Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That—

(a)

the Senate notes that:

(i)

the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that:

(a)

the sea level would rise by between 0.18 metres to 0.59 metres by the end of the century and that these projections do not include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow because a basis in published literature was lacking,

(b)

there is medium confidence (that is a 50 per cent chance) that at least partial deglaciation of the Greenland ice sheet, and possibly the West Antarctic ice sheet, would occur over a period of time, ranging from centuries to millennia for a global average temperature increase of 1° to 4°C (relative to 1990-2000), causing a contribution to a rise in sea level of 4 to 6 metres or more, and

(c)

many millions more people are projected to be flooded every year due to a sea level rise by 2080 and the numbers affected will be largest in the mega-deltas of Asia and Africa, while small islands are especially vulnerable,

(ii)

recent scientific research, published too late for inclusion in the IPCC reports, suggests that the sea level is rising more quickly than previously thought and many eminent climate scientists, including Dr James Hansen, Head of Atmospheric Research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, warn that a warming of 2^o to 3^oC could melt the ice sheets of West Antarctica and parts of Greenland, resulting in a sea level rise of 5 metres within a century,

(iii)

assessing the impact of even a moderate rise in sea level in Australia remains inadequate for adaptation planning,

(iv)

assessing the vulnerability of low coastal and estuarine regions requires not only mapping height above sea level but must take into account factors such as coastal morphology, susceptibility to long-shore erosion, near shore bathymetry and storm surge frequency,

(v)

delaying analysis of the risk of the rise in sea level exacerbates the likelihood that such information may affect property values and investment through disclosure of increased hazards and possible reduced or more expensive insurance cover, and

(vi)

an early response to the threat of rising sea levels may include avoiding investment in long-lived infrastructure in high risk areas; and

(b)

the following matter be referred to the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Committee for inquiry and report by 3 December 2007:

An assessment of the risks associated with the rise in sea level in Australia, including an appraisal of:

(i)

recent science relating to projections on the rise in sea level,

(ii)

ecological, social and economic impacts for the full range of projections,

(iii)

adaptation and mitigation strategies,

(iv)

knowledge gaps and research needs, and

(v)

options to communicate risks and vulnerabilities to the Australian community.

I rise today to seek the support of the Senate in referring a matter relating to sea level rise in Australia for assessment by a Senate committee. The reason for this referral is that global warming is proceeding at a rate faster than anyone has anticipated. In fact, sea level rise is now proceeding 50 per cent faster than was predicted by the 2001 report of the IPCC. That is an extraordinarily frightening idea. I will repeat it: the most recent information reveals that sea levels are rising 50 per cent faster than levels predicted in that 2001 IPCC report.

In recent days we have had reports from many highly regarded scientific institutions telling us that the drought is going to be much worse because we are not going to get the rains that people had thought were coming. Overnight from the International Institute for Strategic Studies we have had a report saying that climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken. Yet yesterday we had the Prime Minister in waiting, the current Treasurer, Peter Costello, rushing out to tell us about his future agenda for Australia—and he did not mention climate change! It is completely unthinkable that anyone seeking a leadership position anywhere could not be considering climate change.

Unfortunately, we have got to a situation where a level of complacency has set in again. It is as if it is enough to say, ‘I now believe climate change is real and I’ll get around to doing something about it in the next 50 years.’ That is where we are up to at the moment—flexible targets for reducing energy intensity, not targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions overall. Since I got into the Senate I have been warning about the implications of sea level rise not only for Australia but for the whole world. But I have not gone as far as the International Institute for Strategic Studies. They say the global security implications of climate change are ‘on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken’. They say global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife. They say the effects would cause a host of problems, including rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts, floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics and so on and so forth.

It is as if the discussion is now about whose target is the relevant one. But let us get back to the substance of the debate. We are talking about a catastrophe for humankind and the ecosystems on which we depend. We have to take action now. When I first moved this motion for a reference to examine the impact of sea level rise on coastal Australia it was defeated in this place by both the major parties. I hope that today I will at least be able to secure the support of the Labor opposition for this motion, because sea level rise and its impacts around Australia are likely to be dramatic. We are not just talking about sea level rise from thermal expansion of the oceans; we are talking about storm surges and we are talking about increased ice melt in the west Antarctic shelf and Greenland.

I would remind the Senate that scientists from around the world have just recently been telling us that the estimates of sea level rise are completely out of date. We know that the Greenland icecap is melting so quickly that pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size are breaking off and triggering earthquakes. The chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment says we have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. He was in Greenland looking at the problem of the melting icecap. He said the ice is moving at two metres an hour on a front five kilometres long and 1,500 metres deep. He said that means that this one glacier—at Ilulissat in Greenland—puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year. The melt-water is pouring through to the bottom of the glacier, creating a lake 500 metres deep, which causes the glacier to float on land. He said these melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface, and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic. And nobody is listening! I cannot believe the level of studied ignorance that is going on.

Since I first moved a very similar motion in the Senate some months ago, the government has moved to start the process of looking at sea level rise around Australia. I welcome that and I recognise that the Australian Greenhouse Office is coordinating some work with Geoscience Australia. They are looking at areas around Australia that are potentially vulnerable to sea level rise. By late next year they will have a first-pass national coastal vulnerability assessment. By the end of 2008 we are going to have the very first preliminary analysis of which areas of Australia are extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. Of course, we know from the Natural Hazards Research Centre at Macquarie University—just talking about the wider Sydney region, including the Central Coast and the South Coast—that there are almost 13,000 dwellings that are less than two metres above mean sea level and there are over 140,000 dwellings that are less than six metres above mean sea level. The reason that is significant is that, if the Greenland and west Antarctic icesheets go, we are talking about a five- to seven-metre sea level rise. But even a sea level rise of less than one metre would have huge ramifications for estuaries, for coastal Australia, and certainly for our Pacific island neighbours. Millions of people around the world are living in such vulnerable areas, so we have to do something.

When we have floods around Australia, as occurred recently in Tasmania, we see what happens when that is linked with strong and high seas, heavy rain and the highest tide we have seen in a long time. We get extensive flooding. We know that this is going to occur, yet there is no planning for it. Local government around Australia has been extremely slow to change local government planning schemes to accommodate sea level rise and the implications of coastal vulnerability. We still get local government giving planning permission for people to build right on the coast in areas that are vulnerable to flooding. Who is going to pick up the bill? The insurance industry has already said that it will not be responsible in the longer term for insuring properties that are built in areas that are known to be vulnerable to flooding. Is local government going to be sued by people who get planning permission and then have their places flooded? Who is going to compensate those properties and people? It is an issue that is certainly not going to go away. In fact, I would argue that the reason the government—and, in fact, state and local governments—have refused to look at the issue of vulnerability to sea level rise is that they are afraid that property prices on the coast will collapse and angry communities will start demanding answers as to who is going to compensate them if they cannot get insurance as a result of storm surges and flooding.

This is an extremely critical issue, and I can understand why property councils and local, state and federal governments are not interested in addressing it. But they have to get onto it. They have to do something about it. I am arguing that what the government has done by having this first-pass assessment of coastal vulnerability is not good enough and that is why this Senate inquiry is needed. It is not good enough because it is based on the assumptions that came out in the IPCC report earlier this year. Let me say at this point that I support the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change processes absolutely, but I also recognise that they are extremely conservative in their estimates of sea level rise. That is because scientists are by nature conservative, and they have been under such scrutiny and criticism by governments, with the IPCC process also being a political process, that they have made predictions of sea level rise which are, in my view, the most conservative scenario. Several leading scientists have come out recently and said that. In fact, James Hansen, who is known as the father of climate change scientists, recently said that scientific reticence is inhibiting communications of a threat of potentially large sea level rises and that delay is dangerous because of a system inertia that could create a situation with future sea level changes out of our control. He is arguing for the calling together of a panel of scientific leaders to hear evidence and issue a prompt, plain-written report on current understanding of sea level change. He is saying that it is far more serious, that it is accelerating at a far greater rate, that the IPCC in 2001 got it wrong to the extent of 50 per cent—that is, there will be a 50 per cent greater sea level rise than they predicted. So if you go to the most recent report of the IPCC, which said that the sea level rise this century would be between 0.18 metres and 0.59 metres, and if you think that is 50 per cent wrong, then at the higher level you are talking about a 1.2-metre sea level rise. That is a more likely scenario, in my view, given the accelerated melt of the glaciers and what we know about sea level rise.

In August we had a visit to Australia of leading scientists from around the world. Professor Rahmstorf from Germany was here releasing a report saying the same thing, that the risks were not properly represented in the most recent IPCC report. At the time that report came out, Australia’s own Professor John Church said his research on the speed of the melt in the Antarctic and the extent of sea level rise had not been adequately taken into account by the IPCC. So let us assume that these scientists from all over the world are correct and that the IPCC’s report is the most conservative. It is then not good enough for the government to have set up a first pass over Australia’s coastline for a vulnerability analysis that is based on the IPCC’s figures. We should assume that is the absolute baseline, but we should be expanding the capacity of that assessment. We need to look not only at the recent science relating to projections on the rise of sea level but also at the knowledge gaps and the research needs. I believe we should be looking at setting a range of assumptions for this vulnerability to sea level rise analysis that includes the work of these other scientists, such as Professor Church, James Hansen and others around the world, so we get a much broader analysis of sea level rise.

Of course, governments will not want to do that because that will mean a greater number of Australian coastal communities are going to be seen to be in the vulnerable category. But surely it is better for us to err on the side of saying, ‘We need to know what we estimate to be the worst-case scenario, and work back from that,’ rather than saying, ‘Let’s not scare the horses and let’s just look at the minimal impacts of sea level rise.’ We know what happens when you get it wrong. We saw what happened when they got it wrong in New Orleans: they had been told that those levees were inadequate but, no, they thought they were okay based on what they knew from the last 100 years—and the place was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. We know, for example, that with sea level rise and global temperature increases the storm belt around Australia will move south. We know that Brisbane is going to be vulnerable to cyclones. Where is the adequate planning in south-east Queensland for the devastation from events that will occur because of global warming? We have also had recent studies looking at the thermohaline conveyor, the ocean conveyor that controls temperature in so many parts of the planet, including in Europe, where it controls the climate and makes northern Europe liveable because of its modifying effect. We now know that that is slowing down.

All of these trends are indicating that the world is facing a major crisis. Yet in Australia the best we can do is have a Prime Minister who is a sceptic; a Prime Minister in waiting who cannot even remember that climate change is an issue when he sets out his agenda for the future; and a government in waiting, in the opposition, who say they acknowledge climate change but will not set a short-term target and keep supporting expansion of the coal industry and the logging of high-conservation-value forests, which are huge carbon sinks. The opposition say they have a target but they will not say how they are going to meet it because two of the ways of meeting it—coal and forests—are off their agenda in terms of any reduction of ongoing activity. Australians deserve better. Australians deserve some honesty from government and an opportunity to have input. That is why a public inquiry, like a Senate inquiry, is essential. We need the scientists to come forward and tell us what their views are about whether the IPCC’s predictions are adequate and whether the terms of reference for the vulnerability analysis that is currently being conducted are adequate or should be expanded to include this new science, which is so very frightening, about how fast the glaziers are melting, how fast the temperatures are rising and how dramatically that is impacting climate and ecosystems.

Overnight from Europe we have had the release of the IUCN red list of threatened species for 2007. Once again we are being told that species are being lost at a far greater rate than before. Once you lose species and ecosystems you lose ecosystem services, which provide clean water and clean air to communities. We have a planet on which there are millions of people vulnerable at this very moment to sea level rise. Our Pacific island neighbours are sitting there, begging for assistance to deal with adaptation to known sea level rise and with concerns about planning for the future.

We need to mitigate increased global temperatures. We need to underpin all our policies with a commitment to constraining a rise in global temperature to less than two degrees. We need to have an honest discussion with the Australian people about the latest science on sea level rise, the vulnerability of coastal communities and the adequacy of planning in those coastal communities. We need to recognise that in some places we will be able to adapt to climate change by a range of engineering solutions but in other places we will not. In many areas, like Kakadu, for example, we will see the loss of large parts of the ecosystem because of saltwater incursion.

There will be coastal communities around Australia which will be tagged, as they have been in Britain, for managed retreat. It is shocking for Australians to hear, I am sure, that the British government, having analysed sea level rise and vulnerability around the UK, have said, ‘We cannot save the entire coastline of the UK. So there will be communities which we must assist in managed retreat.’ They now have a series of strategies to do that.

Australia is not even at first base. We cannot produce a map today that tells us what are the likely implications of sea level rise for vulnerable coastal communities. That is a disgrace when we know the science of climate change. So I urge the Senate and the ‘Prime Minister in waiting’ to get realistic about climate change, to stop obfuscating, to recognise that we are facing the greatest crisis that we have known in our lifetime. This is a much bigger issue than terrorism. Climate change and the earth’s vulnerability are in our face right now. We, as elected leaders, must respond to that. (Time expired)

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion moved by Senator Milne. I indicate that the opposition will be supporting this motion. I came in for the conclusion of Senator Milne’s speech. I may have misheard her, but I think she was being critical of the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, as not being realistic about climate change. I have to say that that is yet another extraordinary example of Green hyperbole in this chamber, which I am getting a little tired of, given that the federal Labor Party has made its position in relation to climate change very clear. We have said for some time that this is a critical issue. I challenge people on the crossbenches to find a time in Australia’s history where there has been a leader of one of the major political parties, one of the parties capable of government, who has made an environmental issue such as this such a central political issue in their agenda for the future.

Labor absolutely understands the reality of climate change. We recognise that this is one of the key challenges facing Australia. This is one of the critical issues a government must face and must tackle. Unlike the Howard government, we accept the science. We say the science is in. We are not, unlike the government, in the game of pretending that this does not exist. What we see on the other side is Mr Howard belatedly recognising that climate change is a political issue, belatedly recognising that he has to be seen to be responding and putting forward a whole range of pretend policies, aspirational target type policies through APEC and so forth, to look as if he is doing something about it.

We on the other side know that this is a government filled with people who deny the reality of climate change. That is not verballing them. All you have to do is listen to some of the speeches given by Senator Minchin, the Leader of the Government in the Senate. Read some of what he has said, or read the recent article by Senator Cory Bernardi, from my own state of South Australia, who yet again put forward the view that the jury in the case for human activity having impacted on climate change is still out. I think the Australian electorate is tired of that debate. I think the Australian electorate is tired of politicians who, for ideological reasons, want to hide their heads in the sand and run away from one of the critical, central challenges that this country faces, that the globe faces and that humanity faces.

We on this side of the chamber understand how important this issue is. We recognise that it is important not just in environmental terms but in economic and social terms. This is one of the issues that Senator Milne’s motion goes to. That is why Mr Rudd has made this a central aspect of Labor’s agenda for change, a central aspect of Labor’s plan for the future. We believe that any future government has to realistically and practically tackle climate change. We have put forward a range of policies to deal with that.

We saw the Leader of the Opposition hold a climate change summit which was instrumental in progressing the discussion about how to deal with this. We have said we would commission the equivalent of the Stern report, to be done by Professor Garnaut, to look at some of the economic impacts. This is the issue that the government seems to misunderstand. Senator Minchin, Senator Bernardi and Mr Macfarlane seem to think that this is some sort of fringe issue. They cannot get over their blind prejudices when it comes to this issue. The reality is that this is a central economic issue. This is a key economic issue, as well as a social and environmental one. You cannot assert that you are prudent and good economic managers if you are hiding or refusing to acknowledge the extent of the consequences of climate change on the Australian economy and the Australian community.

We on this side understand absolutely that climate change will have a dramatic impact on our nation and, in relation particularly to the sea level rise which was flagged in the IPCC fourth assessment report, obviously climate change will have a dramatic impact on Australia’s coastal communities. The federal government knows this. They may like to try to obfuscate and have various ministers and backbenchers write about it—and I see Senator Bernardi has come in. I acknowledge, Senator Bernardi, that I probably did not give you any warning that I was going to mention you in this debate, but I am glad that you are here to respond. Senator Bernardi, like Senator Minchin, is another one of those on that side who deny or are sceptical about the reality of climate change and whether human activity has in fact affected it. You are entitled to that view. I have to say I find it extraordinary given the weight of scientific agreement about this.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Why didn’t you quote it in your rebuttal?

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi, you can continue to come in here and run this hardline ideological position that is out of step with the Australian community and the South Australian community if you wish—that it is entirely your decision—but the reality is that Australians understand the reality of climate change. Those of us from South Australia are actually in the grip of an extraordinarily bad drought. Senator Bernardi knows that. People understand that we have had—and I cannot recall the statistics—something like nine of the driest years on record in the last 10. We understand the reality of climate change, unlike the government, who continues to deny it. It is quite extraordinary. It really demonstrates who the ideologues are in this chamber.

Who are the ideologues in this chamber? Are the ideologues the people who talk about choice, while putting forward radical and extreme industrial relations laws which make life harder for working people, or those who recognise that balance in the workplace is a good idea and having a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work is an Australian value? Who is the ideologue in the chamber who says that the science is still out in relation to human activity actually affecting climate change? Who are the ideologues? We know: they are Senator Bernardi, Senator Minchin and various others on the government benches who are still, in the face of all this scientific agreement, standing there saying, ‘Well, we’re not sure this is true.’

It is an extraordinary thing, isn’t it? It is like King Canute, but the other way around. It is saying, ‘No, we don’t believe this is really happening,’ as the evidence of climate change continues to grow, and it flies in the face of the government asserting that they are prudent economic managers. This is one of the largest economic challenges, if not the largest economic challenge, Australia will face in the years to come. This is one of the most central economic, social and environmental challenges this government or any government will face.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi interjecting—

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is interesting. Senator Bernardi keeps interjecting. I assume he will have some time to speak in the debate if he wishes, and the government can yet again get up and say, ‘Look, we are doing all these things.’ But do you know what? The Australian community understand you have not done anything. You have been in power for 11 years. You have been all over the shop when it comes to climate change and policies to tackle it. You were dragged kicking and screaming to an emissions trading regime which you only moved on, despite the fact that the industry minister ruled it out, because business and the community were ahead of you.

People understand the Howard government have only moved to look as if they are doing something about climate change because they are worried about the fact that they are out of touch with the community. You are only doing it because there is an election coming; you are not doing it because you believe in it. If you think the Australian people do not know that, go out and have a chat to them. They understand this is all about clever politics from the Howard government. It is not about actually believing this is an issue, because you have got form. You have been here for 11 years, and what have you done? You have dithered; you have denied; you have been sceptical; you have not acted. Now, before an election, when it becomes a major issue, all of a sudden the Senator Minchins put their heads down and everyone says, ‘Actually, we are going to do things,’ and what do you do? You say, ‘We have aspirational targets out of APEC,’ and you trumpet that as your big achievement.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi interjecting—

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi, you can keep interjecting, but I assume you are actually going to participate in this debate.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, I am not, actually.

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So he is not going to participate in this debate? He is happy to sit on the sidelines and have a go at me but he is not going to participate in the debate. How typical of the Howard government! You sit there knocking and saying, ‘This is not good,’ but what do you actually do? You have been in power for 11 long years. Where is the evidence that this government has ever seriously understood the enormity of the challenge that climate change represents to the Australian community, to the Australian environment and to the Australian economy? The government know about it because their 2005 report Climate change: risk and vulnerability suggests that as a result of climate change our country is likely to see an increase in annual average temperatures of between 0.4 and two degrees by 2030 and between one and six degrees by 2070.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi interjecting—

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President Chapman, I do not mind people interjecting, but Senator Bernardi actually has not stopped interjecting for the last five minutes. If he wants to do that for the entirety of my speech, I am happy to continue to talk over him, but I would suggest that if he has something worthwhile to say—which is very unlikely in this debate—perhaps he could get up and give his own speech on it, because I would quite like to hear from Senator Bernardi, one of Senator Minchin’s acolytes, who does not believe that climate change has been impacted by human activity.

I would like to get him to stand up in the Senate and say that, because if it does not have anything to do with human activity, if human activity has not impacted on climate change, tell me what the Prime Minister was doing at APEC, Senator Bernardi. Why did he do that? If your thesis is correct and human activity has had nothing to do with global warming, which is the thesis of you and Senator Minchin, what was the Prime Minister doing? Because on that basis, the Prime Minister was just engaged in a huge PR exercise to deal with voters’ concerns.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi interjecting—

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome your interjection. You have the opportunity to speak in this debate subsequently, if you wish to, and you can explain exactly what the Prime Minister was doing at APEC, given that you do not believe that human activity actually has anything to do with climate change.

I will return now to the federal government’s own 2005 report, which I referred to earlier, which outlined some major threats to our marine environment and coastal communities. These include rising sea levels; more severe cyclones, storm surges and storms; possible reductions in average rainfall and run-off in southern and much of eastern Australia; rainfall increases across the tropical north; a reduction in rainfall in south-west Australia of a further 20 per cent—which is really quite chilling for those of us who live in South Australia—and a change in ocean currents affecting our coastal waters. These are amongst the consequences that the government’s own 2005 report, Climate change: risk and vulnerability, identified. Of course, we did not see action from the Howard government in response to that.

As Senator Milne’s motion outlines, one of the most significant consequences of global warming will be rising sea levels. The total observed sea level rise over the 20th century was in the order of 10 to 20 centimetres. Whilst there will be regional and local variations in that rise, there is clear scientific agreement—which Senator Bernardi obviously does not agree with—that sea levels are rising in response to past greenhouse gas emissions and that they will continue to rise during the 21st century.

The IPCC report published in February this year, about which there has been much discussion, projected a sea level rise of between 0.18 metres and 0.59 metres by 2100. Since that report was released, a number of reports have suggested that in fact that was an underestimation of the possible sea level rise as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. America’s leading climate change scientist, James Hansen, and five other leading scientists have suggested that sea level rises could be as much as several metres by the same date. As a consequence, it is generally accepted that the coastline will retreat horizontally 50 to 100 times the vertical sea level rise. Dr Barrie Pittock, a leading Australian climate change scientist, has stated:

There’s a crude rule of thumb which applies theoretically just to straight sandy beach, which suggests for every metre rise in sea level the coastline will retreat or go inland by 100m.

Similarly, Dr John Church of CSIRO argues that for every one centimetre of sea level rise you get about a metre of coastal erosion. The IPCC’s April report, Climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, stated that, with regard to coastal impacts, coasts are projected to be exposed to increasing risks including coastal erosion; corals will be vulnerable to thermal stress; increases in sea surface temperature will lead to more frequent coral-bleaching events and widespread mortality; and, of course, there will be an effect on coastal wetlands such as salt marshes and mangroves—especially where they are constrained on the landward side. Any rise in sea levels will have an impact on coastal communities, which will face a significant challenge in the future. They already face one now as they prepare for the dramatic impacts of climate change. The fact is that the Commonwealth government must help them to meet this challenge.

The 2007 report of the Prime Minister’s Science, Innovation and Engineering Council, entitled Climate change in Australia: regional impacts and adaptation: managing the risk for Australia, nominated cities and coastal communities as one of the six key sectors at risk in the nation. Five priority coastal regions were identified for particular attention: the Brisbane-Gold Coast-Tweed Heads coastline, the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong coastline, Melbourne-Geelong, and Adelaide and Perth. Continuing on the point I made at the outset, which is that climate change is an economic challenge as well as a social and an environmental one, one of the areas in which this has already started to occur is in relation to insurance costs. We know that insurers have to factor in the additional cost of various events which are predicted to increase as a result of climate change. I outlined some of these earlier: increased cyclones, storms and so forth. Obviously sea level rise is another one. This is one of the areas where we see that the Howard government lags behind not only community sentiment but also business sentiment. If you go and talk to many of Australia’s leading insurance companies, you will find that these companies have been pricing into their forward projections for some time the likelihood of increased weather disruption, severity of storms and so forth, as a result of climate change. My recollection is that Insurance Australia Group is one of the companies which were part of the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change. These are companies that recognise, as prudent corporate entities, that they have to manage the risk of climate change just as they manage any other business risk. It will have a financial impact, and that is why these companies want the government to do its part to set the framework to enable them to more effectively meet it. What we know is that insurers and other leading Australian companies have been factoring the cost of climate change into their business risk management plans. It is unfortunate that the government has not factored it in over 11 years and continues to simply engage in window dressing.

As I said, rising insurance costs and issues of compensation and appropriate zoning will need to be factored into Australia’s future coastal planning and management. Climate change pressures, particularly the threat of increases in the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, have led to reconsideration of existing actuarial assessments of extreme weather risks. A potential outcome of these impacts is an increase in the cost of insurance cover, higher excesses and even possibly withdrawal of coverage in some areas as insurance companies would not be able to provide insurance at a reasonable cost or at all. Mr Bruce Thomas of Swiss Re stated:

Houses built on the coast and rivers, in areas that have a larger than one-in-100-year flood events, would find insurance too prohibitive.

Frankly, what we have is a change in the earth’s weather patterns that is of extraordinary proportions over time. It is the largest and most significant economic, social and environmental challenge that any future government should face. What is regrettable is that the Howard government, after 11 long years, has done nothing to prepare Australia for this. What we have instead is a government that is stacked with climate change sceptics. This has impacted on its ability to reasonably respond. It has no plans for the future when it comes to climate change; what it has is a plan until the next election. (Time expired)

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Milne’s motion points to the important and serious role that the Greens take, and have taken over the last decade and more, in trying to bring to the attention and the notice of government and this parliament the incredible impact that climate change is going to have on every Australian’s life over the coming centuries. The motion from Senator Milne is notable for its conservatism. It is a motion to have a Senate inquiry look at the impact of sea level rises on Australia—to gather from the scientific community, the planning community, the business community and from all Australians information about the impact that climate change, through sea level rises, is having and will have on every Australian.

It needs to be reiterated, if I may short-hand it, that Sir Nicholas Stern said in this city, in Canberra, earlier this year, that if we are not prepared to have a one per cent diversion of our wealth now to tackle climate change then the impact on our grandchildren may be a 20 per cent diversion of wealth. With that will come a massive disruption to the psychology of peace and happiness for this planet as it tangles with mass migrations and, potentially, civil conflicts and wars, huge impacts on business and on the general sense of wellbeing on the planet as the environmental catastrophe overtakes us in all areas of living on the planet. I congratulate the opposition, by the way, it having rejected Senator Milne’s earlier move for an inquiry three months ago, for now seeing the sense in our proceeding with an inquiry and agreeing with Senator Milne that this is the responsibility of the Senate, that this is the proper function of the Senate.

The question now comes onto the government. This is again a very big test of the Howard government’s commitment to using its numbers in the Senate with prudence and in the interests of all Australians. There is no way the government can use its numbers to prevent this inquiry and stick with that commitment. Yesterday the Prime Minister reasserted his authority in government. He said he is about to reveal goals for the future and he will see them through before handing the reins to his Prime Minister-in-waiting, Mr Costello. One of the challenges for Mr Howard is to throw off the inhibition, if not the scepticism, of the last decade and to not only make this nation prepared to deal with the reality of the impact of climate change but also put us back in the forefront of the world in legislating to minimise that impact, which is coming down the road on our children, our grandchildren and their offspring for many generations to come. This is a prime responsibility of us as parliamentarians. It is a responsibility that Prime Minister Howard has failed to meet and which now challenges him as Prime Minister of this country. If the direction from the Prime Minister’s office to this Senate, through the government, is to squash an inquiry to look into the fundamentals of the impact of climate change on Australia’s coastlines, it will be a clear statement by the Prime Minister that he is still unable to rise to the Australia of the 21st century, that he is still back in last century’s thinking.

As Senator Milne has pointed out, even the scientists have been too conservative on the matter. Anybody watching our television programs in the last week will have seen the astonishing and extremely frightening break-up of the Greenland icecap. Senator Milne is talking about massive glaciers, which were almost static just a few decades ago, now moving at two metres per hour. We know about the loss of glaciers around the world. In Glacier National Park in the United States 30 glaciers that were there just a century ago are now non-existent. They are rapidly melting in the Himalayas, in the Andes, in tropical West Papua and in Papua New Guinea. Right around the world this is happening. And now there are grave fears for the west Antarctic icecap. The sea level rises that Senator Milne is talking about, of four to six metres, as a result of the Greenland and west Antarctic icecap events, are again conservative measures. To bring this into focus, when you put the tip of a measure at four to six metres on the historic buildings of the Salamanca waterfront in Hobart, the tip is up at window level on the first floor. We have to face the reality of that prospect—

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So why is your office on the ground floor?

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi—with a little bit of humour—asks why our offices are on the ground floor. They are not. It is a humorous interjection from an arch sceptic. But he should pay some attention to the reality and seriousness of this matter, because he is going to be here long enough to see worse coming down the line.

It is an extraordinarily serious burden of duty on every senator to consider this motion brought forward by Senator Milne this morning in the Senate. This inquiry should be set up. To oppose the inquiry is simply to say that we wish the parliament, the Senate and ipso facto the Australian community, including the business community, to be denied the information that will allow us to make the decisions to (a) mitigate, as best we can, the causes of climate change and (b) meet the massive disruption to our environment, our economy, employment prospects and the quotient of human happiness that is coming down the line from a climate change impact which the former Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, pointed out could relegate the spectre of terrorism.

Senator Milne said earlier that the effects of climate change have been likened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies—which normally studies the nuclear threat around the world and has been a leader in looking at the nuclear threat around the world—to the catastrophic level of a nuclear war. The International Institute of Strategic Studies said the effects from climate change would cause a host of problems, including rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts, floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics, crop failures and famines. Australia is right in the firing line. We are not an island unto ourselves. In fact, because we have a 12,000 kilometre coastline we are more vulnerable to this coastal impact than almost any other country on the planet.

And yet there is the frightening possibility for us here this morning—and we will know in a minute, when Senator Eggleston gets up to speak on behalf of the government—that the government will vote down an inquiry into the impact on Australia’s massive coastline, where the majority of Australians live and where all our big cities except this one are situated, and opt for no inquiry. I have no doubt we will hear that somebody has been asked to study this and some group has been asked to study that, but this Senate and its inquiry system has the primary responsibility on issues just like this for coordinating the state of knowledge and converting that into a call for action or study to the body politic. We will wait and see, but, if the government is going to say no to this inquiry, it will echo the failure of Prime Minister Howard in dealing with this enormous issue for Australia in the last weeks or months of his prime ministership.

Senator Wong said, ‘I’m getting a little tired of Green hyperbole on this matter.’ If only Senator Wong and the Labor Party had listened to the Greens over the last decade, we would be a long way further down the line. Senator O’Brien is shaking his head. Senator O’Brien is the shadow minister for forests in this country. He agrees with Prime Minister Howard that we should keep logging and burning the great carbon banks, the great natural forests, of Tasmania, Victoria and southern New South Wales. This is a completely irresponsible act of sabotage of the environment by the government and the Labor Party at this stage of the nation’s debate about climate change. How can you be knocking down these great wild forests, which hold carbon back out of the atmosphere, and then burn them? To be in Tasmania and see the Senator Kerry O’Brien outcome—huge columns of greenhouse gases—

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would rather it go into power plants; but you do not like that!

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator O’Brien says he would prefer that the wood goes into power plants. He says the Greens do not like that—he has been listening to something! What an extraordinary thing! He is talking about Gunns pulp mill. They are creating a forest furnace—

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are wasting your time.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I see he is leaving the chamber. At least he is retreating! The retreating Senator O’Brien supports a Gunns pulp mill which will have a forest furnace attached to it, which will burn 500,000 tonnes of forest wood per annum, next to a pulp mill which at the outset is going to have 80 per cent of its resource stock of native forests. In other words, they are going to create a massive factory to burn the carbon banks or chemically break up the carbon banks now sitting there in the Tasmanian valleys and mountains holding back climate change and they are going to promote the transformation of those great saving forests into an added hit on the global climate change phenomenon.

The Rudd opposition have to come to grips with the destruction of Australian forests if they are going to be seen as responsible on climate change. This simply cannot be allowed to proceed. It is not good enough to support an APEC move to reforest or to prevent the destruction of 20 million hectares of forest outside Australia while promoting the destruction through that pulp mill of 200,000 hectares of native forest here in Australia. I would have thought an opposition would have very quickly taken up what the public knows to be true: that there is a need for us to protect these great living carbon banks in Australia in the age of climate change emergency that we are now in.

The second factor here is the burning of coal. We know that that is having the most prodigious impact on the global climate. Australia is the biggest coal-exporting country in the world. When I made a call earlier this year that in the next three years of government we should look at how we are going to reduce the impact on climate change of burning vast amounts of coal, some sectors of the press went into orbit about it and misrepresented what I said. We Greens say that we must move to energy efficiency and to renewable energy. It is not as if we are talking about an unreality here. If Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in California, can set short-term goals—which the Greens, here in Australia, want to see in Australia—why can’t the Rudd opposition do that, let alone the Howard government? Why is it that these two great parties cannot meet the challenge of climate change?

I congratulate the Labor Party on supporting the Greens’ move for an inquiry to help give us the sensible information upon which this parliament can make better decisions, and I hope the government will, on this occasion, change its mind block on climate change—its obfuscation, as Senator Milne put it—of the last decade. We will test here this morning whether Mr Howard—now that he has confirmed his leadership of the government into the next election—is up to it. He can do that with a single act: by supporting this call for a Senate inquiry into the impact of climate change on Australia’s coasts, its cities, its concentrated areas of population and its magnificent environments. There can be no excuse that warrants saying no to this motion.

Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Nobody denies the reality of climate change, and we have said this many times before in debates here in this very chamber—I must say with the same players: Senator Brown, Senator Milne and Senator Wong. It is almost as though everybody is reading off a script and not listening to what the government has said and not paying any attention to what the government has done in respect of greenhouse, climate change and renewable energy.

We cannot deny climate change. In the south-west of Western Australia, where I come from, there has been a massive decrease in rainfall over the last 20-odd years. That is climate change, and it is very evident in Western Australia. Senator Brown has talked about the melting of Greenland’s icecaps. It is happening. it is real, and that is climate change. I have a brother who lives in Munich, in Germany. He loves skiing, but he could not ski very much last winter in Europe because there was not very much snow. And that is climate change. We hear of icebergs floating off Auckland, suggesting that the Antarctic icecap is melting. Well, that is climate change too. So it is there, it is real and it is all around us, but it has been going on for centuries. That is the other point that cannot be denied.

Europe was, once upon a time, a tropical area. There is evidence of tropical vegetation over most of southern Europe, and the Sahara was once fertile—so more evidence of long-term climate change. I heard a program on Radio National not so long ago about coral core samples being taken off the coast of Java which suggested that there has been cyclical climate change on earth for the last 10,000 or 20,000 years. Thus the issue of climate change is not new. We have to be fair and recognise that.

I looked up on the web causes of climate change—and I have said this in another speech as well—and the listed causes of climate change include continental drift, volcanic eruptions and changes in the orbit of the earth. The earth sometimes just slightly changes its axis and inevitably that brings climate change, because the seasons are related to the position of various parts of the world on the globe—therefore, if the axis of the globe changes, then obviously there will be climate change. Most importantly, there seems to be a correlation between climate change and episodes of sunspots. That has been going on for thousands and thousands of years.

More recently: there have been increases in world’s greenhouse gases since the 1700s and the industrial revolution. It is true that there have been increases in the levels of CO2 and methane in our atmosphere and that those emission levels have accelerated, particularly in this century. In the opinion of many people greenhouse gases do contribute to climate change, but they are not the whole story. There are other things to consider, such as changes in the earth’s orbit and sunspot activity. I do not think the Greens or the ALP can rationally deny that those are factors in climate change.

Another thing that is very evident, and totally and absolutely undeniable, is the fact that, since it first came into office in 1996, the Howard government has been very proactive about dealing with greenhouse issues and with recognising the need for us to change from the use of fossil fuels and move to other energy sources. In fact, the Howard government has a very proud record of having set up the world’s first government greenhouse office, back in 1996. That is undeniable. I think this is about the fifth speech I have given on this subject where Senator Wong has participated in the debate and where she comes in here and criticises and lambastes the Howard government for its failure to do anything about greenhouse, when she knows—it is a simple fact—that this government established the world’s first greenhouse office when it first came into office 11 years ago.

As part of the government’s comprehensive climate change strategy, the government has committed some $2 billion to the management of environmental issues. That commitment of $2 billion has leveraged something like $6.5 billion from private sector sources for environmental programs. The government’s climate change strategy—which, as I said, has involved a commitment of over $2 billion—has recognised our reliance on fossil fuels at the moment and our need to change to renewable and other energy sources. The government’s strategy provides a pathway for moving Australia’s energy sector to a low-emissions future. That is something undeniable. It is a simple reality of this government’s history in office. It shows that the comments that Senator Wong, in particular, keeps making are totally wrong. She knows they are wrong. She comes into the Senate repeating her allegations about the government not doing anything about greenhouse emissions when in fact we have a long history of having been very concerned about it.

Our policies have included the $500 million Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, the $100 million Renewable Energy Development Initiative, the $75 million Solar Cities trial, the $20 million advanced electricity storage technology initiative and the $14 million wind energy forecasting program. The government has explored lots of areas or sources of energy which are not going to emit greenhouse gases. That is something that Senator Wong, the Greens and perhaps the Democrats—who may claim otherwise—simply cannot deny. The runs are on the board. This government has been very conscientious and concerned about climate change during its whole period of office.

People like talking about Kyoto—and I am surprised it has not got a run so far. But I guess it will; there is still time.

Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Toyoto? Did you say ‘toyoto’?

Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Kyoto. I went to a private school, so I have a different sort of accent—but there we are. I am just surprised that it has not had a run and the fact that Australia has not signed the Kyoto treaty has not been mentioned. Kyoto is really just symbolic. It is symbolic of the world’s concern about climate change, and it really would do very little to reduce CO2 levels or alter climate change around the globe.

Although the ALP swears on a stack of bibles that it is an important treaty and should be signed, I note that Mark Butler, who Senator Kirk and anyone involved in the left wing of the ALP in South Australia might know—not that I believe that Senator Kirk is involved in the left wing—is on record as saying that Kyoto is nothing more than symbolic. So much for Senator Wong’s point of view! The government strategy on climate change was endorsed by APEC only a week or so ago when some of the world’s greatest emitters—the Chinese government and the United States government—agreed to work towards setting achievable greenhouse gas emissions targets. So there is no question that this government does not have a great record. It is simply nonsense for the opposition parties to keep coming back in here alleging that this government has a poor record on climate change.

I will now turn to the specific issue of the rise in sea levels. Senator Milne said that the government was not listening, that there was a studied ignorance of what is going on, and that this government seemed to be totally indifferent to the implications of rising sea levels. May I assure the Senate, and Senator Milne in particular, that the government is aware of recent research and reports on rising sea levels and of the risks that such sea level rises could pose to coastal properties and infrastructure around Australia. We have a lot of very low-level communities close to oceans—only a metre or so above sea level. I came from Busselton, down in the south-west of Western Australia. The whole of Geographe Bay is really just a metre or two above sea level. Very large areas of places like Dunsborough, which is a very popular holiday resort down in the south-west, and Quindalup are only a metre or two above sea level.

So sea level change is a very important consideration for Australia. In every part of this country, in a similar way, there are towns, ports and roads which could be affected by rising sea level. Anybody coming in here and alleging that the federal government is not concerned about the implications of that, knowing full well that that there is already a government agency at work looking into the implications of rising sea level change, is, at one end of the scale, being quite unfair to the government and, at the other end of the scale, perhaps being deliberately misleading to those assessing the comments.

Australian scientists are world leaders in research into the area of sea level rise, and the government is supporting research into the causes of sea level rise which has occurred over the last century. We are also supporting research into the contribution of melting ice sheets to future sea level rise around the globe. Accordingly, we do not think there is a need for an inquiry by a Senate committee into the risks associated with sea level rise in Australia, because assessment of these risks is already underway by an agency sponsored by the Australian government. The Australian government is leading work to assess the vulnerability of the coastal zone to climate change through the Natural Resources Management Ministerial Council. This council, which has been set up under the jurisdiction of not only the Commonwealth but also, perhaps, other bodies, is charged with the assessment of coastal vulnerability to sea level rise, and it is due to report in 2002.

The terms of reference include analysis of the risks from erosion in the coastal zone exacerbated as a result of climate change. Erosion of course is very important because it changes the ecology. The second reference is analysis of the risks to infrastructure and coastal ecosystems from climate change. The third includes assessment of the changing vulnerability of the coastal zone as a result of changing demographic and other socioeconomic trends. Those two points cover Senator Milne’s concerns about local government, because obviously if towns are going to be flooded that involves socioeconomic and demographic change. We also have to think about infrastructure like ports, which is a very important point. There are a lot of ports that would be very adversely affected by a three- or four-metre rise in sea level, let alone a six- or 10-metre rise, and there are roads which run along seafronts, and parks. In many places, such as in Kwinana in Western Australia, there are large industrial plants right on the seafront. The impact of sea level rise on facilities such as all of those needs to be given careful consideration and, under this program, the Australian government is undertaking research into the impact of sea level change on those sorts of facilities. The last point of reference is development of information and other tools for managers and planners of the coastal zone to better incorporate the risks of climate change in decision making. In other words, having assessed what the impact will be on infrastructure, on towns and on the ecology of the area, they will provide the basis for decision makers to make decisions about dealing with the prospect of sea level rise.

Senator Milne referred to the fact that we did not have adequate maps and tools available to work out what the impact of sea level rise would be. But the government does recognise the need for better tools and maps to enable more adequate assessment of risks from climate change and sea level rise. To accompany and support the national coastal vulnerability assessment, the Spatial Information Council, ANZLIC, is developing for the first time a national digital elevation model, a three-dimensional picture of the earth’s surface, which will enable modelling of inundation at a resolution that will be useful for decision makers to work upon. In other words, computer modelling is being developed based on data from around the world on what the impact of sea level rise will be.

All of this work will be supported by the new Australian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation, announced by the Prime Minister in April this year, which has a budget of $126 million over five years. That is quite a lot of money and should enable a good job to be done. This centre will be working with the new CSIRO adaptation flagship to improve the science underpinning adaptation, provide better information on climate change to decision makers and support the development of targeted adaptation strategies, including those for the coastal zone as a result of climate change and sea level rise.

So, with all of that being done, the government’s view is that there is no need for a Senate inquiry at this point of time, because, to some degree, it will only duplicate the work of this centre for climate change and in fact may not do the work as thoroughly or as comprehensively as the centre which the government has set up. All it will really do is call attention to the fact that sea level rise is a risk, a potential adverse outcome of climate change. I think there has been plenty of evidence here in the Senate today that all political parties are aware that sea level rise is a risk. Therefore, on that ground, I do not think there is anything to be gained by setting up a Senate committee and advise the Senate that the government will be opposing this motion.

Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Democrats support this proposal for a Senate inquiry into this particular component of serious climate change regarding the rise in sea level. It should be noted at the start that it is no particular secret that there is a federal election very much in the air. It is quite probable, in my view, that next week will be the final sitting week of the parliament before the election is announced, although that is not a certainty.

The motion before us has a reporting date of 3 December, which could be two days after a 1 December election or a few days before an 8 December election—to go as late as is practically possible. In my view, that is not a sufficient reason not to support an inquiry. As senators probably know, but for those who do not, an inquiry can be initiated to start and, whilst it might be suspended or prorogued during an election campaign, it is quite possible to then pick up and continue to run with it after the election. Of course, the composition of the current Senate will stay the same until 30 June next, so in some respects you could argue that the reporting date is probably a bit short for this inquiry. In any case, the initial part of the inquiry of seeking public submissions and input could well be done and, indeed, could continue whilst the rest of us are off doing our campaigning. So I do not think the election should be seen as a reason not to go ahead with this.

If there is one issue this Senate needs to grapple with and really pressure the next government on, whether it is a Liberal or a Labor government, then it has to be climate change. I could list a few other issues, but climate change has to be right up there at the top of the pile. It is an area in which the current government has failed dismally. The current opposition has shown some signs belatedly of treating the issue with some greater degree of seriousness. But, frankly, both alternative governing parties still have a long way to go to be really grappling with the finer detail on the specifics.

Because we have had such an era of wasted opportunity, of culpable negligence, from the current government the time frame is short. The need to pull together comprehensive, wide-ranging action in a vast array of areas is much more urgent. It is unfortunate that significant, complex and comprehensive measures will be needed to be pulled together in quite a short space of time. But, unfortunately, because of the neglect of the issue for 20 years, that is the situation we are in: we cannot afford the luxury of more drawn out, considered assessments about how best to go about this. It is urgent and that is a reason why this inquiry is appropriate at this point in time, despite the pending election. We can get on with the job now by starting to pull that information together and build on that momentum in the new parliament.

That is not to say that the inquiry before us deals with every single aspect of what needs to be done about climate change. Indeed, to some extent this particular proposed inquiry to do with the risks associated with the rise in sea level in Australia is in part looking at dealing with the consequences of climate change that is likely to happen and, in some cases, is already happening. The separate issue of how to reduce the risks of climate change, the extent of it and the impact of it is something that we also need to be working on.

Frankly, whoever are in government, I do not think that is a task where the rest of us can just sit back and hope they get it right. We all need to be working on it together across the political spectrum and across all parts of the community as cooperatively as possible. It is worth noting that one of the benefits of Senate committees in the vast majority of cases—but not in all—is that once they get underway most of the time people from across the political spectrum will seek to work together to develop a range of solutions.

I should take the opportunity to point out that it was the Democrats that initiated the first comprehensive Senate committee inquiry into issues relating to climate change. We did that back in 1988, I think. The report, tabled in 1991, was called Rescue the future: reducing the impact of the greenhouse effect. It was a unanimous report. It is a real tragedy that, despite the urgings and concerns of the Democrats and the recognition of the need for action, the recommendations for action that were put forward by people across the parties in 1991 were not meaningfully and genuinely picked up by the then Labor government. It is just one of the earlier examples of a terribly long list of missed opportunities.

There was a further comprehensive inquiry by the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee—again initiated by the Democrats, in the parliament before this one. It produced a report called The heat is on: Australia’s greenhouse future. From memory, I do not think that report was unanimous but it certainly still produced a comprehensive range of recommendations. That inquiry was not just initiated but also chaired by the Democrats, and its recommendations received support from the majority of senators on that committee. Again, that was a missed opportunity on the part of the government in failing to respond to those recommendations.

There are many other examples, such as the missed opportunity of the government by failing to fulfil its promise to look at inserting a greenhouse treaty in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act back in 1999. The then Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator Robert Hill, backed down and totally acquiesced to the resource lobby within cabinet and the government, totally pushing aside any direct mechanism in our federal environment laws for assessing greenhouse impacts in particular proposals—despite his concrete pledge to do so to this very Senate in this very chamber. So there have been a range of missed opportunities on the part of the current government, and it must bear enormous responsibility for that.

It must be said in passing that, despite the overnight emergence of Mr Costello as the Prime Minister in waiting who is suddenly going to reinvigorate us with a new vision and a new agenda that he has not yet articulated, he has been absolutely in lock-step with every single component of this government’s actions, including Iraq, Work Choices and its absolute failure to take any action or responsibility for the housing affordability crisis, and Mr Costello has also been up-front and centre in the government’s strategy of refusing to act on climate change. He not only refused to act but actually set about actively and deliberately sabotaging efforts in the global arena to get action with regard to climate change.

There has been no indication at any single step along the way that Mr Costello has been anything other than an enthusiastic advocate of that policy of culpable negligence on the part of the federal government with climate change. As far as I am aware, the words ‘climate change’ have not escaped Mr Costello’s lips since he started talking again in the last 12 hours or so. As we all know, it took until this year for him to even mention the words ‘climate change’ in any of his 10 or 11 budget speeches, so forgive me if I do not have a great deal of confidence that we will see any major leap forward. I do not see any sign that Mr Costello has exercised a single synapse on this issue in all the time he has been Treasurer.

That is all the more reason why collectively we need to work on this to overcome the intellectual and political shortcomings of some in positions of influence within the government. There is no doubt that there is a wide range of expertise and ability, including from among many in the coalition who would contribute enormously by being able to engage with this debate rather than leaving it up to a few that have shown they do not have the capacity or an interest in the issue.

The other point I would like to make in speaking to this motion is about the issue of sea level rises. It is a serious problem. It is already happening and there is evidence with regard to some Pacific island nations and parts of Papua New Guinea of the damage that has already been done. It is important to emphasise that sea level rises do not just mean people finding the tide creeping up bit by bit and eventually lapping around their doorstep and around their ankles in a nice, gentle, slow rise. The real danger is not so much that, although that over time is obviously not a good thing, but the greater vulnerability of communities close to the coast to extreme weather events and to storm surges and the impact on rising water tables harming the viability of agricultural land and bringing up saline water into water sources that the people use for drinking water or for watering crops, and there is also the damage to foundations of buildings and infrastructure as well. So it is a lot more than just homes or land being flooded or drowned over time. These things can come on quite quickly and it is devastating for many communities.

I should point out, as a Queensland senator, that it is already a serious concern for Australians living in the Torres Strait, for example. One of the Torres Strait Islands particularly has experienced a number of serious storm surges in recent times. One could argue about whether that is or is not directly related to climate change. To some extent it does not matter: they are experiencing it and have to deal with it. I do not think that there is any doubt that climate change is making the risks from such things as storm surges and the loss of potable water supplies more and more of an issue. The amount of arable land on some islands including those in the Torres Strait and the amount of available fresh water on some islands is a serious problem already, and it is likely to become more serious.

Those sorts of valuable issues would be useful to put to an inquiry like this. It is not just an intellectual exercise with a bunch of scientists giving some theories and different scenarios; it is an opportunity to actually hear from people directly. The point needs to be made as often as possible that these sorts of inquiries and debates are not just intellectual exercises. We are actually examining an issue and the consequence of its direct impact on human beings, on Australians and, in some cases, on some of the poorest people living in our immediate vicinity in the wider region around Australia. We need to be looking at what this means for people at community level as well as what it means for the natural environment with the risks it brings to biodiversity.

Again, as a Queenslander, I have to emphasise the grave concern about the impact on the Great Barrier Reef and the marine park more broadly. It might sound like sea level rises should not matter for a reef because it is under water anyway. But obviously sea level rises can impact on the viability of the reef in different areas, particularly when accompanied by changes such as extreme weather events and changes in the temperature of the water in particular. That can certainly happen with sea level rises and it can also happen with changes in currents. All of these things can impact significantly and rapidly on the reef. Of course, there have been changes in sea level rises over time in the past, and sometimes in the fairly recent past, but the real issue with climate change and sea level rises is the rapidity of the likely changes.

So this is about forward planning and trying to prevent or minimise damage. It is a serious issue, and for those who want to say that it is too close to the election it should be pointed out that it would have been helpful if the government had not blocked previous inquiries into these sorts of areas. Once again it appears we are trying to have an inquiry that the government is blocking. It should be pointed out in passing that this is now one of a very long list of substantive and substantial proposed inquiries the Senate has put forward where the government is using its numbers in this place to block that from happening. I am not saying that governments should support every single proposed inquiry that is put forward—although, having said that, I think that the growing habit of blocking inquiries even into legislation is setting a very dangerous precedent.

One thing that the government should recognise is that they are not going to be in government forever—they might not be in government for much longer at all, depending on what happens at the election. All of the precedents that they put in place now when it seems like a good idea while they have the power are ones that the next mob will look at and say: ‘That’s not too bad an idea at all, actually. We might do the same thing.’ If the coalition does not regain government, then clearly the Labor Party is not going to control the Senate after the next election. But it does nonetheless create a circumstance where the precedents have been set. There is no doubt that the number of Senate inquiry proposals that have been not passed by the Senate in the last couple of years is at a level unprecedented for decades, as a direct result of the government’s use and abuse of their Senate majority.

As I said, there is no obligation to support every proposed inquiry that is put up. The Democrats do not support every inquiry that is put up. It may be that we should be a bit more judicious with regard to the inquiries that we adopt, the workloads that committees bring on and those sorts of things. I am happy to indicate my interest and preparedness to in the future look at considering ways to make sure that any inquiries that are put forward are as effective as possible. But that is a long way from the approach that the government are taking, which is just blocking anything that is politically inconvenient. They have done it time and time again. There have been more blocked than agreed to. Over periods of time, we have had committees sitting there with no work before them at all. That might sound like a nice idea, particularly given that both chairs and deputy chairs get paid allowances these days for those positions, even when in some cases the committees have not had a lot of work to do.

I should emphasise, because it is almost forgotten in this place, that there was a convention which was around for quite a period of time that there would always be one or two—and often more—Senate select committees going. These committees would be put together specifically and solely for the purpose of examining a particular issue, which is different from how the standing general purpose committees that we have are put together. We have not had a select committee initiated in this chamber for a prolonged period of time. That also indicates the clear attitude of the government that they will let a few inquiries go forward if it is in their interest but they do not want to have focused, rigorous and independent examination of any issues. They do not want to divert any attention or any power away from themselves. That has degraded the role of the Senate quite significantly.

The problem with trashing conventions is that they become much harder to restore. We have had a high turnover of people in this chamber in recent times, and we will have some more at the next election. It does not take long before the corporate knowledge and corporate memory disappears and people will not realise that select committees, rather than being out of the ordinary, were very much part and parcel of the day-to-day work of this Senate. There were select committees stretching over the life of a number of parliaments, like the Senate Select Committee on Superannuation. Previous to that, there was the Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare. We had the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health, which was chaired by the Democrats. That produced an incredibly valuable, comprehensive and unanimous non-partisan report. That provided a catalyst for big advances in the area of mental health.

The government should not be afraid of Senate committee inquiries. They actually give them a hand. They help; they assist. They also assist the community in being able to have a say and in being able to access the resources and information that gets tabled and put on the public record through the process. It is not just about what suits the government. One day, perhaps, there will be a recognition that parliament and politics are not just about the immediate contest for political advantage for each of us but about trying to do what is best for the community and about trying to provide more avenues for their expertise to be engaged and used and for people to have a say. It is real tragedy that once again that opportunity is being denied by the government’s refusal to support this proposal.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank senators for their contribution to this debate. I welcome the support of the Australian Labor Party and the Democrats for this reference for the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts to investigate the implications of sea level rise in Australia as a result of climate change. It would have particularly looked at the recent science relating to projections of sea level rise; the ecological, social and economic impacts; adaptation and mitigation strategies; knowledge gaps in research; and options to communicate risks and vulnerabilities to the Australian community. It is appalling that the government is using its numbers to block a Senate inquiry into this absolutely vital issue.

We heard from Senator Eggleston that the reason that the government is opposing this is because there is a government agency at work looking into it. There are government agencies at work looking into lots of things. That is not a reason for the Senate not to investigate this. In fact, as James Hansen, the climate scientist, said—regarding the US, but it is equally applicable here—government science agencies have public affairs offices which are now staffed with political appointees and those political appointees have a big impact on what science gets reported and how it is reported. I am very disturbed about that. Public affairs officials should be helping scientists speak in a language that the public can understand; they should not be massaging the information. But that is exactly what has gone on after 11 years of this government. There has been suppression of information and massaging of information. Government agencies look into what governments tell them to look into and report accordingly. What we want is an inquiry without fear or favour.

Let us assume for a moment that the work that is currently being done by the Greenhouse Office and Geoscience Australia into coastal vulnerability in Australia is completely open-ended and reasonable. The point that I made earlier which Senator Eggleston failed to appreciate is that the assumption underlying the work that is currently being done is the IPCC projection. As I indicated, the IPCC has said that it expects sea level rise to be between 18 centimetres and 59 centimetres this century. That is the assumption that is being fed into all the work that is currently being done in Australia.

My point is that those assumptions are wrong or are very likely to be wrong. That is why I have said we need to look at the recent science relating to projections of sea level rise, because when the IPCC report came out the work of those scientists who are working particularly in the area of icecaps and the melting of glaciers, on Greenland and on the west Antarctic iceshelf, was not adequately included in that report. If you take on board what they are saying, that in addition to the thermal expansion of the oceans and storm surges you have to take into account that ice melt, then the predictions will be of a sea level rise of between 50 centimetres and 1.4 metres this century. If you extrapolate that out taking account of what Barrie Pittock has said, that for every metre of sea level rise the coast will retreat or go inland by 100 metres, we are talking about large parts of the world, Australia included, that are going to be significantly impacted by sea level rise.

Senator Eggleston, on behalf of the government, says: ‘It’s all under control. We’re looking into it. We’re going to have a map.’ Well, the Insurance Council has been asking for a map for a long time. Everybody wants a digital elevation map of Australia’s coastline. Everyone who buys a house should be able to go online and look at that digital elevation map and see where the property they are going to buy sits on that map so that they know about the vulnerability of that property to sea level rises, storm surges and flooding, whether the property is on an estuary or on the coast or on a river. We need to know that. Instead of that, we have a government agency looking into it, and by the end of 2008 it will only have the first cut of areas in Australia which have vulnerability to sea level rise. We will not have the digital elevation maps. We still do not have the maps of the result of the recent Newcastle and Hobart floods. We do not have the capacity at this stage to inform the community of what they need to know and of how to adapt.

It is interesting that Senator Eggleston talks about ports. In 1993 the Japanese did this very study of their own ports. Why has it has taken Australia until 2007 to start the first cut? What the Japanese found was that the costs of protecting port facilities and coastal structures in the Japanese coastal zones against a one-metre rise in sea level were massive: with a one-metre sea level rise, the total costs for protection were estimated at $US115 billion. That was in 1993. Japan then said, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ and then started looking at a process involving three strategies. They looked at whether they should go into adaptation and whether, as part of their adaptation strategy, they should go into managed retreat. They also looked at a range of engineering solutions, as I indicated before, such as building seawalls, changing facilities and so on. Other things are being done in other places in the world. In the Netherlands, for example, they are considering putting out to tender the building of a whole new coastline because they realise that their current strategies are not going to work. They are also moving people from low-lying areas and vulnerable floodplains to other areas. So they are virtually saying they are going to let some areas go because they recognise they can no longer protect them.

Those are the kinds of strategies that are already underway in other countries where this work was done more than a decade, even 15 years, ago. But in Australia we have sat here listening to a government say it is not happening. I am appalled to hear Senator Eggleston continue with the absolute climate sceptic behaviour that is so entrenched in the government, saying time and time again that he is still not persuaded that the current rate of global warming is human induced. He said, ‘There is a reasonable view that greenhouse gas emissions have a role in climate change.’ No. There is a scientific view held by the world’s leading scientists, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that says they are more than 90 per cent certain it is human induced global warming. That report came out on 2 February this year, and the government is still clinging to the nonsense and scepticism being put out through the Great Global Warming Swindle program, which obviously government members have all watched and decided to cling to. When is the government going to get beyond climate scepticism? When is it going to realise that not only is climate change real but it is urgent?

There is another point I want to make about the claim that there is ‘a government agency looking into it’. The IPCC has said that global emissions must peak by 2015. We are in 2007. That does not give us very much time. Talking about nuclear reactors that are 20 or 30 years away and about energy intensity reduction by 2030 is just pie in the sky. We have got less than a decade to take radical action here in Australia to significantly reduce our emissions and to assist our Pacific neighbours to do so as well. Next week we are going to have here in the parliament a delegation of people from the Carteret Islands, off Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea. I hope some of the government members are going to come and listen to those people, who will tell them that they are in danger of losing their land and their culture because their islands are disappearing under the sea. What are we going to do about that? We still have a government that says it will not accept a definition of environmental refugee. Why? Because Australia does not want to take people from the Pacific island nations or from Papua New Guinea or anywhere else when they are driven from their communities because of climate change. We are in danger of losing not only the places where those communities live but the cultures and languages that go with those communities. New Zealand has opened its arms to many of its Pacific island neighbours and has entered into some transition strategies in some of those communities, but not Australia. Is it any wonder those neighbouring countries are increasingly sceptical about Australia’s role in global geopolitics?

I return to the issue of sea level rise and Senator Eggleston’s view. He says that, yes, they have started the mapping. Show me the maps. I cannot go now—neither can the insurance industry nor any person in the community—and get an elevation map of the area I live in which tells me, if the IPCC is right and there is an 18- to 59-centimetre sea level rise in the next 100 years, what it means for my property. If they are wrong and the other scientists are correct and it is going to be more like a 1.4-metre rise, I cannot find out what that means for me, and that is a disgrace.

What the government is currently doing will not provide that information either, because it is based on the most conservative assumptions. That is why this Senate inquiry is important. We need to hear from scientists like Dr John Church who can come and tell us whether the assumptions behind the mapping, behind the assessments that are currently going on, are adequate. I do not believe those assumptions are adequate. In fact, as I said a while ago, Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, in his latest work, is making very serious warnings.

We know that the United Nations estimates that 150 million people live less than one metre above the high tide level and 250 million live within five metres of it. We are talking about massive global dislocation. Even with the most conservative measurements, we know that 700,000 people are already vulnerable to sea level rise in coastal communities around Australia right now. They do not even know it. That is why the final point of this reference to a Senate committee for inquiry is so important—because it is looking at options to communicate risks and vulnerability to the Australian community.

I thought it was very telling that Senator Eggleston said at the end of his speech that all such an inquiry will do will ‘draw attention to the risk and potential adverse impact’. We would not want people to know what risks they were facing, would we? We would not want to tell the people of Cairns that they are extremely vulnerable to cyclone induced sea level rise because of the changes to global temperature and because of the low-lying nature of the area around Cairns. We would not want to tell that to the people in south-east Queensland or south-west Western Australia, an area which Senator Eggleston acknowledged. There are areas right around Australia which today are extremely vulnerable to these risks. Also, people who live there probably have not checked their insurance policies to find that they are not covered for any damage as a result of storm surge and flooding, because insurance policies do not recognise the risks from the sea in many cases.

We are dealing with a crisis situation here, and we are told that we do not need to look into it because a government agency is looking into it. I would like to read some words from James Hansen. As I said, he is the father of climate change science globally. He is sending out a very strong warning to scientists around the world about their reticence to speak out. He is calling for plain communication with people so that they know how serious climate change is.

We know that neither the government nor the opposition is going to really level with Australians about the urgency of the risk, because if you have an urgent risk it means you have to take drastic action and take it quickly. Neither the government nor the opposition is prepared to do that. I say that because, again, we have heard from the Labor opposition that in government it will do an assessment of how much it costs to deal with climate change and will make decisions accordingly. At the same time it is saying that there will be ongoing coalmining, ongoing coal-fired power stations and ongoing logging of carbon sinks. So, again, my question to the Labor Party is: how are you going to meet emissions reduction targets if you are going to continue to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the logging of forests and through coalmining and coal-fired power stations? Where are your wedges to get serious reductions? The Greens have said we need a 30 per cent reduction in 1990 levels by 2020. How is Labor going to get anywhere near that?

I would like to read to the Senate what James Hansen has said about the melting of the ice sheets. It is something which has not been taken into account yet, and it is horrific. You only have to see, as Senator Bob Brown said, the television pictures of those huge chunks, kilometres wide, coming off the glaciers of Greenland and west Antarctica to start realising how serious this issue is. James Hansen says:

Under [business as usual] forcing in the 21st century, sea level rise undoubtedly will be dominated by a third term ... ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on gravity satellite measurements ... As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005-2015 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century. Of course I can not prove that my choice of a 10 year doubling time for non-linear response is accurate, but I am confident that it provides a far better estimate than a linear response for the ice sheet component of sea level rise.

There is one of the world’s leading scientists saying that that is what is happening and that is the level of sea level rise we can expect. He goes on to talk about the legacy of scientists in this regard. He says:

The broader picture gives strong indication that ice sheets will, and are already beginning to, respond in a nonlinear fashion to global warming. There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that IPCC [business as usual] climate forcing scenarios would lead to disastrous multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale.

There is, in my opinion, a huge gap between what is understood about human-made global warming and its consequences, and what is known by the people who most need to know, the public and policy makers. IPCC is doing a commendable job, but we need something more. Given the reticence that IPCC necessarily exhibits, there need to be supplementary mechanisms. The onus, it seems to me, falls on us scientists as a community.

Important decisions are being made now and in the near future. An example is the large number of new efforts to make liquid fuels from coal, and a resurgence of plans for energy intensive “cooking” of tar-shale mountains to squeeze out liquid hydrocarbon fuels. These are just the sort of actions needed to preserve a [business as usual] greenhouse gas path indefinitely. We know enough about the carbon cycle to say that at least of the order of a quarter of the CO2 emitted in burning fossil fuels under a [business as usual] scenario will stay in the air “forever”, the latter defined practically as more than 500 years. Readily available conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 to a level of the order of 450 ppm.

He goes on to say that he thinks that, unfortunately, that will be achieved. So the world’s leading scientists are now saying it is almost over. We are going to get to that critical limit of 450 parts per million. We are going to go over the two degrees and, once we go over, there is no going back, because of the self-fulfilling loops that we know about climate. He goes on to say:

In this circumstance it seems vital that we provide the best information we can about the threat to the great ice sheets posed by human-made climate change. This information, and necessary caveats, should be provided publicly, and in plain language.

He goes on to say that the National Academy of Sciences should report on that. He poses a question. He says:

Reticence is fine for the IPCC. And individual scientists can choose to stay within a comfort zone, not needing to worry that they say something that proves to be slightly wrong. But perhaps we should also consider our legacy from a broader perspective. Do we not know enough to say more?

And that is the opportunity I want to give scientists and the community through this Senate inquiry. I want them to be able to come and tell the Australian people exactly how much at risk this coastal community is and how vulnerable we are to climate change.

I think it is disgraceful that the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister in waiting do not want Australians to know and will not address climate change seriously. If you do not address climate change seriously, you have no future agenda. There is no more important future agenda than addressing climate change and the vulnerability of Australians, our Pacific neighbours and the world generally, and farmers, fishermen and community people will tell the government that at this election because people out there in the community know, as I do, just how critical this issue is.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Milne’s) be agreed to.