Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Climate change is one of the main issues that brought me into this place. It was one of the reasons that I got involved in politics. It was one of the reasons I chose to run for the Senate. So it is with a great deal of sadness that I am rising to deliver this speech. This must be a bad piece of legislation indeed for the parliament’s strongest advocates of a response to climate change to be voting it down. The package of Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills that is before us fails the test of consistency with climate science. It fails to keep faith with the millions of Australians who voted for an end to 12 years of energy policy written by the transnational oil and gas companies and the coalmining industry. The bills enable an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the most carbon intensive industries in the country. They lock in a target so low and so compromised by loopholes as to amount to no target at all. They fail the test of intergenerational equity, binding Australian delegates to Copenhagen with what amounts to a blocking position, a refusal to entertain the Bali negotiating range of 25 per cent to 40 per cent, which must be the bare minimum starting point for the crucial talks later this year. Most tragically, this legislation fails the test of being better than nothing at all.

On Professor Ross Garnaut’s advice the government has pursued a market based mechanism of a cap-and-trade system which embeds a carbon price in the economy. In the 10 years that I have been working on climate change issues, I have never heard anyone say that a carbon price was a bad idea. But this scheme manages to shield the nation’s most polluting industries from the impacts of that price, displacing those costs on to the broader community and warping the principles outlined by Professor Garnaut almost out of recognition. It is a carbon trading scheme in which the more you pollute the more you get paid, turning the principle of a price signal inside out. It is a carbon price but only with exemptions for coal, oil and gas. This is the starkest example possible of how politics—as usual—will fail the Australian people, the global community, those on the front line and the species already vanishing under the early impacts. I have listened to the debates in here and to the contributions from all sides, and it is quite clear that the government has tried to steer a middle way between the science based targets of the Australian Greens and the rearguard demands of the polluters for an entrenchment of business as usual. Of course, politics is meant to be the art of compromise. In human affairs, balancing the competing needs of different constituencies is vastly harder than it looks. But this issue is something different. There is no middle way with climate change. The atmosphere will not compromise and the planet’s heat balance is not interested in negotiating.

As a senator for Western Australia I am keenly aware that climate change has already hit us pretty hard in the west. It is projected to hit us much harder. Senator Siewert has already outlined some of the modelled consequences for the western third of the continent, so I want to concentrate on the opportunities. How many senators in this place realise that in 2008 global investment in renewable energy was greater than all investment in all fossil generation combined? I suspect that that is news to most of us here because so little of that investment is being made in Australia. According to the Global trends in sustainable energy investment 2009 report conducted for the United Nations Environment Program, 2008 was the first year that global investment in new power generation capacity from renewable energy technologies—not including large hydro—outpaced investment in fossil fuelled technologies. Wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted a US$140 billion investment compared with $110 billion for gas and coal for electrical power generation. If you include energy efficiency and other measures, more than $155 billion of new money was invested in clean energy companies and projects in 2008, a year in which the rest of the economy was really only generating bad news.

The growth in investment in clean energy was largely due to record investments by China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies. These are the very nations that Australian politicians love to cite as a reason for Australia to do nothing, and they are now leaving Australia behind. Europe and North America are storming ahead. In Australia we are cursed with a political culture that cannot see past a smokestack. Our leaders assume that only coal and nuclear can generate base load energy, that energy efficiency is a waste of time and that renewables will only ever be a sideshow. All of these assumptions are dead wrong and mean that we keep coming up with the wrong answers.

Last week I commented on a report by Fremantle based Australian company Carnegie Corporation Ltd which showed how building 1,500 megawatts of wave energy power stations by 2020 would create 3,210 Australian jobs and enough energy to power 1.2 million households. The report by that company projects that, by 2050, 14,380 jobs could be created, producing 12,000 megawatts of clean, renewable power. Australia has the world’s most abundant renewable energy resources and we are doing almost nothing with them. Western Australia has world-leading solar, wind, wave, biomass and geothermal resources, and they are treated as irrelevant by a leadership that seems to understand resources only as something that can be burnt, blown up or chopped down. With the right policy settings, Australia could be renewably powered within a generation and could permanently leave the concept of climate change and fossil fuel depletion behind.

One issue that is very close to my heart is public transport and what happens in communities when you get it right. The government seems to think that introducing a CPRS will somehow be enough to drive a change in transport habits. But, of course, it will not go close. If it were done right, climate policy could be an opportunity to support public transport to create genuine travel alternatives to cars. It could be an opportunity to provide incentives for people to choose public transport, which would greatly reduce our carbon footprint. But we know that it has not been done right. One of the more perverse impacts of this package of bills relates to the way that public transport will be disadvantaged relative to private cars.

By including buses as public transport vehicles in the heavy vehicle categorisation, the legislation fails to recognise the bus industry’s unique status within the heavy vehicle sector as an environmentally positive industry that provides a practical travel alternative to the car. The removal of the proposed cent-for-cent compensation for fuel price increases as a result of the CPRS will increase public transport operating costs. This is what the bus and coach industry are saying to us. The rail industry note that their costs will also increase relative to private cars, as the CPRS increases electricity prices. So there you have it: the government’s centrepiece climate change legislation has been drafted to make public transport more expensive relative to private cars—and this is not really an accident; it is something that has been known for many months.

The transport sector is Australia’s third largest emitter of carbon pollution. It accounts for around 14 per cent of total emissions. Road transport—cars, trucks and light commercial buses—accounts for about 90 per cent of total transport emissions. We know that the Commonwealth spends 12 times more on roads than it does on rail, and we know that public transport uses fewer resources for infrastructure, fewer vehicles and less fuel. Trams emit half the carbon pollution of cars, at least per passenger kilometre. When petrol is $8 a litre, the urban freeways that we are building now will make no sense whatsoever. Car-dependent developments on the fringes of our great cities only look affordable in an age of cheap oil and low carbon prices. Take away that assumption, and low-income families in car-dependent suburbs will find themselves highly vulnerable to oil price shocks. The infrastructure that we are designing for the fossil economy is obsolete.

I very much support the recommendations being made today by the Rapid, Active and Affordable Transport Alliance. This is a group made up of a very broad coalition of organisations and includes health organisations such as Diabetes Australia, trade unions, transport advocacy organisations, city councils and environment groups including the ACF. They are calling on the government to rebalance transport spending by dedicating two-thirds of the funding to public transport and one-third to roads. It does make sense, particularly in terms of Australia’s rapidly worsening carbon emissions from this sector. It is naive in the extreme to imagine that the CPRS bills before us will have any real impact on patterns of transport in Australia. If anything, in the absence of a large-scale investment in public transport, they will further compound the misery of people in vulnerable communities without doing anything tangible to provide for choice or alternative options.

The rallying cry for those for whom climate change is still an inconvenient truth is ‘jobs’. At a time of grave economic uncertainty and with the underlying weakness of the global economy laid bare for all to see, we cannot ignore the impacts of climate change on employment. So what kinds of jobs are the climate deniers promoting? They are offering you a job on the Titanic, a job in a future shrouded with risk and dislocation. It is short-term thinking in the extreme to imagine that you can stand up and pretend to be a defender of jobs while steering the ship on which these jobs depend directly at the iceberg. We have seen this coming. Australia signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. That is how long we have had to prepare for the debate this evening, and it underlines the tragedy of the Liberal and National parties running around, nearly 20 years later, flogging us jobs on the Titanic instead of fronting up directly to the challenges that are before us.

As I did in my first speech in this chamber, I want to conclude with some thoughts about the community campaigners who will react to the huge missed opportunity that the CPRS represents: the climate action groups around the country and the ordinary people who will take action because this chamber has failed. Even the head of the United Nations climate change branch, Yvo de Boer, is getting a little desperate. He spoke to non-government organisations last week and said, ‘If you could get your members out on the street before Copenhagen, that would be incredibly valuable’. That is what it has come to. With the parliament unable to decide between inadequate action and no action at all, it again falls to the community to make its voice heard and demand strong action. To paraphrase a quote by William Churchill, it seems the government does intend to do the right thing—after everything else has been tried. We do not have time for this approach, for further delays at the behest of the industries which have held back progress until five minutes to midnight.

This is not the end of this debate. I would like to pay tribute at this point to Senator Christine Milne, who has carriage of climate change issues for the Australian Greens, for the leadership that she has shown in taking such a strong and scientifically defensible line in this debate. I think we will see in future weeks and months, as this debate plays out, that it is really the only sensible course for the Australian parliament to take. This parliament will one day soon have to pass a comprehensive set of measures to confront these challenges directly, to harness Australian ingenuity and the strength of our economy to build a renewable society. Until that day, the real hope in Australian politics lies outside this building in the movement for a safe climate, which is growing around the country.

Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Rudd government’s proposed emissions trading scheme is deeply flawed. If the government’s goal is to help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, it will not achieve that through its ETS. It will not help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 and related bills could well result in more global greenhouse gas emissions than there would be without them. The scheme is not going to do anything for the environment. It is a scheme that will cost jobs and put pressure on our economy.

You would think that a Labor government would care about jobs. But, in this modelling exercise, do you think they assessed the impact of their proposed emissions trading scheme on jobs? No, they did not. They, in their absolutely inadequate and flawed modelling—modelling that is as flawed as the emissions trading scheme itself—included full employment as a modelling assumption, rather than trying to assess employment as a modelling result. They started off telling their model that we are going to have full employment. However, there is going to be an impact on jobs in the steel industry, as we were told in Wollongong when we went there with the Senate Select Committee on Fuel and Energy. We were told 20,000 jobs are at risk in Wollongong. If you tell your model that we are going to have full employment and then 20,000 jobs go down, it says, ‘Oh, well, jobs are going to go up somewhere.’ That is a function of the flawed model that this absolutely flawed government have put together: 20,000 jobs go down over here, so 20,000 jobs must go up over there.

The only category that was left where jobs could go up was ‘green jobs’. So if we are going to have jobs lost everywhere, as the coal industry, the steel industry and a whole range of other industries say, and if you cannot find another category for jobs created, the model says, ‘Oh, well, it must be green jobs.’ Then the government say, even though it is a function of the way the model was put together: ‘Look at this! Isn’t this great? We’re going to have all these new green jobs,’ not telling people who are not diligent enough to look at the fine print that it was not a modelling result but a modelling assumption. They have not modelled the impact on jobs. They have not modelled the impact on regional Australia. In fact, they say it is too hard, too difficult. Heaps of witnesses before our particular committee inquiry said it can be done and there is absolutely no difficulty. In fact, the New South Wales government commissioned Frontier Economics, who did exactly that work. Frontier Economics, who used exactly the same modelling methodology and exactly the same databases et cetera were able to do the work that this government refused to do.

I say it again: compared to the reference scenario, the Rudd government’s scheme will actually make things worse for the global environment, not better. Let us reflect on this for a moment. If there was a price on carbon in Australia in isolation of what is happening in the rest of the world, what would that mean for the LNG industry, for example, which could prosper here in Australia? We have a lot of untapped gas reserves which could contribute to a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by displacing coal fired power stations in China and Japan. Yet under this scheme they are going to be worse off than all of the competition they are facing from companies overseas that are not facing the same cost. If you had the trifecta—good for economic growth, good for jobs and good for the environment—surely a scheme introduced by a government in Australia should make it easier for such an industry to develop, to grow and to prosper, rather than make it harder. This scheme is going to make it harder. We are going to tie our hands behind our back, rather than doing everything we can.

I will put a few facts and figures around this. For every tonne of additional emissions in Australia through the production of LNG, we can achieve a reduction in emissions in China of 5½ to nine tonnes and a reduction in Japan of 4½ tonnes. So, if your objective truly was to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, rather than politically grandstanding, and if you were really focused on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, wouldn’t you design your scheme such that the Australian LNG industry could grow and prosper so that we could maximise our potential to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions? But, no, we have not done that.

Let us go to steel, cement and other industries. An industry in Australia which is at world’s best practice environmentally—that is, the best in terms of having the lowest level of emissions for a particular activity, compared to any other company or business conducting a similar activity anywhere else in the world—will face a cost not faced by any of the others, including the more polluting businesses in overseas jurisdictions. They will be less competitive, so they will get less business. The businesses that are going to get the business are those that are more polluting, and the businesses that are going to grow are the businesses that are more polluting. The businesses in Australia that are operating at world’s best practice environmentally will not do well. That business will get shifted to businesses that are more polluting. That will result in more greenhouse gas emissions—as a direct result of what we are trying to do over here.

A particular witness, Spitfire Oil, appeared before the fuel and energy committee. They said: ‘We’ve got this great new technology, this great new process, which actually will help to have a significantly lower level of greenhouse gas emissions around oil production. However, we won’t be able to get it off the ground because we’ll be competing with imports that are going to be more competitive. Even though we’re much more environmentally friendly and even though our emissions are significantly lower, we’re still going to have to pay a price for carbon that others overseas won’t have to pay.’ So, for businesses that are more environmentally friendly and that are trying to pursue new technology, you are actually going to make it harder to compete with more polluting businesses, as a direct result of what is being proposed here. In fact, that particular enterprise, which is a very creative and innovative enterprise, is looking at relocating offshore. Australia is probably going to lose that particular enterprise, Spitfire Oil.

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator O’Brien interjecting—

Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I invite you, Senator O’Brien, to have a very close look at what they do because they are researching some very good technology which will be very environmentally significant. Yet if this Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme comes into play, that will be the end of it for Australia—it will be the end of it.

There are some basic principles to understand. The Europeans understand them and the Americans understand them. People keep pointing to Europe: ‘They have had an emissions trading scheme and the world has not fallen apart over there.’ Let us just start off by noting that when they introduced their emissions trading scheme they provided more permits than there were emissions at the time. That was the way Europe started off. But then let us just note that their emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries—their export industries—are 100 per cent protected. In Australia we are saying, ‘Oh, well, the LNG industry’. In the end, after a lot of public debate, the government said, ‘We will give you 60 per cent free permits, which over a period of time are going to go down.’

Some other industries were given 90 per cent free permits, but when you actually look at the way it is calculated and go through the ins and outs of it—activity based definitions and all of the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo—this is a very complex, very bureaucratic scheme. It is very difficult to get your head around it. The bureaucracy and the red tape that is going to be built around all of this is just incredible, if this ever gets up. But the government says, ‘Ninety per cent free permits are here’, but in the end clearly we are talking about 60 or 63 per cent of permits. So there is going to be a significant cost. The government is aiming to raise $25 billion through all of this. It is a cost that has to be borne by business across Australia—a cost that is not going to be borne by competitors overseas.

Has the government actually set itself a target as to how much it will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions as a result of this measure? No, it has not. Very specifically, I asked an official from the Department of Climate Change and Water at the table at a particular Senate committee hearing, ‘Can you point me to where in any of your legislation, policy documents, green papers or white papers there is a target as to how much you want to contribute through this scheme to reduction in global greenhouse gas emission?’ There is no target. There is no target as to how much this proposed scheme for Australia will contribute to a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. The reason is this government knows what we know: it knows that this scheme is not going to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is quite prepared to impose the economic cost and the sacrifice on people right across Australia. It is flying blind.

Let us just reflect on the modelling that was done by Treasury. Treasury went through this political exercise: ‘We have got to send this message out there.’ The objective of the exercise was, ‘Let’s go through some modelling so we can send a message out there that the impact is not going to be so bad. It is just going to be a small impact. You can just sort of squeeze it in—softly, softly, don’t worry, she’ll be right.’ Except that is not the case when you start scratching the surface.

We commissioned a peer review of the Treasury modelling and Dr Brian Fisher had a look at it. Dr Brian Fisher asked for access to a whole heap of information, which the government decided to keep secret—but I will get to that in a minute, because it is quite incredibly contemptuous how the Treasurer has handled successive orders of the Senate and legitimate requests by the Senate Select Committee on Fuel and Energy in relation to that information. But this is what Dr Fisher concluded in terms of the Treasury assumptions of its modelling: its international action assumptions are highly optimistic—and I think that has been widely canvassed; the emission-pricing and permit-trading assumptions bias the results toward artificially low costs of mitigation, with Treasury assumptions, ‘which virtually guarantee that the permit prices from the modelling are unrealistically low’ and the electricity sector transformation assumptions appear to underestimate significantly the cost and structural adjustment challenge of moving to a decarbonised electricity generation sector.

In fact, the Treasury modelling assumed there would be an absolute immediate transition, totally ignoring the capital intensity of power generation and completely ignoring the replacement costs and the transitional issues involved with moving from one method of power generation to another. The Treasury modelling assumed that there would be seamless transition. Anybody who knows anything about electricity and power generation knows that there is not going to be any seamless transition should this scheme come into play.

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator O’Brien interjecting—

Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can understand why Senator O’Brien is embarrassed by the scheme that his government has put forward for consideration of the Senate. I can well understand why Senator O’Brien is embarrassed. But the reality is this: we have got before us a scheme that is flawed. We have got before us a scheme that will not make any difference to the global environment. It will not reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It will cost jobs. It will put pressure on the economy. It will put pressure on regional Australia.

Has this government done its homework? Has this government properly assessed what the impact on the economy, on jobs and on regional areas is going to be? No, it has not. Do not take my word for it; do you know what Paul Howes from the AWU said about the Treasury modelling? They are very quiet over there because they know what the answer is. He said it was inadequate. The Treasurer needs to do some more modelling, in particular, given the current global economic downturn and conditions.

Do you know who else said this modelling was inadequate? ACOSS—hardly climate change sceptics or climate change deniers or conservative acolytes. They cannot be accused of doing the bidding of the Liberal Party, surely. ACOSS, AWU and the CFMEU; we had witness after witness that said the Treasury modelling was inadequate and that more modelling was required.

As a committee, we were actually trying to assess and go a bit deeper. We were trying to do the work of the government. As a committee, we wanted to know what the impact was going to be on jobs—not just a fake, flawed modelling assumption that there will be full employment. We wanted to know what the impact was going to be on jobs and we wanted to know what the impact was going to be on regional Australia. So we said to the government that we would like to get access to the underlying information—the model codes, databases and a series of other things.

The Senate Select Committee on Fuel and Energy first wrote to the Treasurer on 8 December 2008. It took the Treasurer nearly three months before he got back to us. Do you know why he got back to us? Because we had given notice of a motion in the Senate ordering him to provide that information. He ignored the first order and came into the chamber with the flimsy excuse that in his view it was not in the public interest for that information to be released and it was about the contractual obligations of the Commonwealth. We got back to him and said that parliamentary privilege overrides the contractual obligations of the Commonwealth—which the government well knows. We went backwards and forwards.

In the end, they claimed commercial harm would be caused to two external consultants they had contracted. We made another order. The committee and the Senate bent over backwards to accommodate the legitimate issues that were raised in relation to commercial harm, insofar as we considered that they were legitimate. We ensured that the information could have been provided in a very confidential way to the Senate committee. Any breach of that confidentiality as per the order would have been a breach of parliamentary privilege and a criminal offence.

Monash University was one of the two external consultants. The Treasurer tried to hide behind the excuse of Monash University to cover up the modelling information that we needed to assess the impact of the government’s flawed scheme on the economy and jobs. But Monash University said, ‘We’re quite happy for you to have it; we’re happy for you to waive confidentiality.’ They wrote to the Treasurer and said, ‘We’re happy to waive confidentiality based on the provisions in that Senate order.’ What would you expect me to do then? Of course I wrote to the Treasurer. We had a good position: an order which requires the government to produce a particular piece of information and the statement from the consultant, Monash University, who provided most of the information that the government was sensitive about. We wrote to the Treasurer on 17 March and said, ‘Please give us the information.’ It was another three months before I got a letter back. Do you know when I got that letter back? The day after I gave notice of another motion. It was hand delivered to my office.

As the chair of a committee of the Senate, I had to wait six months to get information that we legitimately requested from the government. What has the government got to hide when it comes to the impact of its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on the economy, on jobs and on regional Australia? Why is the government not forthcoming in providing the information that it was properly requested to do by a committee of the Senate? Commercial harm was claimed in relation to one aspect of it. But there was a whole range of other information that we asked for—information critically important for us to make a proper judgment about the impact of this scheme on the economy and on jobs. The government was trying to bully us into dealing with it then and there.

The handling of this process by the government has been a farce. Remember the announcement by the Treasurer on 12 February of a new inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics into the choice of an ETS? That was obviously about the battle that was going on between Senator Wong and Minister Ferguson—between the believers and the realists in the cabinet. Those who heeded the comments in January-February, given the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as the Prime Minister kept reminding us at that time, thought perhaps we should have another look at what is being proposed. So on 12 February there was the announcement of a new inquiry. But on 19 February the inquiry was canned. They were all over the place. Then there was the announcement a couple of weeks ago: ‘We are going to delay it by a year.’ Anybody who suggested a year ago that it should be delayed by a year was a heretic, a non-believer, a climate change sceptic. This is beyond a joke. What we have been asked to consider today is a bad scheme and a flawed scheme. It will not reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It will cost jobs. It will put pressure on the economy. It will put pressure on regional Australia. We should not support it if the government forces it to a vote now. We should wait for Copenhagen and see what the rest of the world is doing.

John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk on the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009. Could I say, firstly, that carbon is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is an odourless, colourless, non-toxic gas. I want to make that quite clear. When we talk about carbon, remember that 18 per cent of your body weight is made up of carbon. Everything around us exists with carbon. Without carbon, we would not exist—CO2 is a odourless, colourless, non-toxic gas. When we inhale, Mr Acting Deputy President Bernardi, do you realise that we breathe in about 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide? When we exhale, we exhale 50,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide. I suppose that is an idea: the government could put a tax on breathing and they could call it the ‘breath tax’. Imagine the money they would raise from 21 million Australians breathing. Soil nutritionists refer to carbon as a cycle of life. That is exactly what it is. Without carbon in the soil nothing grows. We need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is food for plants, crops, trees and all the things that grow by photosynthesis. Minister Wong prefers to refer to carbon dioxide as a pollutant. I disagree with that.

What is this whole debate about? What is this whole global issue of carbon dioxide about? It is about whether the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is causing global warming. That is the debate. We know for sure that there is more carbon dioxide in the air now than there was, say, in 1750. Ice samples have proved that. We are running, I think, at about 380 parts per million now and back in 1750 it was around 280 parts per million. History also shows that we have had atmospheric levels of some 2,000 parts per million.

I want to look at a few things here. If the increase in carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is definitely causing temperatures to rise then one thing would be for sure: sea temperatures would be rising. Let us have a look at what Lord Monckton has said in his report, which happened to come across my desk:

Since 2003, some 3300 automated bathythermograph buoys have been deployed throughout the world’s oceans in the ARGO program.

Of course there are thermometers with them, measuring and recording the temperature of the ocean.

These buoys have shown no oceanic warming in the five years since they were deployed, contrary to model predictions that pronounced warming would occur. This result is highly significant, because it is the oceans, far more than the atmosphere, that are the real bell-wether of climatic change. The oceans, some 1100 times denser than the atmosphere, would be expected to take up at least 80% of the excess heat generated by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions: yet, despite continuing rapid increases in emissions, the oceans are not warming at all, and may even be cooling a little.

Surely, with the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, if the theory is right the oceans would be warming. That is not an opinion; those are the tests from those 3,300 thermometers that have been out there since 2003, delivering results.

We would also expect that sea levels would rise. Let us face it: if the theory is that the globe is warming, the first thing we would see is sea levels rising. I would like to talk about a man by the name of Dr Nils-Axel Morner. He is a doctor from Stockholm University and he has been measuring sea levels for 35 years. He has not forecast what is going to happen in the future; he has been out there measuring them in places like the Maldives, which they say is one of the places in the world most threatened by sea level rises. He says the ‘claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud’, because they simply are not. They did rise a couple centimetres over 100 years but then started to reduce their levels again. This is a very good point that Dr Morner makes: if sea levels are rising, the diameter of the earth would increase. He says:

… because if the radius of the Earth increases, because sea level is rising, then immediately the Earth’s rate of rotation would slow down.

That is a fact. I could give Senator O’Brien an example: when an ice skater is doing their performance and they have their hands out wide, when they bring them in they spin faster. It is a physical fact that if the global diameter is increasing it will not rotate as fast. That is not occurring. We are not being reduced to 20 hours a day. There is a second question on it.

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Might as well be, with the rate you blokes are going!

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is that an effect of daylight savings?

John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I take Senator Evans’s interjection, but we will not get onto daylight savings, because that is a real issue that we who live away from the cities do not really enjoy.

I point to the IPCC. The IPCC has done its modelling on the expectation that the globe is warming and sea levels are rising, and that is simply wrong. The sea temperature is not rising, as those 3,300 thermometers have proved since 2003. The global diameter is not increasing. Let us go to the next thing: sea ice, of course. Let us have a look at the sea ice situation. Sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade since the 1970s, according to the British Antarctic Survey. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the world’s ice. While sea ice has been lost in western Antarctica and on the Antarctic Peninsula, sea ice cover over the Ross Sea has increased. So now we are getting the real facts and the truth about the ice. I am saying that there has been a lot of false information presented and the IPCC’s figures are being based on the modelling that CO2 will raise the temperature of the globe. That is where the figures come under question.

What is the government’s plan? The government is bringing in its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Part of that scheme is the emissions trading scheme, and the word ‘trading’ is what we in the Nationals are very afraid of, because when you get a trading scheme what do you have? You have screen jocks, people sitting in front of computers—buyers and sellers. I saw it for years with Australian dollar trading after it was floated. The screen jocks would be there, doing their job, taking their commissions, and the Australian dollar would be going in a very volatile fashion up and down a matter of cents a day as the traders came in buying and selling—and profiteering—on the dealing of the Australian dollar on the foreign exchange markets. Of course, the screen jocks were providing a service and taking their commissions. This word ‘trading’ is the real problem, as it goes in the plan the government is here to bring in.

The National Australia Bank has said that the price of carbon may trade as high as $100 a tonne. The government is obviously fearful of what it is going to trade at, because they have fixed it at $10 a tonne for the first year. We know the government has delayed the introduction of it. Their political plan would be to get an election out of the road before everyone starts losing their jobs. That is why they have delayed it. First it was that if we did not start it next year the world was going to disappear. All of a sudden we can delay it for 12 months and that is not a problem. They are saying, ‘We’ll just wait and try and squeeze an election in before people in the mining industry, people in the agricultural industry, people in the transport industry and all those people start losing their jobs, because they might just have a say at election time.’ That is why it has been delayed for 12 months.

Let’s have a look at what the effect on Australian industry and those jobs will be if the government’s plan comes to fruition. I want to talk specifically about the cement industry. In Australia we produce 10 million tonnes of cement per year and we import two million tonnes as well, so we consume around 12 million tonnes of cement. The cement industry is a big producer of greenhouse gases; in fact, in Australia we produce 0.8 tonnes of greenhouse gas for every tonne of cement that we manufacture, so those 10 million tonnes of cement made here in Australia produce eight million tonnes of greenhouse gas.

Of course, the free permits and discounted permits will disappear as time goes on. Let’s say the cement industry starts off at a 90 per cent discount—very generous. That means that on the eight million tonnes of greenhouse gas they produce they will only have to pay the permit on 8,000. As time goes on and the free permits expire—and if NAB is correct in its predictions that carbon may go to $100 per tonne—for those eight million tonnes of greenhouse gases that the cement industry produces we are looking at $100 per tonne multiplied by eight million. We are looking at an $800 million cost to the cement industry. They will never survive. There are some 15 manufacturing sites around regional Australia employing around 1870 people, let alone the transport and other jobs that rely on that industry. If they are forced out of business then no doubt we will import of our cement from China.

China produces in excess of one billion tonnes of cement per year compared to about 10 million. But there is one catch: when China produces a tonne of cement it produces 1.1 tonnes of greenhouse gases. In Australia we produce 10 million tonnes of cement, producing eight million tonnes of greenhouse gases. Send Australian industry broke, shut down the jobs and we will import cement from China—so the 10 million tonnes they produce in China will produce 11 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. What is the result? The 15 plants are gone, the jobs are gone and we are importing 10 million tonnes of cement. So instead of producing eight million tonnes of greenhouse gases in Australia, we will be producing 11 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in China. How smart is that? This is the point that my colleague Senator Cormann made: if you shift the industries out of Australia, those countries who do not really care about the atmosphere or anything else they are doing, except making money, will take on the jobs and produce more greenhouse gases. The effect on the globe will be worse if that is what you do.

I refer to agricultural industries. They will suffer as well under these costs. ABARE predicts it could cost the dairy industry up to $9,000 per dairy farm. So we will send them broke. What are we going to do: import our fresh milk from China? We have had enough trouble importing food from China recently. Then there is the beef industry. What frightens me is that about 60 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gases are produced through agriculture—around 70 million tonnes. When all the discounts go, when all the costs come on, that will be a $7 billion cost to Australia’s food producers. They cannot suffer that cost. That is where the jobs will go, and there is no doubt that that will happen if this flawed scheme is allowed to proceed.

The aluminium and steel industries are the same as the cement industry—they produce greenhouse gases. Shut them down here and they will move overseas to places like China and India where frankly they do not care. Recently I was talking to a person whose son is currently in China building a power station. He describes it as a 1940s model. The coal that is burnt there is filthy. What is more, China does not care. I am sure that when China, Indonesia and India get to Copenhagen they will play the tune and sing the song and say that everything will be all right but I have little or no confidence that they will be serious about reducing their emissions, because they will be taking over our industries.

Let us move on to the motor vehicle industry. Ford Australia says that the ETS could add millions to its costs and threaten jobs. In a submission to a Senate inquiry it said that additional energy costs would be in the vicinity of millions of dollars. I want to point to those energy costs. I was at Bayswater power station just a few weeks ago in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Bayswater produces 40 per cent of electricity in New South Wales. At Bayswater they pay $350 million per year for the coal supplied to power that plant. Under the emissions trading scheme the cost of that coal will go to $950 million.

Debate interrupted.