Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Accountability) Share this | Hansard source

It is outrageous that today, the 10th anniversary of the Greens voting with the Liberals to block any meaningful action on climate change, a decision that has led to complete policy inaction in this area and the record high power prices we see today, the government would try to stop this debate. As we come to the end of the parliamentary year, today marks the day 10 years ago that the Senate voted down the Labor government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills. Let me briefly recall what happened at that time for the benefit of those too young to remember those events and also for our friends at the end of the chamber, who perhaps have chosen to forget.

When Labor came to office in 2007 it pledged to take effective action against harmful climate change. The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, called a climate summit, at which he described climate change as 'the great moral challenge of our generation'. Labor's problem was that we did not have a majority in this Senate, not even with the support of the Greens—and one might have thought they could be counted on with these bills. So, in that parliament, any legislation tackling climate change had to have bipartisan support. That should not have been too difficult, since every leader of the Liberal Party up to that point had accepted the reality of climate change and the need for Australia to take action against it. John Howard, Dr Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull—they all accepted those two facts. Even so, it took two years of negotiation for Senator Wong, the then Minister for Climate Change and Water, and her opposition counterpart, Ian Macfarlane, to reach agreement on legislation to put a price on carbon. That legislation embodied the best scientific advice of that time, which was that the best way for Australia to fight climate change was to put in place a market mechanism—those opposite say they are the party of the market; they were not in that instance—that created incentives for businesses and households to reduce the use of carbon fuels and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Let's go to Dr Martin Parkinson's recent comments, in the last couple of days, on this point. Only a few days ago, Dr Parkinson reminded us that the last decade of policy turmoil could have been avoided and that, 'Had only the Greens decided not to lay down with the Liberal Party in a marriage of cynical convenience, Australians would today be enjoying lower power prices.' He said that, in fact, 'electricity prices for households have risen 45 per cent over this time and 60 per cent for manufacturers'. Dr Parkinson has directly linked this with the Senate's decision to block the scheme at that time. Unfortunately, I won't have time to go into the government's total inaction on that, because I actually want to come back to our friends at the end of the chamber. Dr Bob Brown, the then Leader of the Greens, announced at that time that the Greens would oppose the bills. In defending their position, the Greens put forward two arguments. The first was that the bills did not go far enough and the second was that Labor had not tried to negotiate better bills with the Greens. That was their complaint. That was what Dr Brown complained about. They fell for the political trap of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Why? Because they are a party of all care and no responsibility. That is the problem with the Greens.

I want to turn to a bit of political theory—particularly, Jean-Pierre Faye's book Le Siecle des ideologies. In that very interesting book, which I would recommend that people read, he describes the 'horseshoe theory'. In political science, the horseshoe theory asserts that the far Left and the far Right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble one another and, in fact, are not at the opposite ends of a horseshoe but they are close together. I do recommend his book. It is quite interesting and probably quite relevant to the current situation in the British election, because it also goes into why the far Right and the far Left are anti-Semitic. It is actually a very interesting book.

I have pages and pages on the Greens and their litany of problems and how they are in fact are a party of all care and no responsibility, but that will all have to wait for another day. (Time expired)