Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Senators Ruston and Cormann in response to questions asked by Senators McAllister and Kitching.

We have to do better. This parliament has been locked in the same battle for 10 long, wasted years. Actions have consequences, but so too does failure to act. Neglect has consequences, and we can see that already. We have seen it this summer. We see it in so many reports about what is happening around our world. We know that the consequences of climate change will only get more serious. To keep the planet safe, we have to achieve less than two degrees of global warming and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees, and to do that the world must achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

This isn't a radical proposition; it's a proposition supported by the Business Council, AGL, Santos, BHP, Amcor, BP, Wesfarmers, Telstra and many others. It is a proposition which has been adopted by 73 other countries, many with conservative governments. Australia must pull our weight. We have to get to zero emissions ourselves. The reason is we have so much to lose and so much to gain. As Ross Garnaut says:

Australia has the strongest interest among developed countries in the success of a global effort on climate change.

Let's put a dollar figure on it. Melbourne university has told us that the cost to Australia of not getting to zero net emissions is $2.7 trillion. That is 20 times the cost of acting. Professor Garnaut has also said we have the most to gain economically from being part of a global transition to a zero-emissions economy. CSIRO said last year that reducing emissions to net zero by 2050 will deliver stronger economic growth, higher wages, lower energy bills—that's not from the Labor Party but from CSIRO. Instead of dealing with the facts and instead of a responsible debate based on facts, for the last decade we have had a fear campaign based on falsehood. I have watched in this chamber as Barnaby Joyce many years ago, whilst he was in this chamber, helped destroy the bipartisan consensus with the coalition and helped move the Liberal Party from a sensible, moderate position to a position determined by those on the hard Right, and we have had a decade of inaction as a consequence.

The political class, the media and the business community—those with the direct capacity to influence and determine our country's response to this profound crisis—should I think take a leaf from the Australian people themselves, because the determination and the cooperation shown by Australians when dealing with the bushfires is the determination and cooperation that we should be showing in this place to address the drivers of bushfires. We have to change our political culture. We must end the climate wars. We need to stop the nonsense that action on climate is radical. It is not. We cannot indulge the fiction that the many who want action are outliers. We are not. The outliers are those who don't accept that we need to get to zero net emissions by 2050.

As I said, we once had consensus across the parties of government on climate action in this country before some decided they could make political gain by creating fear. We see the same battleground again, the same gotcha questions and the same tired debate. I think that so many of these gotcha questions are about distorting the debate in favour of doing nothing, and they are part of the political problem, because they polarise the community and cruel the chances of building enough consensus to act. How about we look at the cost of not acting in terms of the cost to our economy, the cost to our way of life and the cost of lost opportunity?

Each of us needs to ask ourselves whether we're helping or harming in this debate. There are many people inside the Liberal Party and in the community who recognise that this is not a radical position, who recognise that this is something we need to deal with responsibly and who recognise that this is something we should deal with on the basis of evidence and facts and make rational policy decisions about. I say to those opposite: there's a reason Tony Abbott is no longer in the parliament. It's because people who voted for you understood that ultimately his and the position that many of you hold is irrational.