Judith Adams (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Environment and Heritage, Senator Campbell. Will the minister update the Senate on the latest initiatives the Howard government is taking to address the global problem of climate change? Is the minister aware of any alternative policies?

Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Adams for the question. It is a question that has had its importance underlined by the visit to Australia in the last couple of days by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who has been a leader in driving the world towards a practical and sensible way of addressing climate change. He made it clear in his comments whilst in Australia that ‘Kyoto is not enough’, that Kyoto will not even stabilise emissions and that we have to, as a world, look beyond Kyoto and work much harder than we have been able to in the past. I think that he made an incredibly useful suggestion in trying to bring together the multiple tracks that the world is taking to address climate change—that is, the work that we initiated in Montreal to build an effective post-Kyoto framework to bring together the developing countries, such as China and India. We made the point at a meeting in the cabinet room this morning that you could in fact close down all of Australia’s power stations tonight and the emissions from those power stations would be entirely replicated by the growth in China within 10 to 11 months.

It underscores the importance of initiatives such as the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which brings together China, India, the United States, Korea and Japan. That partnership will have its first series of meetings in California next month and 45 Australian industry representatives and officials will be attending to get the working going. Within Australia, the Commonwealth’s policy of supporting the roll-out of photovoltaic cells into schools is on track. The Solar Cities program has $75 million to transform entire communities across to solar energy. There are also the low emissions funds and the renewable energy funds.

Senator Adams asked about alternative policies. In fact on 7 March we saw what I think they call a blueprint launch by Mr Beazley. I do recall that in the old movies blueprints were big rolls of documents with all sorts of fine details and substance. You could not really call this flim-flam, flimsy document anything other than a glorified press release. But it had a couple of points in it. In fact, before the ink on the blueprint was dry, a senior opposition shadow minister came out and basically blew the policy out of the water. I refer of course to Mr Martin Ferguson—a good friend of Senator Conroy, I believe.

Mr Ferguson was interviewed by the Australian and it was published on the weekend. He was asked about the 60 per cent target—the centrepiece of the ‘Beazley blueprint’. They asked Mr Ferguson, ‘Where was this target set?’ We found out that a young adviser from Mr Beazley’s office rang him up and said, ‘Mr Ferguson, where are you today?’ He said, ‘I’m in Melbourne.’ The adviser said: ‘We’re putting together this policy on greenhouse. We need to know where you are.’ He said: ‘I’m in Melbourne. Do you want me to come across to Perth?’ The adviser said: ‘No, Mr Beazley has not been in Perth for months. He lives in Sydney now.’ Mr Ferguson said, ‘Can I come to Sydney?’ The adviser said: ‘No, it is all right. You stay in Melbourne. We’ll do the policy in Sydney.’ Of course they set the target in the leader’s office—no consultation. Julia Gillard has told us about that!

The other thing that Mr Ferguson said about this target is, ‘The target is not set in concrete.’ Mr Beazley’s whole greenhouse policy is about a target in 50 years time, and Mr Ferguson has said, ‘It’s not set in stone.’ The other thing he said in describing the policy is, ‘Anyone can think up some harebrained idea.’ That is the scope of the alternative policy. It is a sham.

Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.