Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It was during my second week here as a senator, in July 2014, that the Abbott government scrapped the price on carbon and began the long years of federal government inaction on climate that Australia suffered through until the election in May this year. It has been such a long eight years. My actual first speech in this place, the 'This is not my first speech' first speech, was to speak to the bill that scrapped the price on carbon, and I talked about the science of the impacts of climate change:

… overall increasing global temperatures, increasing climate variability, increasing rainfall variability, increasing extreme weather events, increasing sea surface temperatures, sea level rise, increasing acidification of our oceans, and the melting of glaciers and the ice caps.

Eight years on this is our reality. I talked about the costs of climate change, particularly the cost of bushfires:

… their increased frequency and severity, and their increased spread across the country and across the year, beginning earlier and continuing later. Think of the likely loss of life that will occur, and the personal losses, the personal costs, and the public costs of dealing with increased bushfires. Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009 cost the community more than $4 billion … and this does not include the health and social costs and the flow-on costs to business.

Yes, think about that in the context of our Black Summer fires that we experienced over the summer of 2019-20, where the cost to agriculture alone was $5 billion and the estimate of the cost to restore the bushland which was lost is a staggering $73 billion a year for 30 years. I talked in that speech about the impact on people:

I spoke this week to a young woman whose family has a vineyard in South Australia. Her father is despairing. He does not have any superannuation. His whole wealth is based on his vineyard. He can see the value of his vineyard evaporating before his eyes, every year, when the quality of his grape crop crashes because of extreme summer heat or when it is affected by smoke taint from bushfires occurring where bushfires just have not occurred before. She is advising him to sell up now, before it is worth absolutely nothing. He is reluctant, but he is depressed and despairing. This is the cost of climate change.

Eight years on, I wonder how this young woman and her father are getting on, so you can imagine, after eight long years, how relieved I am to be speaking to a bill to set a target to reduce our carbon pollution and to have hope that this will be the government that begins to take the climate crisis seriously.

You will note, however, I am still talking in the future tense and I am only talking of hope, not optimism, because this bill is just a beginning. It is just a first step. Let me quote a scientific analysis of what a 43 per cent emissions reduction target means, written by IPCC lead author Bill Hare from Climate Analytics:

The ALP's 2030 target of a 43% emissions reduction is consistent with 2˚C of warming globally. Under this level of warming, if sustained, the Great Barrier Reef would very likely be destroyed, along with all other tropical reefs in Australia and elsewhere. At the global level the most extreme heat events could be about three times more frequent than in recent decades, and in Australia the highest maximum temperatures about 1.7˚C hotter. In other words, an intense heat event that might have occurred once in a decade in recent decades could occur about every three years and would be significantly hotter.

We need more ambition than that. This is not a safe climate. Surely we can do better than to count the death of the Great Barrier Reef on our watch.

We are seeing, we are feeling, we are being devastated by the impacts of 1.1 degrees of warming now. We see more than 1,300 people dead in Pakistan in recent weeks, with over a third of their country underwater by an intense monsoon and melting glaciers—millions of people without food and homes. We had our own floods in Brisbane and northern New South Wales, where the reality of needing to rehome people away from high-flood-risk areas is only now hitting home, and massive wildfires across Europe and North America, following record heat in recent months. Of course, we had our own Black Summer, when two billion animals were killed. We have First Nations lands and people suffering from increased temperatures, degradation and destruction of cultural heritage and natural resources such as plants, grasses, timber and clean running water, which provide a basis for First Nations people to practise culture.

Before 2002 there was just one megafire year in Australian records, in 1939. Since 2001 there have been three megafire years, when more than one million hectares of land has been burnt, including ancient Gondwana rainforests in Tasmania and Queensland which are just not adapted for fire. This is with 1.1 degrees of heating. Labor policy—what is in this bill, a 43 per cent target and continuing and expanding the mining, the burning and the export of coal and gas—has us headed for two degrees or more. As I said in my actual first speech:

We have a duty of care to people and nature suffering and under threat from global warming. We do not have the right to turn a blind eye to the consequences of our dirty economy.

I said:

My agenda for my time here is clear. I want to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye and tell them that it was during my time in the Senate that Australia turned the corner and legislated to begin the shift to a zero-carbon safe climate economy.

And I had a few suggestions for what needed to happen to get us on our way: to set pollution reduction targets based on science; to stop subsidising fossil fuels; to create more jobs by boosting clean energy production and energy conservation; to start closing coal-fired power stations; to say no to new coal and gas; and to make the big polluters pay for the damage they are doing.

Obviously, the climate denialism of the Abbot-Turnbull-Morrison government over the last eight years means there has not been a lot of progress made on this agenda. The big progress—obviously, despite the government—has been how much of an increase in clean energy production there has actually been over the last eight years. The potential of renewable energy production in Australia is only just kicking off. It is massive. So, yes, we actually have been able to start closing coal-fired power stations, and more closures are on the cards. We need a plan, though, and a commitment for a just transition, managed by a transition authority so that workers and communities don't get shafted in the process. But the rest of the agenda that I set out? Fail. And is Labor planning to address it in this term of government? No—fail again. We have not yet turned the corner. I cannot yet look any grandchildren-to-be in the eye. Do we have pollution reduction targets based on science? No. The science says we need a 75 per cent reduction in our carbon pollution by 2030 if we're going to keep below 1.5 degrees of warming and even more to reach zero carbon that would actually achieve a safe climate. We haven't got a safe climate now. There is no carbon budget left. We need to be reducing our carbon emissions as quickly as possible.

Fossil fuel subsidies are still continuing—billions and billions of dollars that could be spent on encouraging clean energy production instead subsidising the mining and use of coal, gas and oil. And making the big polluters pay? Nope. That could be done through a price on carbon, such as was scrapped by Tony Abbott. And of course the big, lumbering, polluting elephant in the room is the new coal and gas: the Mount Pleasant coalmine expansion that's currently before the minister; the Beetaloo Basin fracking, which will be a carbon bomb, bigger than the Adani coalmine; Scarborough gas; the 114 new proposed coal and gas projects. Any government that was serious about addressing the climate crisis would have said an immediate no to these new projects upon taking office. At the very least, they need to commit to a climate trigger in our environment laws so that the damage these projects are going to do to our global climate is at least assessed.

There's a final really incredibly important issue that I talked about in my first speech eight years ago and that I have championed ever since in this place and that is crucially relevant to the bill before us today, and that is protecting our forests—getting timber and woodchips from plantations, not native forests, and not burning forests in furnaces for energy. Now is the time to do this. The Senate committee that inquired into this bill heard stark evidence of how the burning of wood from native forests for energy can in no way be considered renewable. In fact, burning native forest wood for energy actually emits more carbon than burning coal. So I'm pleased that the Senate committee recommended reviewing the renewable energy status of wood from native forests and that the government has agreed to this recommendation.

Labor rejected classifying the burning of wood from native forests as renewable energy in 2011 and 2015, so I recommend that they dust off their thinking from then and make this change as a critical part of protecting our forests. If they need any further prompting as to the importance of protecting our forests and the link with acting on climate, they should have a read of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in their sixth assessment report, released earlier this year, in which they said that the protection, improved management and restoration of forests and other ecosystems have the largest potential to reduce emissions and/or sequester carbon and that safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystems is fundamental to climate resilience development.

Our forests need to be protected for their own sake. They need to be protected because of the role they play in soaking and storing up carbon. They need to be protected as the traditional lands of our First Nations people, for their totems and songlines and for water for wildlife, and for their beauty—rather than burnt in forest furnaces for fake renewable energy under scam systems that undermine the integrity of real renewables.

In summary, this legislation is a start; it's a beginning. But so much more needs to be done. I urge the government to work with us Greens to do the real work that's required for Australia to be playing our part in tackling the climate crisis.