Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and associated bills. At the outset I want to say that I think the names for these bills are wrong. The word ‘tax’ does not appear in the title of these bills and I believe it should be a fundamental word that is included. It seems to suggest that there is no additional cost or burden to the taxpayers of Australia, yet that is exactly where the cost burden will be felt most.

Some fine speeches have been made in this chamber in relation to these bills, yet the media commentary surrounding these great speeches has been one of trying to create a perception of division. This perception of division could not be further from the truth because we are voting on a suite of legislation that has been rejected already by the coalition. We reject the current suite of legislation that exists before the chamber represented by these 11 bills. My colleagues in the House of Representatives last week—on Monday, I believe—rejected every single piece of this legislation that has now come to this chamber. Some of our senators have been pilloried in the press for rejecting and wishing to vote against the current set of legislation. It is a suite of legislation that we do not support. Until such time that we have additional legislation in this chamber to vote upon, that is exactly the course of action that the coalition will be taking. It appears to be a united, unanimous point of view that we do not support the current Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills of 2009. They are flawed and full of mistakes.

I particularly found the comments of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in question time on Thursday last week disturbing. The Prime Minister attempted to link a one-day spike in temperature in the city of Adelaide as something that was a result of global warming and climate change. He used the emotive issue of a one-day spike in temperature. Whilst being a record—and records are being more closely monitored now than they have ever been monitored—it does not give any confirmed or proper evidence of climate change in Australia’s environment. When you start to link emotive things that people can get a tangible hold of to a very complex debate, you are doing two things: firstly, the Prime Minister is trying to belittle the intelligence of the community by linking an emotive event to a very complex suite of legislation; secondly, the Prime Minister is trying to be fraudulent in representing the real issues of the climate debate.

Many speakers have spoken far more eloquently and technically than I will in relation to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation, but one common theme exists. The legislation is being introduced basically to allow the Prime Minister to attend a conference, which is becoming less and less likely to be a successful conference, and to strut his ego on the world stage. It has very little to do with science and very little to do with assisting Australia. It has a lot to do with perception. The perception, unfortunately, has taken over and reality is not manifest throughout the debate.

I think my colleague Senator Brett Mason summed it up exceptionally well with his speech. The pertinent lines in Senator Mason’s speech indicated the fact that the debate we are having in this chamber is not about several things. He said that it is not about whether the earth is warming or whether it is cooling or what people believe. That is not what this debate is about; this debate has nothing to do with that. He said it is not about who is to blame for climate change, if climate change exists—are they natural cycles? He indicated that the debate is not about those issues. He also indicated that the debate is not about whether we need a trading scheme, a tax or whatever. This debate is about, purely, a suite of legislation currently before the chamber that we in opposition do not support.

The other speech I particularly want to highlight as well is the speech Senator Nick Minchin made in this chamber, an outstanding speech in my view. Again, the media have misreported the context of the speech. Senator Minchin’s speech expressed some very good and strong personal views, but he expressed the position of the coalition that we will not support this legislation. It is terrible legislation. If it were good legislation we would not be seeking to amend it. That is the first issue. If it were good legislation we would have passed it and we would not have sought to amend it. We have sought to amend it and, as of that cause, we will not be supporting the existing legislation as it stands, so if no amendments become apparent there will be no support for the legislation. That is quite clear and is exactly what Senator Minchin portrayed to this chamber and to the nation, yet somehow the confusion comes out in the media that there is great division. I did not see great division. I saw absolute unity on opposing the legislation that we are debating. That the media cannot even report it accurately shows how complex it is.

Senator Minchin also indicated—and this comes to the crux of the matter—the whole process of managing the introduction of this legislation and the implementation date of this legislation is all designed around one thing. The government could have introduced it a lot earlier and negotiations probably could have been completed a lot earlier. There are a number of things that point to this legislation as being purely a way of creating an opportunity for the Prime Minister of Australia to do two things. Senator Minchin summed it up quite well when he said:

Frankly, the timing of this debate is also testament to the vanity of Prime Minister Rudd. Right on the eve of the Copenhagen conference, Mr Rudd is determined to have this Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill … passed so that he can strut the stage in Denmark …

That is the first issue. The second part, though, is that the Prime Minister wants to have up his sleeve a double dissolution trigger that will be of reasonable significance, and that is what he is trying to do. The timing of this points to that and to no other reason. It does not point to any crucial live start-up date. I do not think a start-up date of 1 July 2011—not I July 2010—is a credible reason for rushing this legislation through in the remaining four days of this sitting year. A calendar for this year was introduced late in 2008 to set the weeks and the sitting pattern for this year, and again we have come down to the final four days. As the government did in 2008, so they are doing again in 2009. They are not managing the effective timing of legislation through this chamber.

One wonders why the sitting schedule has been reduced in the number of weeks. Is it so the government can get controversial, serious, heavy legislation rammed through the parliament in the last four days of its life for this year? Is that the true motive? Do the government not want to be called to account for more than the 14 sitting weeks, in effect, that the Senate will sit for this year? Next year they are going to do the same, despite warnings from the Greens, the Independents and certainly us that they are not sitting enough hours or weeks. You cannot expect at the end of a calendar year to be able to say to parliament: ‘Hang on, we’ve got this piece of legislation that we think we want to rush through the parliament. It’s very complex. There’ll be very complex amendments if amendments are agreed to. We want you to consider them in the last three days.’ That is just outrageous, given the government have a sitting schedule that could have been a lot longer and a lot healthier.

The government know that life outside of this parliament does exist. Senators and members make commitments outside of this firm sitting schedule and the government know that to extend hours is a very difficult thing to do at short notice. This is why the government have left it to the death knock to let this legislation come in. It is the absolute death knock for this to arrive in this chamber and for us to fully debate it. Also, we are debating the legislation currently, so if amendments are forthcoming from the current negotiations it is going to be hard for us to digest the information and then debate it in such a short period of time. But the government have been placed on notice—they were placed on notice earlier this year, they were placed on notice last year and they have been placed on notice again for next year’s sitting schedule—so we do not get a repeat of these matters.

I also want to raise some questions about new information that seems to have come to light in recent times which probably bears testimony as to why we should not be rushing this. I am looking at reports in the media, and I stress they are allegations and the veracity of the alleged emails has not been confirmed. But this has made national and international media in recent days. The reports are in relation to the hackers that have broken into the leading climate change science research centre in Britain. Documents have been leaked going back some years. Some of these documents, if they are found to be true, just raise further questions which, if I were the Prime Minister of this country and found that there was some veracity to those documents—and I will go through them in a moment—or even if they were just reported, would mean that I would want to hold off a bit. I would want to cool off a bit before I charged off to Copenhagen or put monumental legislation to this parliament.

Again I stress this is reported in the media and there is no firm evidence that this is correct; however, enough media outlets seem to have taken up the charge and the baton. Some of the issues that have come out of the hacking are that there appears to be a widely divergent range of views about climate change. Scientists appear to be, through the emails, frustrated at trying to find evidence to prove man-made climate change. I am not suggesting that any of these reports are accurate. I am just saying this has been raised and is worthy of further exploration. One leading climatologist who supports the theory of man-made climate change, Dr Kevin Trenberth from the US Centre for Atmospheric Research, says in one of the emails:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.

Reports say:

Sceptics say the emails are evidence of a conspiracy …

I do not know whether that is the case or not; I am not suggesting that. Reports say:

… some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

So the theme from these emails is that scientists are having difficulty proving that climate change ‘is largely being caused by the actions of mankind’. The reports go on:

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

So there is an indication there has been some temperature decline. Again, it just needs further exploration and examination before we rush into what is monumental legislation that is very difficult for us to comprehend. But the ultimate effects of this legislation are such that it would be too late if all of a sudden we found out next year the whole thing has been a hoax. So I think further examination is required.

Others have been claiming that scientists are trying to bully into submission colleagues who challenge the theory of man-made climate change, and some of these emails refer directly to the debate in Australia. I think that caution is required on this very significant debate. We are asked to just rush through a debate that a government is leading, with or without amendments. The government is leading this debate. It is not going to hurt the government to slow down one iota and say, ‘We’ve got some serious consideration for a variety of reasons’—not to mention the time frame we have been asked to consider it in. There is the time frame in relation to other material that keeps coming forward.

On top of that, we find that other countries around the world, particularly the United States—the Senate—and Canada, have now decided that they are going to wait. They are doing the prudent thing. Their governments will look at delaying and waiting till after the gathering at Copenhagen, which is not an unrealistic expectation. It is a sensible outcome when you have every country going to Copenhagen to make a decision to collaborate and agree—or even disagree—and to go with a position placed on the table and seek some form of international outcome. Why would Australia go, cap in hand, with a fixed set of legislation that may even be required to be amended when the government returns from those discussions? It does not make sense. It has never made sense that you would not wait until after you have a discussion.

Most legislation that comes before the Australian parliament does so because there is consideration of the facts and the material is analysed. Legislation is developed to either fix a problem—remedy a situation—or create new issues. All of that is done in the consideration of all the facts that are on the table. If you were moving legislation in relation to other sectors or industries and you knew there was a major conference or gathering of all the experts on the particular legislation that you were putting forward, surely you would wait and get all the facts on the table. Then you would say, ‘Let’s design our legislation around what we know to be the views of other countries, especially when we are not a major player.’

Colleague after colleague after colleague has got up in this chamber and stated the obvious: with 1.4 per cent of global emissions produced by this country, our behaviour would have no prospect of changing the world’s behaviour and does not affect the planet to a significant degree. Yes, let us be worldly wise, let us be a community partner and let us do our bit. But it has been suggested—and I find it hard not to believe—that, by doing our bit in Australia, where we only produce 1.4 per cent of global emissions, we are promoting more serious global emissions in other countries. If they took up where our industries could not compete, we would end up with industries polluting to a far greater degree and emitting far more seriously than Australia does. So on the global front we are not going to be assisting the global emission rate at all. In fact, we could be seriously colluding to actually increase global emissions by removing manufacturing industries from this country under the current legislation before this parliament, and that would be a great travesty for the world. If we are really serious about climate change and that is a factor, and if we are serious about emissions into the atmosphere, that alone should deter us from going down this path, because we could be increasing the gases that are potentially or allegedly causing problems to our planet. That is the main reason.

On top of that, if we do that, at the same time as not really helping the planet and maybe making the planet worse, we are going to remove jobs. We are going to make Australian families and workers less competitive. They will lose their jobs. There will be inflation because of all the carry-on effects of this legislation. So (a) we are not going to help the planet and (b) we are going to make life harder for good working Australians.

So why do we do this? What is the logic behind this? I come back to some of my opening remarks. The logic must only be that the government want to wedge us in some way, shape or form and to rush to Copenhagen. They feel as though they can cause a problem for us by seeing that we are debating against these bills quite vigorously because we know they are flawed. They see an opportunity to create a double dissolution trigger; otherwise, this legislation could have been reintroduced a bit earlier. In fact, I understand they nearly made a mistake in the House of Representatives and introduced this bill a couple of days too early. Then they realised they could not, so they had to delay the introduction into the Senate even though it was on the way to completion in the House of Representatives.

So this really all points to a duplicitous Prime Minister saying one thing, really wanting to do something else and not really doing it in the interests of Australia. Maybe the rumours are true: maybe the Prime Minister does want to become the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and maybe that is his grand agenda. I do not know; that is a rumour. When he is sitting in New York in the United Nations chamber as Secretary-General, he really will not worry about what Australians are paying back in Australia for the mess he has left us in.

I reiterate—and I hope the media get this correct—that we are voting unanimously and are united against these 11 bills that are currently before this parliament and this Senate. We did that in the House of Representatives; we are doing it here. Our speeches have all reflected that we are voting against the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills, the 11 bills presented to the parliament, which we do not want to see implemented for the benefit of the planet. They will not assist the planet and they will certainly not help our country.

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

I rise to speak on the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] put forward by the Rudd government. I commence by looking at the term in it. My colleague Senator Parry has said he cannot see the word ‘tax’ anywhere, and perhaps ‘tax’ should be in it. It is called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, but carbon is not a pollutant. In fact, 70 per cent of the food we eat is carbon. So, under the title of this legislation, when you have your evening meal tonight enjoy it, because it is 70 per cent pollution that you will be eating under what is proposed here. I have in front of me the original list of hazardous air pollutants—173 pollutants are listed. There is carbon disulphide and carbon tetrachloride. There is no ‘carbon’ or ‘carbon dioxide’ mentioned there. So I say the title of this scheme is a furphy in itself.

Carbon is essential to life: 18 per cent of our bodyweight is carbon; carbon dioxide is food for our plants. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we do not have anything green. Crops, trees, plants and grasses are destroyed without carbon dioxide. Everything around us contains carbon, yet the title of this legislation is about carbon pollution. That is wrong, and the word ‘pollution’ should be removed from it. If the government want to call it the carbon dioxide reduction scheme, so be it, but it is not a carbon pollution reduction scheme because carbon is not a pollutant.

We can see how the climate has changed. The climate has been changing for millions of years. The climate has been changing over time since day 1. We have been in and out of many ice ages. All of a sudden we now have some people pushing an agenda and saying that they are going to control the climate. I find that simply amazing. People say: ‘It’s climate change that caused the droughts in many parts of New South Wales since early 2002. They were caused by the coal fired generators producing electricity and by the exhaust fumes from motor vehicles and other transport, trucks, tractors et cetera.’ Well, I question what caused the 12-year drought in western New South Wales from 1895 to 1907. There were not coal fired power generators in those days and there were very few motor vehicles, yet the droughts ran on. As Dorothea Mackellar said, in Australia we are in a land ‘Of droughts and flooding rains’. Just last week we heard the Prime Minister talking about climate change, global warming and how hot it has been in Adelaide, making records, but he did not mention that at the same time in Perth it was 19 degrees and raining. Yesterday I was interested to hear, when listening to Macca on Australia All Over, that they were talking about how 12 months ago yesterday it was snowing in Gundagai. But that does not get a mention. They only talk about the hot days; they do not talk about the cold days.

I intend to bring some common sense into this debate. I refer to the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, when she said, ‘We must act now. It is vital to save the earth, to save the planet.’ On 27 March 2009 in an address to the International Peace Institute in New York, Minister Wong said:

And we have reached a point where action is needed, and needed now, while we still have an opportunity to act.

So what have the government done? They have delayed it for 12 months. What irony! What hypocrisy! Minister Wong said in March in New York that we must act now, but then she said: ‘Oh no, we are going to put it off for 12 months. We will put it off and introduce it on 1 July 2011.’ Why is that?

Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Boswell interjecting—

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

Aha! My colleague Senator Boswell has mentioned the word ‘election’. It is because the government know for sure that they can have an election prior to Australia’s commencement of pain—when people start to suffer the costs, when people’s jobs will be threatened et cetera. So I question how committed the government are to acting now when they have gone into delay tactics.

Let me talk about the science. We hear of the scientists who say that the globe is definitely warming as a result of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are well aware that there is more carbon dioxide—280 parts per million in the year 1750 having now risen to 380 parts per million in the year 2009. There is no question about that. Ice samples certainly prove it. The question is: are those extra levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing the globe to warm? That is the question here. I want to refer to one of the leading German scientists, a Professor Latif, who is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is a recipient of several international climate study prizes and a lead author of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change. He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously. But in Geneva in September this year at the UN’s world climate conference, an annual gathering of the so-called scientific consensus on man-made climate change, Professor Latif conceded that the earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering into one or two decades during which the temperatures will cool, so he is flip-flopping all over the place. This is one of the leading scientists, one of the advisors to the IPCC, and he is saying that the climate has not warmed for around a decade and that we are going to have 10 to 20 years of cooling.

I find that quite amazing when we look back at other scientific facts and real issues, such as the River Thames freezing in the mini ice age. From the 1400s to the late 1800s in the 19th century it was not uncommon for the River Thames in London to freeze over. So why, at the start of the 1900s, did the Thames stop freezing? To me that is quite a logical, sensible question to ask. Why did the Thames stop freezing at the start of the 1900s? We know that there were not coal fired power generators. There were not Boeing 747 jets. There were not V8 Falcons and V12 Jags with members of the London population in them chucking donuts around Trafalgar Square or anything like that—this was the early 1900s. So why did the climate warm and why did the Thames stop freezing over when the CO2 levels were obviously not rising? The reason is climate change—climate change that we have had for millions of years. And, no matter what we do, we will never change, alter, prevent or do anything to stop nature running its course. That is the fact of the matter.

We have the argument about sea levels. It is quite amazing how at the centre of Australia you can find seashells. Obviously at some stage that land was under water. Yet we know that thousands of years ago the sea levels were so low that the Indigenous people travelled from Indonesia to the mainland of Australia and to Tasmania. That is a variation that we know of over thousands and thousands of years. But do not worry about it; it is going to rise by a couple of metres by the end of the century, according to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, and he will control it. What people are saying is just outrageous. He will not control it. Nature will run its course and climate change will go on forever.

So what is our solution to this? This is the government’s solution. For a start, they are going to impose a tax on our electricity industry. Everyone in Australia will pay, but the government will compensate some because they will get a fair bit of money from the permits they sell and they can distribute that to the pensioners and low-income earners for the tax they put on our industries. Let us look at some of the taxes we are going to suffer. They include energy, fuel, transport and food processing—costs on virtually everything. As my colleague Senator Joyce has made quite clear to the Australian people over months, Mr Rudd and his tax will be in every part of your life. Whether you are eating at home or travelling around on holidays, no matter where you go you will be taxed.

What is the result of that? We know the threat exists to shift our industries overseas—industries such as cement which will not survive in Australia because of this tax. We know that jobs are going to go. We know coalmines are going to close down. This is a cost that Australians must realise is going to happen if this emissions trading scheme proceeds. I raise a point that I think is vital to this whole debate. We know about inflation. We have heard about the ‘genie in the bottle’. Inflation is a situation where demand exceeds supply. As a result of demand exceeding supply, prices rise, and the amount the prices rise determines the inflation rate. I remember the criticism of Mr Keating when the Howard government had the courage to introduce a goods and services tax to give some proper funding to the states and territories of this nation: it was going to be a ‘monster tax’. In fact, it was a replacement tax.

The funds flowed to the states, but if we want to go the way of spending the money perhaps we could refer to Premier Nathan Rees, if my colleagues would like—we could go down that road with pleasure. But what do we have here? We have a new tax. The price of everything will rise. The price of electricity, the price of food, the price of transport, the price of travel—everything is going to go up. When those figures read into the inflation figures, my question is how much the Reserve Bank will raise interest rates. They run hand in hand: higher price rises and higher inflation rates mean higher interest rates to slow the economy. The last thing that we want in this nation at the moment is another rise in interest rates; we are already getting enough of those because the government will not wind back its spending. There is too much money in the economy, according to the Reserve Bank, and the government is continuing on its borrowing-and-spending spree and is, hence, responsible for the rise we have had so far.

So the emissions trading scheme is going to give us higher inflation rates and, obviously, higher interest rates. Then we go on to the higher Australian dollar, which also runs hand in hand. Every time the dollar goes up a cent it wipes hundreds of millions of dollars off the nation’s income from exports. These are the ramifications that are going to result from this emissions trading scheme. But of course it will save the world. I will get to that in a minute. I just want to point to the serious parts of this emissions trading scheme. The serious parts are the cost to industry, the cost to households, the cost of doing business and remaining competitive in international markets and, of course, the interest rate rises that will put the pain on the battlers—the ones who are having a go—in Australia. They are the ones who suffer the most from higher interest rates.

Then the government propose to have a scheme where the price of carbon will be set on the stock market. It will trade around the world. I just mentioned the Australian dollar. We have the Australian dollar trading around the world, and in the last 12 months we have seen it go from 60c to 93c. That is the dealers trading it up. I had five years trading on the foreign exchange market during a time in my life I wished I had not been in a foreign currency loan. It was in Swiss francs. It is the dealers who trade the exchange rates up with positive sentiment, so we know exactly what the Australian dollar is doing. The dealers are trading it up, because as interest rates go up in Australia the differential between US and Australian interest rates gets wider and, hence, those overseas see an opportunity to make a bit of extra money. The sentiment in the market is positive.

We are going to do this with carbon. We are going to have a situation where the cost of running your household or the cost of running your business will depend on the dealers in stock markets all around the world. To me this is outrageous. Already the exchange rates cost Australia enough when it trades up. Now they are going to give us a double whammy; the cost of doing business in Australia will be determined by the dealers on the stock markets. We have already had reports from National Australia Bank saying the price of carbon could trade as high as $100 a tonne.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whoa. Really?

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

That is what their quotes are, Senator McGauran. Let us have a look at the costs that we are going to put on our industries. I refer to Macquarie Generation. Macquarie Generation run the Liddell and Bayswater power stations, as I am sure Senator Forshaw is familiar with. In the first year, at $10 a tonne—and we know the government has fixed the price at $10 a tonne because it is going to go a lot higher—Macquarie Generation will have to buy 25 million permits. That is $250 million for Macquarie Generation. The only one who is going to be jubilant about that will be the bank. What industry—especially a government owned facility in New South Wales—would have a spare $250 million in their hip pocket? No, they will have to go borrow that and pass the cost on to consumers. In the second year, if carbon is at $25 a tonne Macquarie Generation will have to buy $625 million worth of permits. The federal government will welcome the money. That will be great—money in the kick for the feds—but look at the cost to the people of New South Wales.

The question will be what it will do. The answer is that it will not do anything at all. The reason is that Australia produces 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases. I will give some facts. If the rest of the world’s emissions remain the same till the year 2020 and we reduce ours by 20 per cent, instead of producing 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases it will produce 1.12 per cent. To hope the rest of the world, including China, India and those growing countries, will stay the same is being very optimistic in itself, but when we reduce ours by 20 per cent at a cost of $120 billion or $200 billion—whatever the cost is, depending on the price of carbon by the year 2020—what we are going to do is reduce the carbon dioxide levels around the globe from 380 parts per million to 379 parts per million. One part per million is what the $200 billion tax is going to mean for the whole global atmosphere.

One part per million—how can I describe that? Imagine if we had a huge tub out on the floor down there and that big tub had one million $1 coins in it and we took one coin out of it: that is the difference it is going to make—absolutely nothing. But it is going to cost a swag of jobs, it is going to cost industry a fortune and it is going to cost the Australian people a tremendous amount of money. We all know that; it is going to cost high interest rates and put a cost through our economy that we simply cannot afford, especially at this time of the economic cycle. And we are going to take one $1 coin out of that tub of one million coins. To me that is just plain stupidity, but this is the proposal coming up.

This is why the National Party have opposed this from day 1. We know that regional Australia will cop the most. Even though agriculture is excluded, we know regional Australia will cop the biggest one because agriculture will still have to pay for the extra costs on electricity, fertiliser, chemicals, freight and transport. Even though they are being excluded on the debit side as far as greenhouse gases with the ruminants go, it is still going to cost agriculture a fortune—and to achieve what? If we were serious about looking after our environment, we would be looking at carbon sequestration in the soil, building our soil better. I wish people could go out to Northparkes Mine and see the job that Geoff McCallum has done there.

If we were serious we would start managing our national parks and get grazing in there. The best way to reduce the fire fuel levels is by stock grazing those national parks. But, no, we will not do that. It is just amazing that for every bushfire there is around 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare, so what did it cost us in the 450,000 hectares of the terrible fires on Black Saturday? About nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide, about double what Australia produces in a year just in the bushfires of those days, not to mention the Canberra bushfires. If the government were serious they would get serious about managing the environment.

There is a lot about this whole plan that has been put forward that I find quite amazing. The government’s chief adviser, Professor Garnaut, is not a scientist; he is an economist. Why would you rely on someone who is an economist to give you all this information and detail on a scientific issue? That is simply unbelievable.

I move the second reading amendment standing in my name on sheet 6016:

At the end of the motion, add:

and further consideration of the bills, which will impose the single largest structural change to the Australian economy, be made an order of the day for the first sitting day after:

        (a)    the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit has concluded; and

        (b)    the United States Senate has clarified its position by finally voting on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the Waxman-Markey bill).

We think that this is just a way for the government to collect money. This is not about global climate change; it is about global taxation and global control. That is why we will never support it. I thank the Senate for its time.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate my colleague Senator Williams on a well-presented piece. I rise to support all my colleagues on this side of the chamber on what are momentous and controversial bills, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and related bills. As all speakers have said, the bills place a tax on carbon, where industry must purchase permits to be able to operate. In the first year, the government tell us that they will cap it at $10 per tonne and then in the second year it will be opened up to the full market, and it is estimated it will be as high as $40 per tonne. I heard Senator Williams say that some of the estimates are even higher than that—we do not know for sure; it will be open to the market. But we do know that $40 per tonne is really what we are basing our objection on. Any more than that and you reach a really devastating situation. While the government tell us there will be compensation distributed and paid out to certain trade affected industries, it is on a sliding scale over five years. It is a transition payment, if you like, and only a transition payment.

This is a very complex piece of legislation, and it is not yet properly completed. The devil is in the detail of this legislation, and we have yet to see the detail of this legislation. I will not be voting for these bills—the emissions trading scheme—in any shape or form until there is an international agreement that is indeed active. I should add to that: in place and active. I have the firmest conviction that these bills are not in the national interest. We often see bad bills come into this parliament, at least from our perspective, and we have seen the effect of bad bills that have not been stopped in this parliament. These bills are worse than bad: they are a hoax. They are pulling a hoax on the parliament and the Australian people. Moreover, it is the rural and regional areas in Australia, as my colleagues have previously said, that will be the most adversely affected. This has been my base constituency since being first elected to the parliament. I give evidence to that claim from a well-presented report by the Senate Select Committee on Fuel and Energy on the economic and environmental costs of the government’s CPRS scheme. It is a very good report. Frontier Economics, who were commissioned by the New South Wales government, tell us from the report that modelling has found that the impact on rural and regional areas will set them back by 20 per cent over 20 years. It is not as if they are going to go forward; they will go backwards over 20 years. That same report then refers to the Australian Local Government Association’s State of the regions report which comes to the exact same conclusion—that rural and regional areas will face a double effect if this bill is passed.

So I believe my stance does carry very strong electoral support, in particular in rural and regional areas. Where my view is not carried, I am willing to put and argue my case and beliefs. After all, that is our first duty as elected representatives. That is what we come into this parliament with—the ideal of public service and reflecting our constituency, who have entrusted us and elected us to speak for them up here. That is the essence of the oath of office we take in this place. When it comes to the crunch, is that not the responsibility of every representative? At some point, the politics stops and the principle begins, and this is one such occasion.

Having said that, I am also very mindful of the need from time to time to be pragmatic in politics. It is necessary and proper to be able to weld the many views that make up this parliament, but there will always be a line drawn in public life, and indeed in any sphere of life, and this is a line I cannot cross. For me to cross it would forever dull my conscience and, if I may say, I have always striven to keep my conscience very sharp in politics. I think after all this time I will continue to do so and I will see it to the finish.

As every one of my colleagues has said, this is a momentous piece of legislation, but we have to ask: what is the government’s view on this, outside of what the Prime Minister and his ministers have said? What is the view of the other side in this debate? We have not heard anyone other than three speakers. We have put up 35; the other side to date have put up three speakers. Why aren’t their backbenchers coming forward and debating the case? They have just left it to the frontbench, and I see one from New South Wales sitting over there, very hushed now. He did not mind throwing in a few objections at the beginning of other people’s speeches, but why wouldn’t someone like Senator Forshaw stand up and give his point of view and debate the matter? Is it that he is not up to it? No, Senator Forshaw is up to it. Some of them are not up to it, I should add. Are they cowards? Well, most of them are but Senator Forshaw is not. Are they under the Prime Minister’s instruction—the gag? Yes, all of them are. Three of them have had the courage to stand up and give their point of view. I do not agree with it. Senator Furner was agonising. It was sad, actually, what he had to say, but at least he got up. He ran the old line that the Barrier Reef is going to be destroyed. I do not think time permits me to tackle that issue. I did on Thursday night.

Who else got up? Senator Lundy got up. It is very easy for someone from the ACT to get up and talk about the issue, but I think I would prefer to rely on Senator Humphries, as I turn around and see Senator Humphries from the ACT. As I say, I would prefer to rely on Senator Humphries’s contribution than Senator Lundy’s. Then there was Senator McEwen—good old Senator McEwen. She focused on the link between bushfires and climate change. What an absurd link that is. Not even the $100 million plus Victorian royal commission came up with that link. Why don’t you try something like the link between the state government’s management of those forests and those bushfires? But as I stand up as a Victorian—

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

Senator Forshaw interjecting—

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sorry?

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

Senator Forshaw interjecting—

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a Victorian, I stand up.

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

Do you?

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, and Victoria will be greatly affected by this. Anyone who lives in the Latrobe Valley knows that only too well—and the state government knows it only too well. It has been lobbying the federal government very heavily. So I would say, at the very least: where are the Victorian senators on this matter? Where is Senator Collins on this matter? She had some pretty big shoes to fill, I would say, replacing Senator Ray. This is her second time around. She is not up to this debate. She does not have her name on this debate. Is she representing the Latrobe Valley workers or not? I really think, watching Senator Collins, she does not have her heart in her second term on this matter at all.

What about Senator Conroy? He has just come back from somewhere. He was absent. He will not speak up because the truth of the matter is everyone knows he is one of the greatest sceptics next to Minister Ferguson.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Nash interjecting—

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, he would have to tell the truth. He is not that big a liar, is he? He would have to tell the truth. He and Minister Ferguson are the biggest sceptics—

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McGauran, I would just ask you to reflect on your inferences on senators in this place, please.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw it if I was reflecting on Senator Conroy. I believe that, if he stood up, he would have to have told the truth, as he would. Senator Marshall is a Victorian who, I would say, to give him a compliment, has actually blossomed in government. He is never short of a word. He always manages to get up on the most trivial pieces of legislation and rant and rave, but when it comes to the big stuff he has gone missing. Senator Marshall loves a debate but he has gone missing. Am I missing someone else? Let me just get out the list, because the Victorian senators are so obscure, I must admit. There is Senator Feeney, a great academic.

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

Madam Acting Deputy President, I rise on a point of order. I know that senators are allowed to range widely in their second reading debate speeches, but I would ask you to draw Senator McGauran back to the legislation that he is speaking to. We do not need a rollcall of the senators from Senator McGauran.

The Acting Deputy President:

There is no point of order, Senator Forshaw.

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

On that point of order, Madam Acting Deputy President, Senator McGauran is very clearly speaking to the legislation and all of the comments he has made very clearly are highly relevant to the legislation before the Senate.

The Acting Deputy President:

Senator Cormann, I had said there was no point of order. I thank you for your assistance, but I had ruled there was no point of order. Senator McGauran, please continue.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to assure the chair I have done deep research into this matter. Look: I have book after book, and scientific modelling. I have really come well and truly prepared, but what has got under my skin—and I have wasted more than 10 minutes on it—is, lo and behold, the Victorian senators and what a useless mob they are.

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

Labor senators.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor senators, of course. Who would think otherwise? Rest assured, I have come to debate this issue: the politics of it, the science of it and, more so, the public representation of it. Everyone should be involved in this debate. Any Victorian senator worth their salt would stand up on this issue and this legislation. As I said, it is the greatest hoax of all and Victoria is probably going to suffer more than any state—let alone at the farm gates—because of the brown coal industry. I hear a Western Australian interject and rightly so. Everyone knows their economies are going to be devastated. Everyone is in here to represent their states. For once, can the Senate be a state representative body on the other side? At least get up and defend your case. I grew up in the Latrobe Valley coal mining district. It is my home district.

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

Where is your office now?

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, I had an office in Moe at one time. I am down to eight minutes, Senator; could you please? I have spent so long doing the research on this and I want to make this point. Having grown up in the Latrobe Valley, I learnt one thing very early: that a job is the cornerstone of people’s lives. This is for all the knock-on reasons that you know only too well over there—for personal reasons, for family reasons, for local community reasons and for the opportunity it brings to people. To strip away the chance to keep your job in the Latrobe Valley alone, a Labor area to its bootlaces, and to not even get up and explain why you are doing it—for absolutely meaningless reasons, as every speaker has properly pointed out—is a travesty.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Shame!

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a shame, a disgrace and a contravention of your own office. The Labor Party have now completed the whole circle. They have completely moved away from their working class roots. Not even the three speakers—there were only three of them—that bothered to get up mentioned the effect on jobs.

Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They don’t care about blue collar workers.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They don’t care about blue collar workers. They have studiously avoided how this legislation will affect the jobs of their constituency—let alone all Australians, industry or the economy at large—and, in a micro sense, how it will affect the jobs of those in the Latrobe Valley who work in those power stations and who have given loyalty to the Labor Party over so many years.

I always recall the Prime Minister, when he first came into office, saying that Gough Whitlam was his political hero. This sent a chill down my spine. But he was not kidding; he was serious. The apprentice has now truly surpassed the master. This is more destructive and more incompetent than any Khemlani affair. It is a bill that has no good intentions other than to meet the politics of the day of the Prime Minister. You were all cowed by that. Will you commit to at least standing up for five minutes? We are willing to make way on the list for you, Senator Forshaw. You are an intelligent man. You read books, you know science very well and we hear you pontificating on so many other issues. Just stand up and tell us why you will not defend this legislation, particularly in New South Wales?

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

I would rather listen to you talking about me.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Where are the unions when it comes to jobs? Where are the unions on the issue of defending the workers’ jobs? We know jobs will be lost in the aluminium industry, we know jobs will be lost at BlueScope Steel in Port Kembla, we know jobs will be lost at Caltex, we know jobs will be lost at Xstrata and we know jobs will be lost at Ford—it is all listed and you can test their claims. We have tested their claims and they are absolutely correct. All these jobs are going to be lost.

You have got no responsibility. You have just proven it. You love the power of government more than the responsibility of public life. After all these years at least you are someone who could stand up there and debate this issue. Maybe some of the new senators have not got the courage to stand up to the government but what have you got to lose, Senator Forshaw? Why don’t you place public service and your public oath ahead of the power of government? You will not. You enjoy being in government too much. You are cowed from the top down and we are now seeing it on one of the most important pieces of legislation. Just as the unions have been bought off on the Fair Work Act, in the end you will not stand up for workers on this bill.

The government has willingly entangled itself with the extreme end of this debate. What it thought was good politics in 2007—and it may well have been—is not good politics now, in 2009. You have put yourself in the hands of Professor Garnaut, who I heard Senator Williams mention. What a joke his report was, suggesting that we ought to replace cattle with kangaroos. That is his credibility. I know Tim Flannery declared that Adelaide was going to run out of water last year. You have put yourself into the hands of these people. You are at the extreme end. Professor Stein, who is one of the people who kicked off this whole debate as the senior adviser in England, has been shunted aside after he suggested that we all ought to be vegetarians. Even the English government has now shunted him and do not accept his findings. The government is certainly not acting on it. You have a shift in public opinion on all of this.

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

Get your facts right. You said Professor Stein. Is that right? It’s Stern. Who was it?

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are very talkative now. Why don’t you get up and talk about it from your seat?

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

Get your facts straight.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, get up and dispute the facts—dispute the facts of the 35 plus senators on this side who have put up a scientific policy, and who have represented their regions. Why don’t you enter the policy debate instead of just interjecting? What a disgrace it is; particularly for you, Senator Forshaw, who have been here so long. I am saying it again because I hope, at the very least, I can prick your conscience and you have a sleepless night tonight, knowing that you have not properly stood up for your constituency and that after all these years your conscience is dulled. You have been dulled. You are now just a journeyman—just a dull backbencher in government who is enjoying all the luxuries but when it really comes to standing up, where are you? You have been made a fool of by the Prime Minister and he will continue to do it until you all crash and burn. I have said that public opinion has shifted on this. We know this, if nothing else, from the Lowy institute poll and we also know that the science has properly shifted on all of this. Thank goodness it has; I was getting a bit worried in 2007.

Have you ever bothered to read the absolutely creditable research from Professor Garth Paltridge, the former CSIRO chief, called The Climate Caper? Of course you have not. What about Heaven and Earth by Professor Ian Plimer? It is credible documentation, shifting the debate and challenging the science. Even the scientists who were personally involved in the document from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are now starting to come out and say, ‘We have been verballed by a small minority of scientists.’ Let me just quote one, the United Nations IPCC’s Japanese scientist Dr Itoh, an award-winning environmental physical chemist. He said about the climate change alarmists:

The worst scientific scandal in the history … When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.

There are hundreds of those scientists who are now starting to reject the IPCC’s initial report, which is the foundation stone of this whole debate.

There is much to say in this debate. My colleagues have presented it well. Our outrage is obvious. The hoax, the fix, is in. But what I want to concentrate on is the great disappointment in those on the other side who are not willing to stand up and put their case. Many of them actually believe what we on this side believe: that these bills ought not to be passed.

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Name them.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Conroy is chief among them. There is one sitting over there. There is Senator Sterle. There is a whole list of them. All right, if they do not want to bust their government they should at least stand up and say something in the debate. Tell us how jobs will be saved under this. You at least have that baseline responsibility. (Time expired)

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I heard the call from Senator McGauran for every senator to state his or her position on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and related bills and I have come down to answer that challenge—not as entertainingly as he has, I am sure, but I will attempt to put my position clearly. It is three months since coalition senators and the crossbench voted to defeat the Labor government’s original package of climate change bills. I expressed some regret on that occasion that this debate was shrouded in misinformation and misrepresentation and I am sad to say that today, three months later, very little has changed. Very sadly, this is a political debate before it is a debate about the environment.

I want first to address the question of the status of climate science and the issue that many senators have raised in this place already about the extent to which we should be relying on that climate science to make decisions about this matter. In the course of these debates, many contributors with limited or no scientific knowledge have passed judgment on the validity of scientific findings about man-made global warming. I am not a scientist. I have difficulty on occasion understanding the technical arguments that are presented in many of the scientific papers which support the argument for climate science. To the best of my knowledge, there are no members of the federal parliament who in fact have expertise in climate science.

However, lest someone might say it is appalling and inappropriate that the Australian parliament should make a decision about what to do about climate science when we have no expertise in our ranks on that question, I would respond by saying it has always been the role of members of parliament not to necessarily acquire for themselves an intimate knowledge of the areas in which they are conducting a debate but to in fact take the best available advice on a particular area and learn and act accordingly. We live in a society with a very sophisticated and elaborate division of labour. It is not possible for all of us to understand completely areas of specialised knowledge. We must therefore rely on experts in those areas of specialised knowledge to guide us in the actions that we take, particularly as members of this place.

When I climb aboard a plane to fly to Sydney, I confess that I do not understand the functioning and the structure of the jet engine that lifts the plane out of the airport and into the sky. When I receive a vaccination I do not know what the chemical compounds are in the vaccine that is injected into my veins. I rely on a scientific consensus from chemists and medical practitioners that this vaccine will protect me from harm and that it will do what I am told it will do. I do not rely in those circumstances just on the knowledge of the technician who might have prepared that particular batch of vaccine; I rely in fact on the whole scientific orthodoxy which has created the environment in which that vaccine can be safely produced—scientific values, rigour, training and research principles. I put it to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, that every one of us, every day, relies on that kind of scientific consensus and knowledge that is filtered and sifted over sometimes decades in order to arrive at a credible and appropriate use of that science by the broader population.

I see climate science in a very similar sense. It is true that climate science is not as settled as some other areas of science. It is true that there is dissent and disagreement about the prevailing orthodoxy in that area. In general terms, it would be best when confronted with uncertainty to wait until the science is settled. That option is not available to us here because, if we accept the majority scientific opinion, we have to accept that the need for action is immediate. The need is now, not in the 10, 20 or 30 years it might take to collect the data necessary to establish the truth or otherwise on climate science and climate change. It is not an academic debate about whether Pluto is the ninth planet in the solar system or something less than that or about the exact nature of the virus affecting the faces of Tasmanian devils. This is an immediate, real issue, the consequences of which, if the science is to be believed, will have an immediate and very real impact on not just our society but the entire world.

It is true that there are some specialists who argue that the science is wrong—that the evidence is not conclusive and that it points, in fact, in the other direction. But, to senators who are considering that argument, I say that we need to act not just on the basis of what appears to laypeople to be a convincing argument with respect to climate science but also to look at the majority consensus in this particular area. What is the majority consensus in the area of climate science? It is that man made activities are slowly and inexorably warming the globe and that the consequence of that, if the more severe scenarios eventuate, will be catastrophic for mankind. The majority opinion that I refer to is overwhelming in its verdict.

Let me list some of the organisations which subscribe to the view I have just postulated: the Royal Society of Canada, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the French academy of science, Germany’s National Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Italian academy of sciences, the Science Council of Japan, the Mexican academy of sciences, the Russian academy of sciences, the Academy of Science of South Africa, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America. We have heard from other senators about the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That body recommends very strongly, notwithstanding what Senator McGauran has said, action on climate change, and its membership is impressive in its collection of scientific expertise on this area. It includes: the CSIRO of Australia, Environment Canada, the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute of Japan, the Finnish Environment Institute, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, Germany’s federal environment agency, Russia’s institute of global climate and ecology, the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the United Kingdom and the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research of Norway to list only a few. That is the scientific consensus of which I spoke. That is the overwhelming majority opinion of the world’s scientists with expertise in these areas.

The National Academy of Sciences in the United States has said:

In the judgment of most climate scientists, Earth’s warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Royal Society in Britain, also known as the UK’s national academy of science, says:

International scientific consensus agrees that increasing levels of man-made greenhouse gases are leading to global climate change.

Our own Australian Academy of Science has a very illustrious membership with many Nobel laureates represented amongst its members. Every one of us would have had some interaction with members of that organisation. It endorsed the findings of the fourth assessment report of the IPCC, saying, in a statement on 1 July 2008, that:

… the increases in global average temperatures and sea level are unambiguous and are almost certainly primarily due to greenhouse gas emissions.

If members of this place doubt that that does represent the majority opinion of the world’s climate scientists, I ask them to apply the following test themselves: we have heard reference to many people who do not agree with those views—Professor Bob Carter and Professor Ian Plimer, for example, within Australia—but how many of those points of view have been adopted by peak scientific bodies in any country of the world? The answer is, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely none. It tells us quite clearly that the opinions we are receiving from those organisations, and from peak scientific bodies, are close to unanimous in their warnings to us and that we would be foolish in the extreme to ignore those warnings. We cannot choose to accept the advice of such bodies only when it is convenient and only when it pleases us. There will always be questions and doubts about some areas of scientific activity. In a case like this we cannot use that doubt to preclude us from taking action where action is called for. In saying that, I cannot exclude the possibility that that minority sceptical viewpoint might ultimately be right. I take the same view as Senator Birmingham took in his speech the other day. I hope that they are, in fact, right. It would be infinitely easier, cheaper and more convenient if the danger of global warming were not to be a danger at all. But it is dangerous to delay action in the hope that they might be right. We simply do not have that luxury.

The problem of dealing with this situation, however, is compounded immensely by the fact that the Rudd government, in response to this urgent climate problem, has presented an emissions trading scheme which is deeply flawed and which contains many, many problems. They are problems which have been drawn attention to by a very large number of commentators, left and right, scientific and not scientific—all of them pointing to a need for serious revision of the government’s proposed response to this problem. It is flawed and will unnecessarily harm Australian exports, jobs and living standards. That is why the coalition has been negotiating with the federal government in good faith to attempt to mitigate the more extreme elements of this package. The ball is now in the Labor Party’s court because it is beyond question that there are flaws in the original bill and that the number of opponents of the legislation, as it now stands, is legion.

If the amendments proposed by the coalition are accepted by the government, I believe those amendments would prevent the closing down of important industries and save thousands of jobs in trade exposed sectors such as aluminium, coal and natural gas. The proposals would cushion the impact of power price increases on small businesses and consumers, in some cases cutting them by up to half, without taking the pressure off industry, particularly the energy industry, to develop alternative strategies for dealing with our global problem. We believe the exclusion of agriculture is a very important part of that process, and the allowance of offsets for forestry and soil carbon sequestration and other measures is very important.

It is important to recognise that in proposing these amendments the coalition is not suggesting, as some have said, that we should be rewarding polluters, that we should be simply watering down the effect of the measures the government has proposed in order to simply delay the inevitable. I think it is about managing a transition to a new low emissions future. I ask members to bear in mind that as a society we have a huge amount of adjustment to make to become genuinely less polluting than we are today. Bankrupting a coal fired power station might give some zealots in our society a great deal of satisfaction, but it would be a very dangerous step: it would disadvantage the customers of that power station, it would certainly create unemployment in the community in which that power station operated and I think it would ultimately lead to a weakening of a process of public support for an emissions trading scheme, and the other measures that go with it, to reduce our climate profile. As well, I believe it is important to acknowledge that the amendments proposed by the opposition would allow for voluntary action in energy efficiency to be recognised. It has been the power of individuals through personal choice and action that has shaped so much of our world, particularly in the area of climate change, and that kind of public support and pressure for change in societal activity is a very important part of this process and must be supported.

As I said, there are some serious flaws. One that I made reference to a moment ago, the lack of harnessing of community activity, is reflected in the government scheme by the inability of communities and individuals to make a difference with respect to Australia’s climate targets. Dr Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute—and that is not a body I usually quote—made a very important point about the way in which this government’s scheme works in that respect. He said in a research paper he wrote in November last year:

... Australian households will be largely disempowered and unable to help abate Australia’s emissions through their own efforts but with a higher emissions target, the consequences will not be as dire.

If a person decides to ride their bike to work or installs a solar hot water system on their roof, they are removing the obligation of their electricity company or their fuel company to buy an extra emissions permit. This means that another polluter, perhaps a cement kiln or a steel works, can instead buy a permit to cover increased pollution from their plant.

If people decide to spend money on voluntary offsets so that they can become ‘carbon neutral’, all they will have done is increase the amount of pollution that others can emit although Australia, as a country, will continue to stay within its ‘cap’.

That is a very serious flaw in this government’s policy. It effectively disempowers communities to take steps towards reducing the nation’s overall emissions levels. There is nothing in the government scheme as presently drafted which addresses that issue. That is one of the reasons the coalition has said we need to revise the way in which this government is operating.

Another concern is with respect to the way in which the government deals with the question of compensation. In its original form, the CPRS provided compensation to low-income households and non-government organisations for the rises that will be incurred in energy costs. This is not, however, the case for state government instrumentalities. I do not normally come in here to argue the case for state governments. However, I have to say on this particular occasion I acknowledge that these organisations will have to meet significantly higher costs because of the way that this government scheme has been designed. Access Economics estimates that those costs will be in the order of $2.1 billion every year. This amounts to a cost which has to be borne ultimately in the form of reduced services by state government instrumentalities or by higher taxes and charges. Again, Dr Denniss from the Australian Institute said:

Responding to climate change involves ‘mitigation’, which means trying to reduce emissions in order to avoid dangerous climate change and ‘adaptation’, which means investing in new forms of infrastructure and services to help cope with the change that we cannot avoid. Unfortunately for the state governments, the way that the Rudd Government has divvied up these responsibilities ensures that the less effort the Commonwealth puts into avoiding climate change the more money the states will have to spend adapting to it.

He comes to the conclusion:

It is hard to imagine a scheme that is less fair than the CPRS.

I completely agree with him. Only a couple of weekends ago, UnionsACT—again a body I do not usually quote in this place—wrote an open letter to the Chief Minister of the ACT government that was published in the Canberra Times saying:

Rising electricity bills are an unavoidable consequence of the CPRS, but unless public sector budgets rise accordingly there will have to be a reduction in services, jobs and the wages budget—or an increase in ACT taxes—to meet these increased costs.

Based on the Access Economics report the costs are estimated to be $18 million in 2013 rising to $43 million by 2020. Those are the sorts of costs which, for a small jurisdiction like the ACT, would be very difficult to address. I want to see our community adopt real local solutions to some of these problems, but we cannot do that with the way that the current government’s CPRS is designed.

Rising in this place, as so many of my colleagues have, to say that the government scheme is fundamentally flawed and must change should not be interpreted as a call to stop any kind of change to address the challenges in our environment. It is a call to be realistic, to acknowledge that this community is a sophisticated, educated community which is capable of contributing to a debate about these matters so it is not dealt with in the very unsatisfactory way that this government has done by laying a take it or leave it proposal on the table and, until relatively recently, refusing to debate it. Our response to climate change will have to evolve over time. Whatever legislation we pass through the parliament this week or in the near future—if we pass anything at all—will inevitably need to change as circumstances change. We need to be part of that debate because this emissions trading scheme needs to be better than the one put on the table by this government.

Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here we are again debating the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and related bills three months and a few days after the Senate first rejected the legislation. I think this timing belies the true agenda of this government. While our debate today is about the carbon pollution reduction scheme bills—all 13 of them—it is important to outline what this debate is not about: it is not about climate change and it is not about the human impact on it, whether in absolute terms or by degree. This parliament can no more unilaterally change the climate than it can make it rain, for Australia represents such a small percentage of the world’s carbon and other emissions that it is nothing more than extreme hubris to think that we alone can determine this issue.

This is a debate about these bills and Labor’s ETS, not a debate about the science of climate change, and it is important that we begin from this principle as the government seeks to conflate these two issues, not for the purposes of informing debate but to limit it, and for brazenly partisan goals. These bills were rejected by all the non-government senators in this place just over three months ago—they are truly friendless—and nothing has changed. These bills still have all the flaws they did three months ago. The government has artificially created the timeline we face here today, firstly, by insisting that the vanity of our Prime Minister comes before our national interest as he sought legislative approval for his flawed ETS before Copenhagen and, secondly, in its efforts to intimidate the Senate with the threat of an early election. The first excuse has been destroyed by the failure of Copenhagen. Despite all the rhetoric and desperate attempts to claim otherwise, the lack of a legally binding document for consideration by countries and governments and the fallback to nothing more than a statement of intention belies the fact that there was not previously—and there is now—no need for Australia to act unilaterally before the rest of the world. The second excuse is so immature that it is not worthy of a response in this place.

The Senate has a duty to protect the people from governments intoxicated with their own power and righteousness and, just as it has stood in the way of previous dominating executives convinced of their own brilliance, it will continue to exercise this power of review. Indeed, this is all the more important as we know the Labor Party exercises its power as a monolithic block. Just as it constrains internal debate by factions and deals, it seeks to constrain debate in this place with false timelines.

What has also happened is that the rhetoric of the climate change alarmists has become more extreme—I hasten to add that it is indeed a minority who fall into this camp—and there are many Australians who have legitimate concerns about this issue. But this debate is increasingly dominated by a noisy and belligerent minority at the expense of a rational debate about the problem and the consequences and our ability to address these. Listening to these extremists every week, every month, the consequences of not passing these bills becomes greater—centimetres of forecast sea level increases become metres and fractions of degrees become calamitous increases in temperature. But what they do not say is that these bills will achieve nothing. None of these alleged scenarios will be avoided by the passage of these bills this week. It also betrays another aspect of the agenda of those who might be termed ‘climate change extremists’: to create a crisis, to scare people and to frighten them into silence.

Last week the Prime Minister raised the spectre of that great historic example of scientific intimidation—the suppression and trial of Galileo—when he said in the other place, ‘It is as if we are back at the trial of Galileo.’ But the reality is that Galileo was persecuted for challenging conventional wisdom and the powers that be. He challenged prevailing wisdom. The Prime Minister, the minister and the alarmists among us have more in common with Pope Urban VIII and the suppression of alleged heretical views than they do with scientists challenging the status quo, as they seek to belittle, sideline and attack anyone who raises an alternative view or question. The label ‘sceptic’ is the modern expression of the Middle Ages accusation of being a heretic. Your views will not be considered, regardless of their merit. But this pales into insignificance when considering the language used by a small number of extremists in this debate. For some proponents of radical action on emissions to use the term ‘denier’ and subtly or otherwise attempt to conflate the Holocaust with this debate is offensive in the extreme. It belittles the greatest abuse of alleged science in the history of mankind as well as the millions of Holocaust victims. It simply has no place in this debate or any other of this sort.

I remain open to changing science. In an area where technology and knowledge is developing as quickly as this, it cannot be deemed by a government or any institution as settled—other than to suppress its further development. I do not claim to make a definitive statement on climate science, but I know that any attempt to suppress debate can only constrain its future development. Indeed the Australian people do not react well to being told what they may or may not think or discuss or to any attempt to limit or circumscribe debate about an issue like this, and it will do its proponents no favours. The great gift of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was that knowledge became contestable. It is a hallmark of human progress and we should not resile from this principle in this or other debates.

I highlighted earlier that these bills still contain all the flaws that they did just over three months ago. These bills represent a massive tax grab—tens of billions of dollars will be stripped out of the hands of Australians with no offsetting tax cuts elsewhere. The size of government will radically grow. This bill and these taxes will ensure that the government has indeed created for itself a new tax base to fund its profligacy and the debt it has accumulated in only two short years. But it will come at the expense of millions of Australians choosing to spend the money they have earnt in the way that they choose; it will come at the expense of economic activity; it will come at the expense of jobs; and it will be handed to whomever the government deems worthy of support, assistance or compensation.

This is partly justified on the hope of these so-called ‘green jobs’. I outlined in my last speech on these bills just over three months ago some of the research that has been undertaken on the true cost of these so-called green jobs. While the government can create jobs through subsidies, mandates and direct employment, these all come at a cost of the jobs of others. They have come at the expense of other jobs unless they add to overall employment. But we do not hear of these costs or of these job losses because they are hidden from public view. Imposing indirect costs on all to benefit a few is a path we abandoned years ago. We know that it failed; we know that hiding the costs of such programs is unfair; and we know that it hits the weakest in our job market and in our community. The mere adoption of the language of the market does not make something a market solution. We have spent decades unwinding the influence of government over such basic decisions in our economy and our community, and Australia and Australians are unquestionably better-off for it. But these bills represent a massive reversal of that. These bills will fulfil the aspirations of the Prime Minister and place government at the centre of the economy, as he put it earlier this year. These bills open up the opportunity for government patronage and preference to a degree this country has not seen since the days of the Tariff Board. If decisions about commercial viability of projects and businesses are to come down to the government providing assistance or exemptions from general laws then, quite simply, we have got the framework wrong.

Sadly, it appears that decades of misadventure and miserable failure in this regard, particularly by the Labor Party, have not taught this government any lessons. Furthermore, these bills, once passed, will have great impediments on their future amendment or repeal, for the bills create a personal property right and, as we know in this place, section 51(xxxi) of the Constitution limits the power of the parliament to the acquisition of property on just terms. The institution of a scheme such as this without detailed consideration of this particular issue is, quite simply, irresponsible. We should give much more serious consideration to the prospect of binding future generations to such a degree. Our knowledge is not perfect; this scheme does not—

Debate interrupted.