Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I join Leader of the Australian Greens, Christine Milne, in rejecting this appalling policy—this expensive joke of a policy—that has been cooked up in a deal done between a coal billionaire and the Prime Minister, who believes coal is good for humanity. This policy means that Australia—instead of being one of the global leaders in addressing climate change—will become a global joke on climate change. What more can you expect from a party that, fundamentally, are climate change deniers? There is no other way of looking at it. If you were really serious about climate change, why would you get rid of an effective package that was addressing climate change, building jobs and bringing down carbon emissions?

We are told that this deal will save the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. If memory serves me correctly, we saved that previously. Apparently this deal has saved ARENA. How do you save a body established to promote renewables and invest in renewables when you take $700 million out of it? That is not saving it. That is hobbling it while pretending to save it so that you can hold a media conference to say, 'Look, what we've done,' while forgetting to tell everybody that you have supported the government to rip $700 million out of it.

If PUP had supported the Climate Change Authority and stood with the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party, we would not have needed this flawed legislation to save the Climate Change Authority; we have saved it before, and we could save it again. This is a strategy to make Australia think that PUP have achieved something, when all they have achieved is facilitating Tony Abbott to wind back effective mechanisms to address climate change. PUP say that they support the RET, but, of their three senators, at least one does not support the RET. So you cannot believe that statement either. We have been told that all those things have been achieved by this deal, when really all that has been achieved is billions of dollars, in the long-term, going into the pockets of the polluters and the big end of town.

I want to remind people about what climate change is and what it will do to our planet and to future generations. What this government is doing by failing to adequately address climate change amounts to intergenerational theft: theft of their future, loss of food security and loss of species. Climate change will have fundamental impacts on our economy and on our marine environment. It will lead to increasing pests and diseases; health impacts, which we are only just starting to understand now, which are only going to escalate; and threats to our agriculture. This government is so bad that, when it released its green paper on its competitive agriculture policy, climate change was not even addressed—it got a mention twice, and one of those mentions is in a reference. The government has no strategies in agriculture for adequately addressing climate change.

Climate change will have untold impacts on our economy. It will have untold impacts on the species that will be lost due to climate change. We have already had so much impact on species, particularly here in Australia. We have already lost a number of species; Australia has the highest rate of mammalian extinction in the world. Because we have cleared so much of our country already, species will not be able to move to address climate change; they are losing their refugia. So even more species will be lost.

One of the biggest losses is to the renewable energy industry, which this government seems determined to rip down. They are ripping money out of the bodies that facilitate and promote the industry, and they are stopping projects that are just about to get underway. Where the transition has started from the old fossil fuel industries and energy sources to the new renewables that are creating jobs, providing employment into the future, providing research and development, not only in the construction areas, this government is clearly undermining those new industries.

Can you imagine what it would have been like if that is what they had continued to do for technology that had been developed? Can you imagine what would have happened if they had said, 'No, we'll stay with the horse and buggy, thank you very much'? In fact, there were some people that opposed changes and wanted to keep the horse and buggy, and they have been consigned to history. This government will be consigned to history for the impact that they are having. Generations ahead will look back and say, 'Actually, they did start addressing climate change back then. They had good measures in place and the Abbott government came in, tore them up and decided to support the big end of town, decided to support the dinosaur industries, the fossil fuel industries.'

This legislation is flawed. It will not work. It invests billions of dollars into plans that are clearly flawed and will not work. It is a short-term fix. It is incapable of being scaled-up to meet our emissions reductions challenges without a massive burden on public expense. It will cost taxpayers billions of dollars to meet even mildly—and I use the word 'mildly'—higher aspirations under an international agreement that will be negotiated in the future. The world expects Australia to do its fair share in limiting global warming to two degrees. The policy that is embedded in this legislation cannot get us anywhere near that requirement. There are huge commercial opportunities, currently, for countries that are transitioning from a high pollution-intensive economy into an efficient low-carbon and prosperous one.

The Carbon Farming Initiative Amendment Bill 2014 takes away any competitive advantages that Australia is currently developing and, instead, encourages business to be wasteful in its resources, or to rely on government subsidies for its profitability. This is from a government that pretend they are economic geniuses. Instead of the marketplace driving the innovations and productivity gains across multiple sectors of the economy, this bill will make government decision makers responsible for choosing those advantages in very limited sections of the economy. As I said, this is from the people that claim they are economic geniuses. They are undermining the advantage that Australia has by moving to renewable energy, moving to ensure that we have a future based on renewable energies. Not only could we have those renewable industries here, but we could then be selling the technology that we have been developing. It will not drive the transformational change necessary for Australia to prosper in a carbon constrained world faced with a climate change emergency.

There are many reasons for that, and I will go through some of the main ones. It is too narrow to achieve the lowest cost emissions reductions. The bulk of the grant scheme will be focused on energy efficiency. Despite the minister's assurances, energy generation, mining and transport will be cast aside from direct action. Carbon farming will only be competitive if the integrity of the scheme is completely abandoned by giving absolute discretion to the minister to vary the relevant methodologies. It is unfinancial because the grants are so small, contracts are limited to five years, payment is available only on completion, and the prices on offer are so low that it falls far short of being investment-grade. Finance institutions and banks will not waste their time to finance a project under the Emissions Reduction Fund. It is optional so that there is no incentive for polluters to participate. The scheme will be underutilised by all except for those best placed to receive easy subsidies. Low participation increases the cost of reducing emissions because of less competitive pressure. Furthermore, any reductions in emissions in one area of the economy will be lost by gains in another unregulated area.

It is costly because it requires a huge bureaucracy to administer the scheme. There will be very little emissions reductions for the amount of public money required to administer these expensive tasks. This is from a government who continue to say that they want to reduce red tape. It is economically illiterate because to achieve enough abatement to reach the government's paltry five per cent reduction target would require a carbon price of between $20 and $40. Under the existing budget the scheme could only pay $3.60 per tonne. It is pointless because the projects that are most likely to succeed under a reverse action will be low cost and will have a short payback period, meaning that they are most likely to happen anyway without the government's corporate welfare on offer.

In addition to these fundamental design flaws is the significant weakening of the methodologies that calculate how much carbon can be sequestered in the land. The overreliance on soil carbon as a silver bullet is flawed. Like the entire direct action policy, the mechanical framework has been painfully contorted in order to achieve superficial political objectives. In this case the government's political objective is to make funds for carbon farming competitive against energy efficiency or capital upgrade projects. To achieve this, carbon farming rules have to be massively weakened in order to get public money out of the door and into forestry projects similar to those driven by the managed investment schemes under the Howard government—and we know how many of those ended!

The wide discretion this bill provides to the minister to allow projects to generate credits removes any guarantee that a tonne of carbon paid for does not end up in the atmosphere. This would result in the worst of both worlds: public money spent on abatement projects that have no identifiable environmental benefits. To meet the UNFCC Kyoto rules, Australia's policy framework must be rigorous. Giving the minister huge discretion to undermine methodologies makes our compliance highly questionable and may make carbon credits ineligible in international markets.

Another area of serious concern is the removal of the prohibition, in section 27(4)(j) of the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011, on a project earning credits from clearing native forests or using material obtained from clearing a forest. It is to be replaced by a requirement for the minister to simply 'consider' any adverse environmental impacts. The concern is that that would breach the Kyoto rules. The intention of the bill is to offer desperately needed revenue streams to the failing native forest logging industry. That is very clear.

The Greens are concerned by the weakening of the additionality rules—the changes to the permanency requirements that allow 25 years of sequestration instead of 100. In short, 25 per cent of the time still gets you 80 per cent of the value. That is an extreme concern, as is the delinking of projects from natural resource management plans. We have an amendment to address that. Natural resource management plans are extremely important documents. They are the documents that guide the strategic approach to landscape-scale repair. It is a complete joke that this scheme would be delinked from natural resource management plans. The fact that the government does not want to use these carefully-thought-out strategic approaches to landscape-scale repair again makes you question whether the government is at all serious about this issue.

All of these major flaws in the scheme show that the government is not serious about addressing climate change. It only wants to be seen to be addressing it—while at the same time helping the big end of town. This scheme will have a massive impact on taxpayers for no gain, or at least no gain other than political gain.

This brings me to Direct Action, the government's pathetic, ill-defined excuse for climate action. The original Carbon Farming Initiative and the Biodiversity Fund—initiatives of the Greens and Labor—created jobs for farmers, Aboriginal communities and landfill operators. They generated more than 150 projects around Australia. The Abbott government, in combination with coal billionaire Clive Palmer, have destroyed these jobs and are causing the axing of investment in renewable energy. They are foreclosing on a clean green future for Australia, they are foreclosing on leading-edge research and they are foreclosing on our ability to constrain greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a flawed policy. It is a flawed approach to addressing climate change. Climate change will cause more extreme weather events, adverse health outcomes and, unfortunately, more deaths. We will see impacts on our agriculture and on our marine environment. We will see the loss of entire species as a result of climate change. This has fundamental implications for our planet—and, therefore, our economy. This is a serious backwards step.

We oppose this legislation but we will continue to campaign on climate change. We will continue to campaign for renewable energy. It has now been clearly demonstrated that we can achieve a 100 per cent renewable future. That is the future of our country. That is the future I want to see for my grandchildren and for their children. This condemns future generations. Not addressing climate change, I say again, is intergenerational theft and we will not support it. We will not be part of it. We will be part of the continuing campaign—because Australians want action on climate change. We will continue to campaign for a different approach, for a different future for our planet and for our country.