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

It is absolutely incumbent upon us to make sure that we have the future of young people at heart and that is the subject I want to talk about today in relation to climate change. As we know, we only have until 2015 for global emissions to peak and then come down or else we face going over the two degrees of warming that will lead to catastrophic climate change.

That would certainly deliver to the next generation a far worse life than the one which we have enjoyed. It is sobering as legislators to realise that we are the first generation of people to hand on to our children a world less robust than the one into which we were born. That is a tragedy that is occurring because of the underpinning ecosystem collapse that we are seeing as a result of habitat loss, climate change, alien invasive species and so on.

The thing about the young people of Australia is that they understand this tragedy better than most adults in the community. In Tasmania, there is an incredible cohort of young people from primary schools, secondary schools and into the senior secondary years who are working very hard to study what is happening with climate change and who go out and try to change people’s attitudes and make changes in their homes and in their communities. I want to particularly talk about some of those schools today. For many years, the Don College in Devonport has had a climate program. Its students have held many events and have also gone to Hobart to look at the CRCs on marine studies and climate change. For example, students have visited the Antarctic CRC to look at the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. At Hellyer College there is a very active group as well. I had breakfast with them just recently to talk about what they are doing at their school.

Recently, some young students from Ulverstone High School, which is along the coast, took it upon themselves, with the support of the school of course, to organise a full day of activities around climate change. They bussed in students from schools right along the north-west coast, including Miandetta Primary School from Devonport, in order to talk to them about what they might be able to do about climate change. At schools such as Latrobe High School and Blackman’s Bay Primary School in the south, there were tree plantings and the students talked about all of the issues associated with ecosystems, climate change and building resilience.

But the school that I particularly want to talk about today is Huonville High School, in the south of Hobart, in the south of the state. Over three years, students at Huonville have conducted a survey on climate change. The students have learnt about the carbon cycle, carbon chemistry; they have looked at alternative energy sources and the ways of reducing the carbon footprint; but, more particularly, they have started this exercise of surveying Tasmanians on the issue of climate change. Over three years, they have surveyed around 1,300 people in the north and the south of the state. Each year, a survey was conducted over three days. The students raised the money to enable this survey to be done. They also travelled to the north-west of the state to look at the wind farms at Woolnorth.

The survey was conducted from 2007 until 20094 and the results are really encouraging. Basically, the students went out and asked people: ‘Were they aware of climate change? Do they think human activity is responsible?’ They asked people when they thought the impacts of climate change would be a major risk to lifestyle. They asked about how quickly something should be done about it. They talked about what lifestyle changes they might have made to reduce the impact of climate change. They talked about the things that people might do to solve the problem. They also asked whether they believed that the process of addressing climate change would end up costing money. The three things that they wanted to emphasise at the end of the survey were that the people of Tasmania are overwhelmingly aware, concerned and already doing a great deal to combat climate change. They indicated that there is a growing trend for people to be aware of climate change but that people are also starting to voice their concern that not enough is being done quickly enough to address it. They concluded by saying that this is too important an issue not to act on or to act too slowly in relation to it.

I have circulated their report titled, The climate is changing to all the whips of the various political parties in the Senate. I will be seeking leave at the end of my contribution in order to table this work so that all senators can be aware of the work being done in schools to raise awareness of climate change but, more particularly, to become aware of the results of this survey. It was developed and conducted in a professional way. It is the first example that I know of where a school has conducted a three-year study that asks people about their views on climate change. It is extremely impressive. We hear a lot about students and what goes on in schools, and I certainly want to be on the record saying that what is going on in Tasmanian schools in relation to the science of climate change and the responses to climate change is very impressive indeed.

The values being exhibited by the students in these schools are ones of intergenerational equity, of generosity and of genuine interest in learning. It is also bringing students to the notion that they must go on with their education. Recently, there was a science competition on the north-west coast of Tasmania and in the south. Several of the projects related to responses to climate change—for example, looking at various designs of blades for wind turbines. There was a young student from Latrobe High School who did some work on that, Sam McCall, who won second prize in the grade 10 section. I am very delighted to see his interest in this area. Right around the state, people were looking at issues such as building resilience in agricultural systems and how we respond to those challenges. It is a very impressive body of work being carried out in Tasmanian schools.

As I indicated at the start, one of the questions the students asked in the survey to which I refer is: ‘What lifestyle changes have you made to reduce the impacts of climate change?’ Whilst the most popular things that people had changed in their lives were things like the amount of electricity they used at home and their use of transport, the least popular climate change action was to move to solar, and that was because of its cost. That is where I want to take this work. The students pointed out that people wanted to take advantage of renewable energy but it was the upfront cost that prohibited them from doing so, which is why the Greens have argued so strongly for a comprehensive and internally consistent framework to roll out renewable energy, to retrofit Australia’s houses and then to move on with the roll-out of renewables. I was distressed to see a big announcement saying:

First Solar today announced a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Chinese government to build a 2 gigawatt solar power plant in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China.

It went on to say:

This major commitment to solar power is a direct result of the progressive energy policies being adopted in China to create a sustainable, long-term market for solar and a low carbon future for China.

The head of the project said:

The project will operate under a feed-in-tariff which will guarantee the pricing of electricity produced by the power plant over a long-term period.

He went on to say:

The Chinese feed-in tariff will be critical to this project. This type of forward-looking government policy is necessary to create a strong solar market and facilitate the construction of a project of this size, which in turn continues to drive the cost of solar electricity closer to ‘grid parity’ where it is competitive with traditional energy sources.

So here we have the announcement of this huge solar plant in China and at the same time, in Australia’s press today, we have Solar Systems going into voluntary administration because it cannot raise the capital to continue the work on a project which the government recognised was an important project for Mildura.

The point here is that China has put in place the legislative framework to encourage private sector investment in the rollout of large scale renewables; Australia has not. It is almost as if the government are determined not to have a gross feed-in tariff in Australia in order to hold back the commercialisation of large-scale renewable energy. I can only assume they are desperate to hold it back because of their huge investment in so-called ‘clean coal’. They have invested billions of dollars in technology which, as Four Corners demonstrated on Monday night, does not have a hope of coming to fruition in the next 20 or 30 years, if ever.

We have a legislative framework in the Senate which can drive this technology. I introduced legislation for a gross feed-in tariff and saw the government and the coalition combine to send it to COAG in order to try to kill it. They succeeded in burying it at COAG. That legislation is still here on the books. Should the minister want to, I am ready to debate and pass it tomorrow, so that we do not experience the hideous collapse they are having at the moment in certain parts of the world. In the US and China, solar is going ahead in leaps and bounds and the country with the greatest source of solar energy, Australia, is going backwards. How can that be the case?

Not only is the government in Australia holding back renewable energy but we have complete hypocrisy from the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts in responding to the threats currently posed to our wildlife and ecosystems. Just recently, Mr Garrett said that, in addressing species—and it is Threatened Species Week this week—we can no longer concentrate on individual species but should be looking at whole ecosystems. At the same time he is saying that there is wholesale logging in Tasmania of ecosystems of native forests and primary forests which, in many cases, have never even seen an axe. They are being clear-felled because there is this ridiculous subsidising of primary forests, while hypocritically giving Indonesia $200 million not to log their forests and subsidising forest companies in Australia to destroy our own.

The Tasmanian government are going from bad to worse, promoting a logging road in the Tarkine in north-west Tasmania, through the largest tract of temperate rainforest in the Southern Hemisphere. It is at the moment and will be in the future one of the greatest attractions in the north-west. It will underpin the economy in the north-west because it will give substance to the claim that this is an area of great natural beauty, fantastic forests and great opportunities. And here we have the Tasmanian government prepared to spend $23 million to destroy that area while not having the money to build a new hospital. These are really warped priorities when you see this preference for destroying ecosystems. It is critically important because this road will open up the area to road kill for the Tasmanian devil. We have major projects now trying to save the devil because of devil facial tumour disease. This area has the only devils at the moment showing any genetic resistance to the disease and the Tasmanian government are going to open it up to possible death by road kill for the devils. It is just madness and ought not be allowed. I would certainly encourage everyone out there, the minute this is referred to the federal minister, under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, to say, ‘This is an unacceptable project. Stop it immediately!’ There is no point spending a fortune on research on devil facial tumour disease while opening up a whole new area to possible death by road kill.

At the same time people should be cognisant of the fact that through this Senate we have the renewable energy target which will allow the burning of Tasmanian native forest woodchips in furnaces at Gunn’s pulp mill in the southern forest. This is outrageous. If we are going to address climate change, we have to protect ecosystems and forests. We have to protect our species, particularly our native species in Tasmania. We are not seeing that happening. At least I have faith in young people. As I indicated before, I have circulated previously to the whip the report from Huonville High School The climate is changing: why don’t you report. I seek leave to table that report.

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