Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise also to speak on this matter of public importance from Senator Whish-Wilson on the devastating storms and floods in South Asia and the Americas and the threat posed to Australia's natural resources. It calls for urgent action on global warming. It is a topic of debate with which we on this side have no issue. We have long stood for urgent action on global warming. It is important for Australian households and businesses and it is vital for people living in areas of our world who face a high frequency of natural disasters. But I do wonder where would this debate be if in 2009, before Senator Whish-Wilson and I were in this place, his predecessors Senator Milne and Senator Bob Brown had supported the original Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Climate change was an urgent policy area in 2009, which is why we introduced the Clean Energy Future package—to provide a mechanism that would ensure prices were affordable, to ensure our electricity infrastructure was reliable and to ensure that we promoted technology that is sustainable, low carbon and, where possible, carbon free.

It is a tragic debate that has plagued this nation for the past decade, and it remains an urgent policy area now in 2017. But, of course, when the Greens did support Labor on climate change action in 2011, the mechanism within the legislation to reduce carbon pollution was almost identical to that in the earlier 2009 bill. With a delay of two years, all that was achieved was the creation of space for Mr Abbott to launch his dangerous, ill-informed scare campaign—a scare campaign that his former senior adviser Peta Credlin admitted this year was all about politics and nothing about economics or the environment. It is important to point out the delay of two years enabled Mr Abbott to take the leadership and commit the next five years to the repealing of the carbon price. However, he failed to replace it with any credible climate change or energy policies after it was repealed. So, when the Greens get up in this place and say we must take urgent action on climate change, I agree, but I remind them of their ideological move in 2009, when they were unable to accept a proposal that would have had the support of all Labor and the majority of the coalition. No, that just wasn't good enough for them. The failure to legislate for the CPRS back then is a big part of the reason we are where we are in this country now, and it set in train the climate change policy calamity of the years to come.

Regardless of the political history, this is a timely matter of public importance. With the destruction we've seen in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, the Caribbean and the southern United States, urgent action is desperately needed both to mitigate the impacts of climate change and to limit climate change itself. In the week that the Turnbull government is seeking to strongarm AGL into selling or keeping open the Liddell power station and in the week that the National Party passed a motion at its national conference to end all subsidies to renewable energy, we're presented with this matter of public importance on urgent action on climate change.

While the wording of this MPI is a little hard to understand, I commend Senator Whish-Wilson for including both the devastating floods in South Asia as well as the hurricane in the Caribbean and southern United States. Too often the debate is focussed on Australia and our immediate allies, when natural disasters know no borders and when millions of people in less developed countries face homelessness, loss of livelihoods and, indeed, loss of life. In The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Peter Hartcher, wrote an article, 'Five big global crises that got worse while the world watched Hurricane Irma'. Tucked in at No. 5 was climate change. Mr Hartcher wrote: 'Climate change gathers force.' He said that three climate scientists from Scientific Americanwrote: 'The strongest storms are getting stronger.' They said:

... it is not likely to be a coincidence that almost all of the ... hurricanes on record ... have occurred over the past two years.

Critically, it is now possible to confidently attribute certain weather events and natural disasters directly to climate change. Rephrasing that, we can now attribute the incidents of an individual natural disaster to climate change. What does that mean? Simply, it means we need to act. We need to act now. The old saying, 'You can't attribute any single extreme global event to global warming,' is indeed a mark of the past because the science has moved on and, to be frank, the time for debate has expired.

In South Asia, entire villages remain under water and 40 million people are trying desperately to rebuild their lives. Forty million people—that's basically twice our population; two times the population of Australia—have spent over a month with their villages under water, their crop lands destroyed, no access to clean water and nowhere to bury their relatives and friends who have passed away. In the Caribbean, 34 people are known to have passed away. While fewer people are affected than in South Asia, the stories of devastation are similar.

We're not without threat. Our cyclones and wildfires are getting more intense and more frequent, and many of our near neighbours in the Pacific are already facing permanent displacement. There has been no pause in climate change, no slowdown in temperature rises and no reduction in natural disasters, and yet there has been complete inaction from the government. Yes, they went to Paris and they signed up to the Paris agreement. Yes, they maintained that Australia must comply with our international obligations. But they failed to see the huge benefits, both economically and environmentally, that can flow to Australia from having strong action on climate change. They go to the opening of a renewable energy project and pretend to support the workers there, but they offer no support when they come back to Canberra.

The Paris agreement is our world's first comprehensive climate agreement. It's the culmination of decades of negotiations and decades of scientific research. The Paris agreement has three aims: holding the increasing temperatures below two degrees, increasing our ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and improving financing pathways for low greenhouse gas emissions energy development. For Australia to meet our obligations under the Paris agreement, we need a government that is willing to act; a government that's capable of reaching a compromise; a government that puts the planet and people at the forefront; a government that will admit that it was wrong in 2013 when it repealed the carbon price without replacing it with any legal mechanism to ensure that Australia tackles climate change; and a government that will admit that it was wrong in 2013 when it left Australia without a path to help industry, households and businesses reduce emissions. We have a government that won't introduce policies that give Australia a chance of making our contribution to holding the increasing temperatures below two degrees; a government that isn't interested in supporting Australians and the people of our region to adapt to climate change; and a government that is deeply divided over finding ways to finance and build new low-emissions technology and renewable energy technology.

It's time for Mr Turnbull to show some leadership on climate change; stop the cheap, baseless politics made famous by his predecessor, Mr Abbott; pull his rogue junior partner into line; enact a sector-wide energy policy that will ensure that prices are affordable for Australian households and businesses; and ensure we have an energy system that is reliable, sustainable and promotes new low-carbon and carbon-free technologies.

Labor is offering to work with the government to find middle ground here and set a place in the future for a credible low-carbon energy policy—a suite of policies on climate change to ensure that we do our bit to reduce carbon emissions, that we are able to adapt and manage the devastating impacts of the disasters that we know have been caused naturally, and that there are appropriate incentives in place to see the rollout of renewable energy technology. The matter of public importance today is timely, and it's vital that we see this debate both in terms of Australian households and businesses and in terms of the natural disasters around the world, because they are increasing in severity, they are increasing in frequency and they are directly related to climate change. We need leadership from this Prime Minister on what was once a central tenet of his political purpose, leadership from Mr Turnbull that is sorely lacking. We need urgent action on climate change in this country. Labor have consistently said that we will work with the government to achieve a lasting solution, but we need the government to come to the table and take this matter seriously.