Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the matter of public importance, which is the government's climate policies, which have us on track for catastrophic global warming.

It's interesting that, in December last year when the Prime Minister was in the US at the time of the Conference of Parties for the climate change convention, he wasn't actually at that convention; he was at a box factory with President Trump and a major Liberal Party donor, Mr Pratt. At that same time, in New York, at the Conference of Parties on the climate convention, a crucial report was being handed down. What's called the United In Science report said that all countries' global pledges to date under the Paris Agreement have us on track for 3.4 degrees of global warming. Do you know who was the lead author of that report? It is none other than the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. This government's target, which they say they're going to meet and beat—but nobody else does, certainly no-one with any qualifications—actually needs to be lifted threefold to keep us to even two degrees, and it would need to be lifted fivefold to keep the damage to 1½ degrees of global heating.

We have this government's climate policy, or lack thereof, which has us on track for 3.4 degrees of warming. What does that really mean? Think about the summer that we've just had: the fires, which burnt more than 20 per cent of our forests, which is the largest amount that's ever been burnt in our history and, in fact, is the largest amount that has ever been burnt in fires anywhere globally; the floods that followed; the dust storms that permeated, the heat waves; the hailstorms; the cyclones that are forming; and the drought over the summer. All of that happened with just over one degree of global warming. This government has us on track for 3.4 degrees of global warming. I asked them the other day: 'Do you actually understand what that means? Are you across the science of what that means? Moreover, have you actually costed what that will do to our economy?' I didn't actually get an answer to that question. It's not called 'question time' for nothing. It's certainly not called 'answer time'.

This government, which loves to criticise everybody else for their pledges to take climate action—some of which are all right and others of which are science based—hasn't even costed its own climate policy, and it hasn't costed the impacts on the economy of 3.4 degrees of warming. So it's a bit rich for this government to try to say that everybody else is economically reckless, because if it actually did the costings it would realise that the true recklessness is in having the climate stance that it has, which has us on that trajectory, and in failing to do the costings of what that actually means for our economy, for our community and for our planet.

The climate scientists and meteorologists have looked at this, and they say that, if we're on track for 3.4 degrees, that will mean human beings will have to migrate away from equatorial zones. High humidity will cause intolerable heat stress and flooding across most of northern Australia, rendering it uninhabitable for much of the year. The hectares of irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin—which I thought the government was meant to care about, but their policies might indicate otherwise—will drop from 1.8 million hectares to just 100,000 hectares, a $4.4 billion drop in Australian agriculture. One in six Australian species will be extinct or face extinction, we would have vast dead zones in our oceans, and 200 million people would sit permanently below the high tide line, affecting countries in our geographic region.

But this government doesn't want to know about those impacts, it certainly doesn't want to do anything about them, and it doesn't want to cost the economic impacts of that. Whenever we ask about this, the government simply says, 'We've got an economic plan; we're not going to damage the economy.' Well, you are. Your plan stinks. It has us on track for those devastating outcomes that I've just outlined. You won't even cost your own policy, but you're happy to criticise other people for not having costed theirs. I note that the Greens have costed ours, and I note that the commentators say that taking climate action will actually be good for prosperity and will help our economy, as well as making our planet continue to be habitable.