initiative Amendment Bill 2014, but before addressing the amendments that are contained within it, I am making it crystal clear that Labor is extremely supportive of the Carbon Farming Initiative. We have strongly supported it since we set it up as a means of enabling the land sector to engage in carbon abatement activities. It allows farmers to diversify their practices by using soil carbon sequestration to abate carbon and to sell that abatement to the government. It has offered an alternative revenue system for drought-affected farmers. This bill amends Labor's Carbon Farming Initiative to use the CFI's structure of crediting and purchasing carbon emissions for other industries under the government's Emissions Reduction Fund.

I urge the current participants in the Carbon Farming Initiative to contact the minister immediately and get his guarantee that their projects will be funded out of the $2.55 billion that is apparently available in abatement funds. Do not be satisfied with the minister's promise, because we all know the government's attitude to its promises these days. Imagine being the Minister for the Environment whose only thanks comes from those he is paying to pollute the environment. It is not even ironic; it is sad. We have all noticed the minister describing his limp little deal as a tremendous outcome of the government. He never says, 'This is a big win for the environment,' or 'What great news for the country!' and we know exactly why—because Direct Action is a program built on begging big polluters not to pollute. It addresses the problem of climate change with all the sincerity you would expect of someone who once declared that climate change was 'crap'.

In 2007, I was impressed by Senator Brandis's proud description of the Howard government's emissions trading scheme as:

…the most comprehensive scheme in the world. …This world-leading scheme will cover 70 to 75 per cent of total emissions or almost 100 per cent of industrial energy and mining emissions.

I accepted the now Treasurer's comments in 2009 that:

Our very strong view is, we were the initiators of an emissions trading scheme, and we believe in a market-based approach.

I remember how offended the now Leader of the House sounded when, in 2009, he said:

The idea that somehow the Liberal Party is opposed to an emissions trading scheme is quite frankly ludicrous.

And I agreed with Malcolm Turnbull when he referred to the coalition's direct action policy as 'a con, an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing'. But today, reflecting on the government's dreadful budget, with numerous broken promises, I agree with Malcolm Turnbull now more than ever that the coalition is open to the charge that it is without integrity.

Direct action is a pointless policy with no discipline on pollution whatsoever. The Treasury's advice to the coalition in the aftermath of 2010 was clear. A market mechanism can achieve the necessary abatement at a cost per tonne of emissions that is far lower than alternative direct action policies. We know when it comes to climate change that the position the government takes is very much ideological. Direct action is not a policy based on science, economics or evidence, and it saddles our nation and our children with a climate debt burden that is unsustainable. To paraphrase the Prime Minister, every year we are still polluting is a year we are running up a very heavy bill for our children and grandchildren to meet.

This morning on the radio the environment minister pushed back direct action's so-called safeguards mechanism to mid-2016. So all they would offer Australia now and for the next two years is a slush fund of a tawdry tuxedo that will chuck taxpayers' dollars at big polluters, begging them to maybe start reducing their pollution. Make no mistake: as the Leader of the Opposition has said, this destructive policy will cost Australia dearly into the future. It will cost our country more and it will achieve less—just like the minister's review of an emissions trading scheme with which he bought off the member for Fairfax. The best justification we have heard for this review is that, 'There's no harm in having a review.' On such a pathetic foundation this government's policy is built and taxpayers' money is wasted.

There are three elements to the ERF: credit emissions reductions, purchasing emissions reductions and safeguarding emissions reductions. The government does not intend to introduce the safeguarding element—the most important part of the ERF for some time. This is the only element that is actually designed to monitor carbon dioxide pollution from big business, but it is in the too-hard basket. Yet once they manage to get the safeguards in place they will not use them. The minister does not expect they will be necessary, begging the obvious question: why impose such unnecessary red tape? They have replaced Australia's cost-effective policy with the most expensive, ineffective climate policy they could ever devise. In fact, the Prime Minister's Direct Action Plan will have a net cost in the end to the taxpayer. You would almost think they wanted it to fail.

A recent Senate inquiry into direct action did not hear any evidence that suggested direct action will achieve its goal of a five per cent reduction to Australia's emissions by 2020. The Senate committee recommended that the government not proceed with the emissions reduction fund, as it is fundamentally flawed on the following grounds: there is no legislated limit or 'cap' on Australia's emissions in line with emissions reductions targets, there is insufficient funding to be able to secure enough abatement to meet Australia's emissions targets now and into the future, and there is a lack of a robust safeguard mechanism with stringent baselines and penalties for exceeding baselines. But the minister blithely keeps saying that he believes and expects that direct action will reduce Australia's emissions by the vanishingly timid margin of five per cent. He says this, though, with absolutely no evidence. His department has done no modelling, but he believes, he has expectations, that it is all going to be okay. Of course, it does not matter what the minister believes, expects, hopes or guesses, because reducing emissions is very much a secondary goal of the coalition's policy. If they wanted to reduce emissions they would pursue a policy that works—not a program for boondoggles. It is not me saying this; it is almost everyone who knows better than this.

I refer to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald on 28 October 2013 where 35 prominent university and business economists were polled. Only two believed direct action was the better way to limit Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. Thirty, or 86 per cent, favoured the then existing carbon price scheme. But, because those expert economists and expert scientists are not big business grandees and are not climate change sceptics like Maurice Newman and Dick Warburton, the government has been ignoring these experts in favour of advice that is more 'business friendly'. Professor Ross Garnaut, who literally wrote the book on climate change policy in Australia, dismissed the Prime Minister's promise to limit the cost of direct action by capping funding. Professor Garnaut dismisses the Prime Minister's promise not because the Prime Minister tends to break promises for fun but because the cost of emissions reduction will blow out into the future and if—and that is a big 'if'—the government wants to keep up with the international standards that will emerge from the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. The objective of that conference is to achieve a binding and universal agreement on climate from all the nations of the world, despite the Abbott government's inevitable cobra strikes at global climate science consensus.

The Prime Minister has capped the fund at $2.55 billion and not one cent more. But to reach our five per cent target, direct action will actually have to spend $4 billion to $5 billion of taxpayers' money every single year on paying polluters to start to reduce their carbon pollution, rather than having an emissions trading scheme that actually makes the polluters pay. So already their policy is underfunded.

Where is the government going to find this $5 billion every year? It isn't. How could it? It is not even going to look for it. That budget hit is just to meet our present commitments. The logic baffles. The hypocrisy staggers. A conservative government that wants a price signal to discourage sick people from going to the doctor rejects a price signal to discourage polluters from polluting. This is the noxious hypocrisy of a government that refuses more-ambitious emissions reductions unless the big polluters, like China and India, take action to control their emissions yet ramps up its coal exports to those countries because it is concerned about electricity poverty. In fact, Direct Action rejects action. It is a licence for big polluters to carry on polluting. We know how excited the Prime Minister gets about exporting coal. So by his definition the more coal we export to China and India the less likely we are to implement effective climate change measures.

Senator Cormann interjecting—