Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion. I do so at a time when it is more important than ever that we consider Australia's role in the global fight to contain global warming to less than two degrees. In just a few weeks, parties from all over the world will congregate in Paris. The goal, of course, is to obtain commitments from all countries, for the first time, to reduce their emissions and ensure that we can keep the global temperature at a safe level.

In this country, unhappily, the debate has not been helped by those opposite. It concerns me greatly when I look at the actions that the government is taking, or failing to take, as we approach this very important meeting. All developed countries intended this year to submit their targets for this conference. Australia was the last of the major developed nations to put forward its target.

The government has now said that we will reduce emissions by at least 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. Unfortunately, this initial target probably does not help us meet the goals that we need to meet at this meeting. The Climate Institute has indicated that if others took the same approach and took on the same share that we have chosen to take on then we would be locked in to three to four degrees of global warming. This is completely unacceptable. It is unacceptable that we would contemplate playing a role in a global agreement that undermines our ability to reach the two per cent target. It is unacceptable that in putting forward this target, instead of standing at the front and leading—as it is in our interests to do and is our responsibility to do—we have chosen to stand at the back of the pack.

The other thing that concerns me greatly, as we consider the government's approach to this issue, is the policy mechanism, which Senator Reynolds has been discussing. Direct Action has been out there for six years, and every expert and stakeholder group who has looked at this policy has confirmed that it will not achieve meaningful reductions in carbon pollution. AiG have predicted that if the government's emissions reduction target were delivered solely through budget spending, as this policy demands, it would cost between $100 billion and $250 billion. According to RepuTex, Australia's biggest polluters will increase their pollution levels by 20 per cent over the next 15 years without exceeding the completely inadequate baselines that are set by the government's so-called 'safeguard mechanism' under Direct Action.

What really surprises me is that with the change of leader, the change of Prime Minister, the government has confirmed that it is sticking with this approach. Mr Turnbull, the Prime Minister, has previously indicated his contempt for the policy settings that I have just spoken about. Yet, just in the last few weeks, he has confirmed his intention to push forward with them, saying:

The policy we have in place is very clearly costed and calibrated … and it is effecting reductions in emissions now and at a very low cost.

It is disappointing—isn't it?—but it is really not hard to see why, because when you look at the rest of the people in his party room, they are simply not on the same page. If we look at someone like Barnaby Joyce, as recently as 2012 he said:

It is an indulgent and irrelevant debate because, even if climate change turns out to exist one day, we will have absolutely no impact on it whatsoever … we really should have bigger fish to fry than this one …

In fact, this year he said:

Look … I just—I'm always sceptical of the idea that the way that anybody's going to change the climate—and I'm driving in this morning and we're driving through a frost—is with bureaucrats and taxes.

We have a group of people in the coalition who fundamentally do not accept the science, who do not accept the role of humans in changing the climate and who are fundamentally unwilling to take the necessary steps for Australia to contribute to a meaningful global contribution to fix this problem.

The Prime Minister, in fact, knows that this is wrong. In 2009 he famously penned the words that 'Abbott's climate change policy is …'—and we all know how the rest of that quote finishes. He also said:

The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is "crap" and you don't need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing.

He went on to say:

First, let's get this straight. You cannot cut emissions without a cost.

  …   …   …

Somebody has to pay.

That is true. You cannot cut emissions without a cost. The way that the government has resolved this challenge is that, instead of asking polluters to pay, they have asked ordinary people to pay. They have asked taxpayers to cough up billions of dollars to fix a most serious problem and, unfortunately, to craft a solution that simply will not deliver.

It is tempting to cast this as simply a question of our global responsibilities, and there is no doubt that we have very real responsibilities, particularly to our Pacific neighbours, as Senator Singh pointed out. However, even if we think only of our own self-interest, there are powerful reasons for Australia to act. We are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming of two degrees or more will induce significant loss of species, including those much loved species on the Great Barrier Reef that provide so much pleasure to so many Australians and provide a tourism industry and an income to many, many people in Northern Queensland. Warming of two degrees or more would produce dangerous water shortages. It would produce severe damage to coastal infrastructure and settlements. It would lead to large areas of agricultural land being taken out of production and to major risks to human life from extreme climate events.

Before I came to this place, my work in the infrastructure sector led me to have a lot of contact with those parts of Australian business that are running transport infrastructure, water infrastructure and electricity infrastructure. All of those businesses are currently making plans to deal with climate change, and when they look at what the costs of climate change will be to their business, they are not insignificant. They are particularly significant when you start to think about the impact of the increasing frequency and severity of severe weather events. If you think back to Cyclone Yasi and the floods in Victoria, the cumulative Commonwealth bill for that was $6.6 billion. Infrastructure deficits are already a problem for this country. Infrastructure that is adequate to cope with significant levels of global warming will be enormously expensive, and we need to be thinking in a very clear way about the costs to all of us if Australia goes down a path where we fail to address and halt global warming.

My concern also lies with our failure to capture the economic opportunities that will present as the globe decarbonises. We are falling behind. Investment in large-scale renewable energy fell by 88 per cent in 2014, despite the fact that, globally, clean energy investments grew by 17 per cent. This is totally unacceptable. Climate change will not be the only course of economic change for our country in the next decades. It is true that any change is difficult and produces costs and challenges for some communities. We need to confront those head-on, and we need to consider that there are very real risks to leaving change to the last minute. Rapid change is very hard for communities to deal with and leaving things to the last minute presents the very real risk that we will fail to capture the upside and will fail to get involved in the industries that might provide our people with good jobs, well-paid jobs, jobs that are connected to global markets in the energy sector, and we need to act on that now and not leave it to the last minute.

I want to talk about our approach. Labor in government will put a legal cap on carbon pollution. In fact, we will put on exactly the kind of price cap that was previously advocated by the Prime Minister before he decided to get on board with the fairly backward views of his colleagues on this question. We will increase the share of renewable energy in our electricity mix to 50 per cent by 2030 and we will work to create the jobs of the future through an electricity modernisation plan. We are moving into a very important period in terms of obtaining a global deal. Now is the time for Australia to be in the lead, not lag behind. I urge the government to change its approach. (Time expired)