Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to make a small contribution in relation to the report tabled by Senator Urquhart this afternoon on behalf of the Environment and Communications References Committee. The government senators on this committee, me being one of them, consider that the premise of this inquiry really had nothing to do with Australia's environment. In fact, we thought it was completely baseless and motivated by political intent. The idea that the Abbott government is attacking the environment, following the disasters of the previous government in relation to things like green loans, the carbon tax and the home insulation scheme, seems really quite hypocritical.

The most distressing thing was, as the Greens were the ones that actually called for this inquiry, just the extraordinary scaremongering that went on. It was completely unnecessary and damaging scaremongering. Then, to come into this place to try to table this document was very disappointing. I put that in the context of being the chair of the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee and deputy chair of the references committee. I worked very hard with those opposite, whether it was the opposition, the Labor Party, the Greens or the crossbenchers. In every report we try to bring down a consensus report. This inquiry was so ridiculous that, right from the word go, you knew you could never even attempt to get a consensus report or an outcome in which this reference actually delivered a heap of recommendations which might have some meaning or some benefit for Australia. It was never going to do that, because the basis of the inquiry was never going to allow it to do that.

Something that just cannot go without being mentioned today is some of the facts and figures that were just put on the record by Senator Urquhart in relation to the emissions reduction fund. The reality is that this government put to the Australian public an emissions reduction fund, which was like a reverse auction, and we purchased 47 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent abatement. That is four times as much as achieved under the previous government's carbon tax. Those results alone clearly prove that the coalition's climate change policy is delivering real and significant abatement benefits, just as we said it would. For all the scaremongering that went on through this inquiry and previous inquiries into this particular issue, the cold, hard realities were that when the first round of reverse auctions came down it was quite clear that this particular program was working a whole heap better than the carbon tax had ever even attempted to work.

If you sit down and have a look at it, the 47 million tonnes of abatement was delivered at an average of $13.95 per tonne. If you have a look at the $15.4 billion that was spent by the previous government on the carbon tax to try to reduce emissions, it works out at $1,300 a tonne. You do not have to be much of a mathematician to realise that that is actually 93 times more expensive. So, to come in here and suggest that this government is attacking the environment, when we have actually delivered, at a very reasonable cost to the taxpayer, something that they said we never would, is ridiculous. In addition to that, we are investing $2 billion to manage natural resources—things like Working on Country, the Green Army, the Reef Trust; there is a whole raft of policies and platforms that this government is delivering in support of our environment. And the redesign of the Landcare program: whilst there is no doubt that this government was left with a legacy of debt and deficit that you could not jump over, we still have tried to manage, within the resources that were available to us, programs that allow—particularly in the case of Landcare—decision making to go back to the local communities. I think Australians are sick to death of being told what to do by government. I think they would like to have a little bit more say in what is going on. The redesign of the Landcare program to allow this decision making to go back to local communities is but one example of the way this government believes we should be looking to run this country.

There was no question in the committee that we all acknowledge the financial constraints with which we were faced in this space. There was no doubt, in the government's side of the debate, that budget measures needed to be implemented. We would have liked to see much more money spent in the environmental space, but the reality was that we could not. In this context, the government cannot and will not restore funding to the Environmental Defenders Office, which I think was one of the key platforms for the political motivation by the Greens for this inquiry to be held in the first place. I do not think the discontinuation of funding to EDOs reflects an adverse judgement on the merits of EDOs at all. It just reflects the broader context of the stringent resource constraints that we face because of the actions of those who go before us.

Instead of the recommendations that have been tabled in the substantive report today, instead of this witch hunt, this committee should have commended the government for undertaking massive investment in environmental programs in an unprecedented environment of fiscal constraint and given that in the first 18 months of this government we have delivered some very significant benefits and changes, not least of which is the decision by the World Heritage Organization not to proceed to put the Great Barrier Reef on the endangered list. Unfortunately, as much as I would have liked to work with the opposition and the Greens to come up with a consensus report, that was obviously never going to be able to occur, simply because it was, I believe, a witch hunt set up by the Greens.