Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator Campbell. Will the minister advise the Senate of the role that coal will play in the world’s future energy supply and the need for clean coal technology? Can the minister also advise the Senate of any alternative approaches of which he is aware?

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

It is an incredibly important issue because we know that coal will, if we read the International Energy Agency reports on this, play an increasingly larger role in providing the world’s energy needs and Australia’s energy needs in the coming 25 years. In fact, their latest report shows that coal production in the world last year was just under five billion tonnes and that it is actually on track in the next 20 years to rise to around 7½ billion tonnes, in answer to Senator Payne’s question.

This shows that if you are serious about addressing climate change, which we absolutely must be as a global community and as a nation, you cannot ignore coal. We know that mankind has pumped about one trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last 150 years. We know that that has had a contribution to warming the temperatures across the globe by around 0.7 of a degree, and roughly doubled that at the poles, has warmed our oceans and will have potentially very dangerous impacts on the climate, on mankind and on our ecosystems, so it is absolutely vital that we address that but that we address it in a practical and sensible way.

Senator Payne has asked about alternative approaches, but if you listen to the Australian Labor Party and you see the way they behave towards coal, you will know that the Labor Party controlled Newcastle City Council voted to ban any new coalmines in the Hunter. In a letter to me, Kelly Hoare, a Labor Party member of the House of Representatives, has described the mining industry in Newcastle as the home of a rapacious coalmining industry. Senators opposite voted for a Greens motion in support of closing down the Isaac Plains and Sonoma coalmines in Queensland and the Waverley City Council in Sydney—the Labor-Green dominated council, all part of Mr Beazley’s Labor Party—voted in August 2006 to stop the Anvil mine. And this afternoon or tomorrow morning the Labor Party and the Greens will combine to put an Anvil Hill amendment into the environment protection law. That is because of Justice Pain’s decision to stop the approval of the Anvil coalmine because they had not assessed the impact of the greenhouse gas emissions coming from burning coal on the opposite side of the world.

Luckily, in the debate today Senator Milne belled the cat on the Labor party by saying that we need to assess every project in Australia for its greenhouse impact. Why would you do that if you did not want to stop the coalmines? The reason you assess it for its greenhouse impact is to stop it, because Senator Milne does want to stop it. The Labor Party are dog-whistling to the Greens by saying, ‘Oh no, we want to have a greenhouse trigger in the EPBC; we want to have the Anvil coalmine trigger in the EPBC; we want to ensure that a future Labor government can stop every coalmine in Australia by putting a provision into federal law to do so’—the anti-coal amendment—and Mr Beazley is absolutely silent on this. He is very happy for the coalminers who turned up at those abysmal rallies today with abysmal performances to have no assurance about the future of their jobs, because a federal Labor government, with the support of the Greens, would stop every coalmine in the country. Can I tell you what the impact of that would be? If you closed down every coalmine in Australia, there would only be a reduction of around 400 billion tonnes of coal in 20 years time. There will be a massive increase in the amount of coal used in the world. What we have to do is clean that coal, not close down the coalmines. (Time expired)