Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Climate Change and Water (Senator Wong) to a question without notice asked by Senator Allison today relating to emissions trading.

The minister made a very welcome announcement this morning that emissions trading would proceed in 2010, unlike the previous commitment which was 2012, as I understand it. The problem is that, even though that has been brought forward by a couple of years, it is going to be about 2020 before we see even minor reductions in greenhouse emissions coming into effect. The conclusion of the National Emissions Trading Taskforce was that reductions in actual emissions are going to be very slow in getting off the ground.

The minister says that they are doing the modelling and that that will all feed into the trajectory, which is going to determine the rate at which emissions will be abated. But it seems to us that talking about determining what the trajectory means and then talking in the same terms about not knowing until the economic modelling is being done suggests that we have nothing leading this process. So the government are not saying that we must contain emissions to the point where, globally, parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere will be contained to 450 parts per million, 350 parts per million or some other figure. There is nothing in the government’s guiding, if you like, of this whole process that says that we want to keep temperature rises to within one degree, two degrees or six degrees—who knows. So we are not sure exactly what it is that is going to determine the process leading up to emissions trading, but I do know that nothing much is going to happen until a long way down the track—and this is a serious mistake.

We are getting very impatient. This government is not proving to be all that fast off the blocks on greenhouse than was the previous one. It could get going straight away with a mandated renewable energy target. It could increase that target, as Labor has long said it intended to do. We have the structure; we know what to do. We have an electricity generation system which is used to it. The retail section knows how to purchase renewable energy certificates. We know that there are some seven million certificates that have been banked, so even if you were to set that up tomorrow it would not cause any difficulty in the industry in terms of generating certificates to meet the new targets. We also know that Australians are great wasters of energy, so an energy efficiency trading scheme—and I draw the government’s attention to the bill which I tabled some weeks ago which would put in place such an energy efficiency trading system—could likewise shave two per cent a year off the consumption of energy in this country.

The great benefit of a trading system like this is that the cost of efficiency is offset by the lower cost of using electricity, so it is not quite revenue neutral but it is almost that. This is a quick, easy, effective and fair way of reducing emissions. Those two measures alone could start tomorrow. There is no reason why we should wait until the end of the year until we get this sorted out. We know what the emissions trading system is going to look like. We will then take another year to get it into legislation before it is actually implemented. We could start tomorrow by picking up on two systems which would not require huge consultation around the country and would not need us to appease large sectors of the community. Let me talk a bit about why it is critical to start today. There was 23 per cent growth in spring melt in the Arctic sea ice in 2006-07. We discovered this just last week. The scientists are telling us that glaciers and sheet ice are melting at a much greater rate than we ever thought was the case. Climate scientists are doubting—(Time expired)

Question agreed to.