Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in opposition to the Carbon Farming Initiative Amendment Bill 2014. I am speaking tonight on behalf of the majority of Australians, who want serious, powerful, urgent action on climate change. Australia has been a leader in acting on climate change, and we have rapidly moved to the bottom of the pack. We are facing serious problems. The world is going to be a different place, if the climate change that is currently foreshadowed occurs. Currently, we are on track for four degrees of warming and more. The extreme weather events that that will result in are going to have huge implications for Australia and the world. The rising sea levels will have massive implications for billions of people around the world and for people in Australia, like my mother, who still lives in Altona, which will not exist if sea levels rise a meter. There will be a loss of species, because of that amount of warming. There will be an impact on our food supplies. I think that people who are not serious about taking action on climate change have not understood what the implications are.

The implications are that our wheat growing areas in Australia will no longer be able to grow wheat, when the climate of Dubbo, for example, becomes the climate of the central deserts. With four degrees of warming, it will not be possible to grow food crops in the tropics, and that will impact on the world, on refugee movements and on billions of people. It will impact our water supplies, increasing droughts. There will be loss of lives due to more intense bushfires spreading over a longer period of time, affecting more people more widely. Hundreds of people died in the heatwave that preceded the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Melbourne. Then over 100 people died in the bushfires themselves. This will become the new norm.

I am here speaking on behalf of people who understand this reality, particularly young people and people who have understood the science and said, 'Yes, this is a very scary situation that we are looking at,' but realised that they can take action to change these things. Restoring a safe climate for us all—for humans and all the species which we share this planet with—is something that we can do. We know that it is possible, but we have to take serious, important action. The very sad thing is that Australia was on track to be doing that. We had the architecture set up. We had an emissions trading scheme. We had measures in place that were the beginning on which to build to create the reduction in carbon emissions necessary for Australia to play its part and to be a world player in reducing carbon emissions. We were heading towards a future of zero carbon emissions, so that we could restore a safe climate for humans and all the other species that we share this planet with to live in.

I have spoken to people across Australia who are disturbed and distressed by the actions and backward steps that Australia is taking on climate change. They look at what other countries are doing and think, 'Well, there is a saving grace: with Australia being a laggard and completely left behind, at least other countries are taking action.' They look at the actions that are being taken in the European Union and their very ambitious reduction targets. They look at the fact that coal in China is about to reach its peak and is going to be declining. They look at the massive rollout of solar energy in India. Then they look back at Australia and think, 'Poor, poor Australia, we are being left behind.' They know that it is not just an environmental issue; it is both a social and an economic issue. We know that all of the international agencies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have done the reports. They have said that it makes more sense economically to be taking urgent action on climate change now rather than leaving it to the future.

The government's Carbon Farming Initiative Amendment Bill and Direct Action Plan are a fig leaf. We have already heard today from my colleagues how little it will impact on our carbon emissions. The RepuTex report estimates that it will achieve a 20 to 30 per cent of the five per cent cut in emissions by 2020—that is, a one per cent reduction in Australia's emissions. In fact, we were already well on the way to doing that with the emissions trading scheme and the price on carbon that was initiated, which has now been scrapped.

We need meaningful action. We know that Direct Action, as well as being ineffective, will be massively expensive. I hear the government benches, day after day, say that it is important that in a budget emergency we have to be careful how we spend our money. Yet $2½ billion will be spent and which will achieve so little. What is worse is that the $2½ billion that will be spent will go into the pockets of the big polluters, to be doing something that they probably would have been doing, anyway.

In repealing the clean energy future package, we have dismantled infrastructure that will have to be reconstructed again in a very short time period because direct action will not work. In doing this, there will be a significant cost to Australia in lost time, money, innovation and competitive advantage. We need to be working towards an economy and a society that is powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. This direct action is taking us backwards in that regard. We need to be putting infrastructure together that will enable us to phase out coal.

The very sad thing is that, when we finalise this debate, we will have the summing up done by a government that says that coal is good for humanity and that makes ridiculous quotes about the support for coal that Bob Brown once had in 1981. I expect that is what we will hear from Senator Cormann in his summing-up. It is just inane and the people listening to it will know that it is inane.

In order to be taking real action on climate change we need to phase out coal. We know that it will be in Australia's economic interest to do that. We need to be saying no to increasing coal exports through the Great Barrier Reef; saying no to unconventional gas, including coal seam gas; and to be saying yes to renewable energy.

Our emissions trading scheme was an important, efficient and effective way of doing this, backed by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA. We now know, having just received the details of the bill that is coming up tonight, that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA are said to be abandoned at any time after December, in two months time. Critical parts of the infrastructure are there and the uncertainty that has been put in place will just create further devastation for any remnants of action on climate change that was being taken.

The government is sticking its head in the sand. My message to the government is: Direct Action is not the climate action that Australians are looking for. We want decisive, effective and fast action. Direct Action is a slogan, not a real policy. And it comes from a government whose only real priority is propping up its friends in the big end of town. These friends of the government are people who are still misguidedly living in a parallel universe where, supposedly, burning fossil fuels can continue unabated. The government is addicted to fossil fuels. It is trying to drag the dirty coal fired industries of the 20th century with us into the 21st century, instead of helping us transition to a clean energy future.

Direct action is not a viable replacement and it is vastly inferior to the carbon-pricing mechanism we had. We had a world-leading scheme to price pollution and to drive down dangerous global warming emissions. It is inevitable that pricing carbon pollution will become a permanent feature of the global economy. Even Clive Palmer, with his emissions trading scheme, recognises that. He knows that people around the world know that an emissions trading scheme is the most effective way to get effective action.

Under this government Australia is totally out of step with international trends and efforts to address global warming. We are not just out of step; we are stepping backwards fast. Direct Action is a high-cost, narrow, government-controlled scheme, the intent of which was to replace the existing market driven, economy wide, lowest cost method of reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions. What this dodgy direct action scheme consists of is voluntary grants that will just allow the polluters to get their sticky fingers into taxpayers' pockets.

Mr Clive Palmer and his Palmer United Party senators is a good example. We now know why Clive Palmer has been interested in supporting the government on abolishing the carbon tax: he did not have to pay tax for his carbon emissions but now he stands to potentially benefit from Direct Action.

Another thing that makes me sad, knowing that this is such an important policy and that we are going backwards on the most serious issue that faces humanity today, is the secrecy and the haste. We are voting tonight on a bill where even the Palmer United senators did not know their own party's amendments until this morning. This is not the way to do business, it is not the way to do government and it is not what the people whom I represent want to see happen. They have got expectations that we will be considering important pieces of legislation such as this seriously, with due regard and due respect, paying proper attention to what all the implications mean. Yet we know that we will have sent Australia backwards on our journey towards acting on climate change by the time we rise tonight.

A very important impact of this policy that has only just become evident this evening is the impact on our forests. The Carbon Farming Initiative, as it stands, had a prohibition on the clearing of native forests or the use of products that come from native forests being eligible under the carbon farming initiatives. But we now learn that that prohibition is no longer in this bill. So we now know that there is the potential for the clearing of our native forests and the use of wood products that are harvested from those forests to be considered as eligible carbon farming initiatives. This is opening the door to be logging our native forests and to be burning the products from those forests in forest furnaces for so-called clean energy. At a time when we have the native forest based industries on their knees in Australia because they do not have a product for their woodchips on the world market, and at a time when the majority of Australians want to see protection of our native forests, it is going to be opening the door for logging of those native forests—and getting further subsidies for doing that—and destroying our native forests by burning them in forest furnaces for energy.

This is very indicative of how sad and how debased this debate has become and of how out of touch our policies in this parliament are with what Australians want. We know that the majority of Australians want to see serious action on climate change. Every poll shows that is the case. The majority of Australians want to see protection of our native forests. But tonight we are serving the interests of environmental destruction and serving the interests of the biggest polluters—and paying them excessive amounts to do it.

The Greens, as you know, are going to be standing up and doing our best to bringing attention to how we are going backwards in this debate. I am proud to be here tonight as part of a party that is standing up for the environment, is standing up for serious action on climate change and is standing up and wanting to do something to get answers and to get protection for our future. I have two children and I hope to have grandchildren one day. I want them to have a planet that is liveable. I want them to have a planet that allows them to be healthy and allows them to have the same quality of life that I have had. Under the prospect of dangerous climate change, I feel frightened for them. I really think that, unless we come to our senses and join other governments around the world in coming to our senses, it is a really a bleak future.

The positive side of this, however, is that I know that there are things that can be taken; there are solutions. It is in our power as a parliament to be taking action that will set us on a path of a positive future—a path of 100 per cent renewable energy and one that creates jobs and supports those renewable energy industries that are burgeoning across Australia and across the world. I know that we can be transitioning to a zero-carbon economy and that it will be cheaper for us to do. But, instead, tonight we are going backwards. And I think that is a very, very sad place to be.