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

I rise tonight to highlight the importance of the COP21—the conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in Paris later this year—and to highlight why this government's emissions reduction targets announced last week do not go far enough. To do so, I want to draw on cartoonist First Dog on the Moon's concise description of this government's so-called climate policy:

Direct action isn't a policy position, it's the rules of a late night drinking game at Greg Hunt's place. It's not about economics or the environment, this is nothing more than gleeful glittering, skittering revenge.

I could not say it any better myself. Last week Mr Abbott committed Australia to one of the weakest emissions targets in the developed world: a reduction of just 26 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, or only 19 per cent on 2000 levels. That target does not put us 'roughly in the middle of the pack of comparable countries', as the government would have us believe, in the face of all the evidence and basic economics. In fact, in the words of Bernie Fraser, the chairman of the board of the government's Climate Change Authority and one of the most eminent economic minds in Australia, 'We're pretty clearly at the bottom.' In the lead-up to the COP21, the UN Paris climate change conference, the Abbott government is setting Australia up to fail in helping to prevent the world from warming by more than two degrees. Climate scientists say that, if the world fails to limit this warming, it will tip over the point where the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases like methane from melting permafrost or monster forest fires can be prevented. All the government has in its toolbox is the slush fund it calls the Emissions Reduction Fund. As a policy tool, the ERF is about as weak as climate action gets. In fact, as Malcom Turnbull, one of the government's own ministers, has said and has never taken back, it is:

… a con, an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing.

The ERF is designed to make sure that the government will not be accused of doing nothing, but in the real world, where we all live, it is nowhere near enough to protect Australia's atmosphere, environment and economy. For starters, the cut in emissions from the recent Direct Action auction is not as big as it sounds. On average, the contracts signed by the government last for seven years. Broken down, that means a cut of just six to seven million tonnes a year. To put that into perspective, using the most recent available data, Australia will need a cut of more than 40 million tonnes each year to reach the national target of a five per cent cut in emissions below 2000 levels by 2020. So what Minister Hunt announced for the next decade needs to be delivered annually just to meet Australia's minimum target. As Mr Fraser has made very clear:

If we are going to rely on Direct Action and the Emissions Reduction Fund, the costs of that on the budget are going to be enormous and they're not going to be sustainable …

France understands this problem. They think our Prime Minister is opposed to ambitious action on climate change; that, if he even goes to Paris, he will go as a wrecking ball to climate consensus. China is also openly sceptical. They have accused us of doing less to cut emissions than we are demanding of other developed countries. Therefore, I want to read into Hansard some of those questions that China, the United States and Brazil lodged with the United Nations in April this year. They are painful questions for this uncomfortable Abbott government to answer about what it actually means to do something about global warming and what it means for Australia to play its fair part in the global effort to delay or mitigate global warming.

Let me read some of those questions. Australia has a smaller population than nine European countries, yet it emits more than every European nation bar Germany. Why then, during the negotiations leading up to the Paris climate conference at the end of this year, is Australia doing less to cut emissions than it is demanding of other developed nations, and why is this fair? What evidence or modelling is there that the Abbott government's Emissions Reduction Fund, the centrepiece of Direct Action and under which the government will pay some emitters to make some cuts, is enough to make up for the axed carbon price and to meet Australia's commitment of a minimum five per cent emissions cut below 2000 levels by 2020? Will this government explain Australia's low level of ambition, and does it at any stage plan to boost its target to cut emissions more quickly? Is Australia actually lowering its level of ambition, not raising it, by effectively reducing the pace at which it will cut industrial emissions through the expansion of the number of agricultural programs included in its greenhouse gas accounting?

These are the questions that have been put to the Australian government by other nations in April this year. If the Abbott government had a credible global warming policy or even a climate policy beyond 2020 at all, these questions would not be painful. A Shorten Labor government, pursuing Labor's climate policy goals, would answer these questions with authority, credence and evidence. In fact, the world would not need to ask a Shorten Labor government these questions at all. A Labor government would have directed its departments to do the modelling. In comparison, the Abbott government admits that no quantitative analysis has been conducted on the mitigation potential of the Emissions Reduction Fund. That is because Mr Abbott does not trust Australians. He is not prepared to ask us whether, to paraphrase Clive Hamilton, we are willing to delay the growth in real GDP to 2030 by 12 months and, in so doing, play our part in global efforts to tackle climate change, or whether we would prefer to do nothing about climate change, sponge off the rest of the world, become an international pariah and get that growth a year earlier.

Labor does trust Australians and we will give them a choice. At the next election, we will be a choice between real action on climate change versus no action at all. Labor has a vision to reach 50 per cent of renewables by 2030, and we want to see our country do its part to reduce emissions with an emissions trading scheme, the market based mechanism universally regarded as the most effective and economic means of reducing emissions.

While we still have a choice when it comes to our climate, it is the Australian people's present misfortune that it is the Abbott government choosing for us at the moment and it is the Abbott government representing us at the COP21 meeting in Paris later this year. It is my growing hope, and I know it is a growing hope for a number of Australians—in fact, that number is growing by the day—that in the next year, or at least at the end of next year, Australians will have chosen a new government, a Labor government to take the strong and necessary action on climate change not just for us but for our children, for our grandchildren and, indeed, for the future of our country and our planet.