Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' So spoke the Labor Party, through its current leader, to the Australian people just days before the last election. At a time when the polls were perilously close—they were tight—Labor, its leader and its deputy leader solemnly promised the Australian people that there would be no carbon tax. Suggestions that there would be were dismissed by Labor as hysterical. Nothing could be clearer: Labor sought and obtained a mandate from the Australian people not to impose a carbon tax. The fact that we are debating these 1½ reams of legislation, 18 or 19 bills, to impose a carbon tax is the legislative proof of Labor's deceit and of Labor's contempt for the Australian people. The Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills, if they are turned into acts, should they pass this place, will be 19 separate acts of deceit, 19 separate acts of betrayal, 19 separate acts signifying the contempt in which Labor holds the Australian people.

Every single Labor member of the other place and every single Labor senator elected at the last election was elected on the clear promise of no carbon tax. In fairness, however, they were elected on a promise to see if a community consensus could be built around a carbon price. Here Labor have succeeded, and spectacularly so. A consensus, and a very strong one, has been developed—a consensus to which Labor and Ms Gillard should lay personal claim because, but for their advocacy, the consensus would not be as strong as it is today. But, alas for Labor, the clear, strong, overwhelming consensus on a carbon price is a consensus in opposition. The Australian people do not want a carbon tax. Despite spending millions of dollars of Australian taxpayers' money in a desperate advertising campaign, despite Labor funding their carbon tax cheer groups in the community, despite setting up their propaganda unit in Mr Combet's office, the consensus Labor have established in the Australian community is an overwhelming consensus against the carbon tax.

This overwhelming consensus against this destructive and corrosive tax is built on three factors: firstly, the blatant deceit of the electorate by Labor; secondly, the fact that it is bad policy; and, thirdly, that the carbon tax will do nothing for the environment. As the Senate embarks on the second reading debate of the Orwellianly named clean energy package, Australians know it is a package based on deceit, a package based on a dirty deal. Rather than debating the clean energy package, we should in fact be renaming it the 'dirty deal package' because it was struck with a dirty deal with the Australian Greens—a party, incidentally, led by a person who advocated for coal-fired power stations in his opposition to renewable, environmentally friendly hydrogeneration. It was in this month 30 years ago that Dr Brown was advocating coal-fired thermal power generation as 'the best centralised option we have' and 'manifestly better' than more dams for Tasmania. Oh, what a visionary thinker! But consistency, integrity and robustness of thought have never been that de facto prime minister's strong suit.

Why the ALP would listen to the Greens' policy prognosis and prescription after a three-decade record littered with policy failures is emblematic of how the Australian Labor Party has lost its way. But, as the proverb so correctly tells us, if you do not believe in something you will fall for anything. The worst 21st century exemplar of that proverb is the hapless Australian Labor Party of today, an ALP whose light on the hill is no longer powered by reliable, baseload, traditional Labor thought but powered by faltering and flickering transitory trendy fads changing it from a once-strong, clear beam to a pale, intermittent, slowly dying ember. The ALP has not only lost its moral compass; it has lost its policy map as well. That is why it should be no surprise that Labor has served up this policy mish-mash, which will increase the cost of living, tighten the throttle around the throats of our famers and small businesses even further and reduce our manufacturing sector's capacity to compete with imports, let alone in overseas markets—not to mention the destructive impact on our volunteer sector and the disability sector. The carbon tax will impact every endeavour of human life, from our power bills to our grocery bills to our rates. The costs of running schools, hospitals, aged care facilities and prisons will all rise. Volunteering will become more expensive.

As everyone is impacted, so everyone will pay. That is why, on sober reflection, countries that were previously preparing to go down this route have accepted the wisdom of what the former climate change minister, Senator Wong, said about a carbon tax: it is 'no magic bullet'. She was right then and she remains right today. She is especially right in the absence of unified global action. But she will be here in this chamber compounding her party's deceit on the electorate by trying to explain away what everybody knows to be true: the carbon tax is no solution.

As the Greens-Labor government foolishly and recklessly rush to create this toxic tax, they tell us that countries all around the world are moving just as quickly. I have to concede that they are right. Countries are moving just as quickly—but in the opposite direction. A quick perusal of international headlines just this month shows the unmistakable trend. Canada's foreign minister, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting just last week, when specifically asked whether Canada would be introducing a similar regime, gave a one-word, two-letter answer. Have a guess what that was. It was an absolute no.

If we needed a country to compare ourselves with population-wise—a federation, a resource based country—the country we would identify with most closely would be Canada. They have deliberately said no to a carbon tax. Japan has indefinitely postponed its carbon tax. The European scheme—which, might I add, is at only 10 per cent of the proposed Australian level—is facing collapse whilst Europe fully reconsiders its position. The United Kingdom is reducing its green energy subsidies. New Zealand is winding its scheme back. Russia is taking no further action. France is saying no. South Korea is delaying. The list is ever growing. The United States is not proceeding; President Obama has said so. Individual US states, such as New Hampshire, are repealing their carbon tax type laws, as are the provinces of Canada, such as Ontario. And of course the Chicago emissions trading scheme has collapsed. Even Spain, once heralded as 'the future', along with California, is slashing its wind power subsidies by 40 per cent.

So let's not have this deceptive nonsense that we must act now or be left behind. The world is moving in the opposite direction. If this tax is legislated we will be the only country in the world with an economy-wide carbon tax, with the highest rate. The indecent haste to get this legislation through is simply based on Labor's need to feed its insatiable vanity. If we recall the discredited and defunct Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, we might learn a few lessons. We were told that the scheme was urgently needed because climate change was 'the greatest moral challenge of our time' and that the world could not afford to be denied the huge environmental benefit that a five per cent reduction would make to our 1.5 per cent of global emissions. The hyperbole was flowing thick and fast.

Of course, the real reason for the urgency at that time was Labor's desire to be the performing clowns of Copenhagen, to wave their legislation around at an international forum and say, 'How clever are we?' Now, two years later, the torrent of hyperbole is, thankfully, absent, but the excuse has changed to 'business needs certainty'. The businesses I speak with tell me they prefer the uncertainty of life to the certainty death has to offer. Of course, the urgency has nothing to with Labor's new-found concern for business certainty. If they were concerned about business certainty they would not have broken their solemn promise that there would be no carbon tax. If that was their main concern they would not have broken their solemn promise that there would be no carbon tax. If that was their main concern, they would not be going down this route at all.

Once again we find that Labor wants to be the world's performing dunces at another international conference, this time at Durban. Our nation was saved from Labor's desire for international humiliation once. Let us hope we can be saved again. The feedback I receive is that the world community is looking on in disbelief as Australia prepares to inflict unilateral economic pain on itself for no environmental gain, in the hope that someone might stop to admire and notice. Let us be clear. Those that may stop to admire will be those with whom we compete internationally. The first ones, I am sure, will be Canada. The next ones, I am sure, will be the United States, New Zealand, Japan—and the list goes on.

If the government are genuinely concerned about the world environment, they have a few other options available to them, very easy options. They could decide to sell uranium to India. Just that one decision would make a bigger dent in carbon dioxide emissions than the carbon tax in Australia will. They could expand and encourage Australia's native forestry, thus slowing the rate of forest destruction in other parts of the world. They could accept native forest wood waste as biomass for renewable energy. And, of course, they could seek to do something about Australia's shrinking forest plantations. But instead the government have brought us pink batts and cash for clunkers, all in the name of the environment. Being rightly emboldened by the runaway success of pink batts and cash for clunkers, they now bring us this forest of legislation in the name of the environment.

This is the question Labor needs to respond to: what will this legislation do for the environment? By how much will world temperatures decrease and when? How much will sea levels be reduced by? How much lower will sea levels be and when? I suspect Australians would be willing to suffer some economic pain for environmental gain, but the reality is that, as our economy becomes less efficient under a carbon tax and prices itself out of world markets, those economies without a carbon tax, with even greater levels of pollution than Australia, will simply have their production substituted for ours, with the resultant effect of even greater carbon emissions into the world's atmosphere.

It is exactly this experience that is making Europe reconsider its stance on carbon pricing. I do not ask this rhetorically: where have all the European aluminium smelters gone? Not to wind power, not to solar panels. They have actually gone—gone offshore, to Africa and elsewhere. And how are the environmental standards there? Undoubtedly a lot better than they previously were in Europe! But that is the message that Labor is trying to sell us. So the world's environment suffers further, at the behest of those who put blind zealotry ahead of sound, evidence based public policy. It is reminiscent of a person who preferred coal power over hydro power some 30 years ago.

Let us ask the question: what would a five per cent reduction now do in relation to the world's environment? Professor Graham Farquhar of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute has said:

The aim of the carbon tax is to reduce Australian emissions by five per cent. In turn, the aim of that reduction is to put political or economic pressure to encourage or shame other countries to reduce their emissions by five per cent. If we are successful and all the countries of the world reduce their emissions to five per cent below what they would have been, then the anthropogenic climate that we would otherwise have seen in 2031 will be postponed until—

when?—

2032.

Twelve months later. That has to be part of the context of this debate.

Labor's whole carbon tax deceit is compounded by other deceits. The Treasury modelling is all based on other countries following suit. Well, the list of countries I have read out indicates that the world is moving in the opposite direction to Australia. So what they are doing is compounding their lie with erroneous modelling to suggest an outcome which is false. We then have the claim that we will have a lot of green jobs. All the world's studies have shown that, for every green job created, there is a huge taxpayer subsidy and about two or three mainstream jobs suffer and fall by the wayside. As a result, there is a net loss of jobs.

Let's go to some of the impacts of this legislation on everyday Australians. Among the great sufferers will in fact be the single-income families of Australia, part of Labor's social engineering. But the reason that the Labor Party deceived the electorate about this is that they knew this was a toxic tax, they knew it was bad policy and they knew they could not sell it to the Australian people. Why? Because it will be a $9 billion per annum tax. It will increase power bills by 10 per cent. It will increase gas bills by nine per cent. And that is on Labor's own assessments. There will be higher marginal tax rates. There will be a huge impact on single-income families and 280,000 self-funded retirees will be worse off.

As we analyse this legislation, we see it was built on a deceit and it is now being compounded by shonky and flawed modelling based on the suggestion that the rest of the world is following and the assumption that somehow this will do something beneficial to the world environment. As we have pointed out, this legislation will in fact make the world's environment worse, cost Australians their standard of living, destroy jobs and be of no benefit. So why, with Labor knowing this, are they doing what they are doing? I think the Prime Minister may have been right when she said, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,' because it is the Australian Greens, under Senator Bob Brown, that are actually leading this government.

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

I rise today on what is an historic day in the Australian Senate. This is the day when the Senate will begin to consider the clean energy package and will start delivering real action on climate change in Australia as these bills pass. It is an historic day in Australia and globally because it is the day when the seven-billionth person is expected to join us on the planet. We live on a finite planet and the non-renewable resources of the earth are under huge pressure. Equally, the earth's atmosphere, oceans and rivers do not have an unlimited capacity to absorb waste. That is why we are suffering the consequences of global warming already. Global warming is accelerating. In 2011, at the end of the first decade of this century, it poses the greatest threat to human civilisation and to the ongoing health and wellbeing of the fellow species and ecosystems with whom we share this beautiful planet.

As I stand here today, the evidence is clear. There has been near record summer sea ice melt in the Arctic. There are indications of Arctic permafrost melt and seabed methane hydrate emissions going to the atmosphere. We are seeing destabilisation of the Western Antarctic icesheet and increased glacial decline right across the planet. Seas are rising at a greater rate than predicted and ocean acidification is worsening. We know from the research conducted at the Antarctic and Southern Ocean CRC that the tipping point for ocean acidification is 450 parts per million. With acidification of the oceans, miniscule creatures cannot form shells and the whole ocean food chain is compromised. Coral reefs, already beset by bleaching from higher sea temperatures, are weakened by acidification and vulnerable to breaking up in storm surges. The Great Barrier Reef—our reef of outstanding universal value, World Heritage listed—is a source of joy and pride to all Australians. But it is already deteriorating.

As temperatures rise, the great carbon sinks of the oceans are slowing in their ability to absorb carbon. The world's remaining forests are being cut at an alarming rate and there is a risk that they could become carbon sources in the future as temperatures rise. Extreme weather events are causing death and disruption throughout the world, but especially in the developing world, where drought in Somalia, floods in Pakistan and mudslides in Brazil have cost thousands of lives this year alone. In Bangladesh millions live on the delta and now face being washed away or displaced to the cities as the tides sweep across the levies.

A recent report from Foresight in the UK, Migration and global environmental change, predicts that by 2050 millions will have been forced to migrate because of climate change. Professor John Beddington of the UK warned, 'We are facing what I believe will be unprecedented difficult times over the next 20 to 40 years.' He went on to talk about not only increasing migration but millions going into more environmentally vulnerable areas. The report says that by 2060 up to 179 million people will be trapped in low-lying coastal flood plains subject to extreme weather events such as floods, storm surges, landslides and rising sea levels, unable to migrate because they are too poor or ill-equipped or because they are restricted by political or geographic boundaries. Two-thirds of the world's cities with a population of more than five million are at least partially located in coastal zones, including rapidly growing urban centres in Asian and African mega-deltas.

We also know from our own Pacific neighbours, who have done virtually nothing to contribute to global warming, that they are already paying the price of the developed world's failure to act to address global warming. From Tuvalu to Kiribati, leaders are pleading with the rest of the world to recognise that their nations are suffering from sea level rise and incursion of salt water into freshwater lenses, leading to loss of crops and livelihood and forcing internal migration. Those leaders are already asking who will take their people.

Here in Australia, where we have always experienced drought, floods, bushfires and cyclones, the intensity of these events—from the ACT and Victorian bushfires to the South Australian heatwave, to the Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi and to the Murray-Darling drought—has increased with global warming, resulting in greater loss of life and property and ever-increasing economic and social disruption.

We are in a race against time. Globally, our greenhouse gas emissions need to peak and begin to come down within five years if we are to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. The question before us all is whether the nations of the world are capable of acting decisively in that time frame. This is the biggest challenge of governance facing each nation and the United Nations simultaneously and to date the system has been found wanting. While we have the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto protocol, further progress towards a global treaty that might have a chance of delivering a safe climate has been too slow. The failure to make strong progress in Copenhagen, the incremental improvements in Cancun and the lack of optimism for Durban weigh heavily on those of us who understand the global emergency that we are facing. It is too late to stop global warming. The challenge now is to limit its extent.

Future generations will pay a high price in both economic and social terms for the lack of leadership from President George Bush and Prime Minister John Howard and their administrations. These leaders had the scientific information and the opportunity to act decisively and early to reduce the pain and disruption of global warming, but they proactively and cynically obstructed the action necessary domestically and globally. The next generation of US Republicans and Australian Liberal Party and National Party members of parliament share the same dubious legacy. All of those who will speak against these bills can count themselves in that category. Their children and grandchildren—the next generation—will look back and hold them accountable for their failure to act sooner and their failure to support what is needed now. What we are seeing in Australian politics, in a large part of the old fossil fuel business and in the coalition is cowardice and cynical populism, and they will be defeated. These bills will pass. They will come into law—and, what is more, they will not be repealed.

As it stands, leading into the 17th Conference of the Parties at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the world has pledged to constrain global warming to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. But, not only is two degrees of warming no guarantee of a safe climate, the pledges on the table from individual nations will result in warming of closer to four degrees. And in such a four-degree world, as the Royal Society said this year, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceed throughout the world. That is the emergency we now face.

So to the clean energy package we are debating today. It is based on a core scenario of 550 parts per million, which is in line with a three- or four-degree projection. That is why one of the best parts of the package that we have negotiated is the fact that right across the package there is a capacity for upward ambition when the political will is there to deliver it. That is something critical that the Greens have delivered to this package and which makes it head and shoulders above the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which limited upward mobility in terms of levels of ambition. Our task as a community is now to get that political momentum underway.

In terms of the clean energy package of bills, the thanks have to go to the voters of Australia for having returned a minority government and a balance-of-power scenario in both houses—because it has been in balance of power, with a Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, supported by experts, that we have been able to deliver a set of bills which puts us on the path to a whole-of-government approach, an internally consistent approach, which addresses every aspect of climate change, with a few notable exceptions to which I will come in a moment.

But I want to put on the record at this point my thanks to my colleagues in the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee—to the experts: to Will Steffen, to Professor Garnaut, to Rod Sims and to Patricia Faulkner—who came into that committee and gave service to the people of Australia by trying to provide policy rigour to the outcomes. I want to thank the Independents, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, for their contribution to the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee and of course my colleagues Senator Bob Brown, the Leader of the Australian Greens, and Adam Bandt, the member for Melbourne, who sat around the table with the Prime Minister, with Minister Combet and with the Treasurer, supported by the bureaucracy, in particular the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Everybody worked very hard to deliver this package.

In the case of the Greens it is very clear that we would not be having this legislation now were it not for a balance-of-power scenario and the agreement that the Greens reached with the Prime Minister to deliver a carbon price mechanism in this term of government. I want to also thank those in my office who have worked for the past six years to develop the policy rigour that has enabled us to get to this outcome. In particular I want to note the work of Oliver Woldring, Katrina Willis, Tim Hollo, Sophie Underwood, Imogen Birley, Jeff Dunn, Sandy Bowden and Wendy McLeod, who over six years have worked in all manner of ways to get us to a point where we had the policy rigour to deliver. I also want to thank my other Greens Senate colleagues, and in particular Greens voters around Australia, who have stood by and have supported us at every turn in making sure that we have challenged the lack of climate policy in Australia.

The package we have developed has four pillars. One pillar is an emissions trading scheme, where we have achieved an 80 per cent target by 2050 and an independent Climate Change Authority, enabling us to have upward mobility. The second pillar we have achieved is the renewable energy package—the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which are going to be the largest boost to renewable energy this country has seen. And renewable energy is a major driver of jobs and climate action into the future. As the British minister Chris Huhne said in a speech to the RenewableUK conference this week, 'Renewable energy technologies will deliver a third Industrial Revolution.' And he did say he wanted to 'take aim at the curmudgeons and fault-finders who hold forth on the impossibility of renewables' and the 'unholy alliance of short-termists, armchair engineers, climate sceptics and vested interests who are selling the UK economy short'. He goes on to outline, in very substantial detail, the attractiveness of renewables for the UK and the number of jobs that renewables are already delivering in that country. He also talks about the Green Investment Bank in the UK, which has been capitalised with £3 billion to help unlock private sector investment at scale. For the first time ever the UK will join every other leading developed economy in having a public development bank focused on key economic goals. That is precisely what the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is designed to do, and that is why Mr Abbott will not repeal it.

The third part of the package is an energy efficiency package. That is also to provide incentives to see Australia finally start reducing demand. To that end, we also have a directive to the Australian electricity market operators to start planning for 100 renewables and at the same time an undertaking that the Commonwealth will lead the states in moving on national electricity market reform so that we incorporate demand-side reform and get that well and truly onto the agenda and not just focus always on new supply.

We also have a comprehensive land sector package for enhancing carbon in the landscape, because not only do we need to reduce emissions from the big polluters through the emissions trading scheme but we need to protect the carbon stores in the landscape, particularly our forests. They are critically important, and a key component of this package is to end the ability to make renewable energy certificates by using native forests. We must protect our forests and move to increase our targets as we protect those incredibly important stores that we have in the landscape.

These four pillars are underpinned by a compensation package, recognising that the big polluters will pass on some of the costs associated with their buying of permits to address their emissions—and that is why householders will be compensated. What is more, there has been a real focus on low-carbon community initiatives so we can enable the people who are most affected to reduce their energy uptake through efficiency measures. It is a well-designed package of initiatives that we have.

This package misses on the transport front. We need to work hard to bring into the future more investment in public transport and we need to get rid of our fossil fuel subsidies. That is a key component of where further action will be concentrated. This package represents the beginning of a new way of thinking in Australia. It lays the foundation for a low-carbon economy and enables the scale of action required as we build that political will to make sure we do not see a four-degree temperature increase globally result from inaction. The coalition cannot escape from the old ways of thinking. As John Maynard Keynes said:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones…

What we have seen in here is a refusal to escape from the old ones, even in the full knowledge that the old ones have failed civilisation, ecosystems and our global biodiversity. One of the things in this package which we are particularly pleased about is the Biodiversity Fund, because in enhancing carbon in the landscape and protecting carbon in the landscape we must also do everything we can to improve connectivity so that species have an ability to move through the landscape. We will see massive extinction as a result of climate change—we are already seeing it—but by doing what we can to build resilience in the landscape we will give species their best chance. Professor Schellnhuber was here in Australia recently and he said:

If political reality is not grounded in physical reality, it is useless.

That is why the position taken by the coalition is useless—because it is not grounded in physical reality.

The Greens view of this package is that it recognises physical reality but it does not go far enough. We are proud of what we have done and what we have achieved. This parliament will be recognised in Durban later this year for the major step forward that Australia has taken in recognising that a nation so dependent on fossil fuels is prepared to move on climate action. What is exciting about what the Greens have been able to deliver through the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee and through the result of the 2010 election is that we have a genuine engagement with the crisis that is climate change. We have a potential for upward mobility, right across increased targets, to get to net carbon zero by 2050. We also have the potential to move to 100 per cent renewable energy as quickly as possible and to take up all the opportunities that responding to global warming can bring. What we do know is that this will mean new jobs, new industries, more sophistication in the Australian economy and greater investment in education and training. They are the things that are so badly necessary in Australia.

We heard recently that more than 50 per cent of our exports are coming from digging up, cutting down and shipping away those resources, particularly coal, at the fastest rate possible. It was described as an export market that is primitive. That is how the rest of the world sees our current export market. This economy is disguising the fact that we have underinvested in education, we have hollowed out the manufacturing sector and we are losing some of our best brains and technologies overseas. What we will achieve with this legislation is the beginning of the transformation that is necessary. We need a wave of transformation—of social, technical, environmental and economic innovation that will touch every person, community, institution and nation on earth. The irony is that this transformation is still viewed as an economic cost when it is an enormous economic opportunity—an opportunity that we are now being increasingly forced to recognise as a people. In this parliament we are now recognising this opportunity and taking it up. I congratulate everyone who will support the passage of these bills, from the government through to the Independents and the Greens. This is something of which we can be very proud.

Matt Thistlethwaite (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians have a unique and meaningful relationship with the land on which we forge our lives. Our vast landscapes, from barren deserts to magnificent coastlines, are a part of us. This is despite the fact that many of us live in cities which dot our coastline. When a drought hits we empathise with our farmers, although they often live thousands of kilometres away. When a big swell hits our coastline we feel for our lifesavers who risk their necks to keep us safe. And when we hear of the ice caps melting we wonder what this might mean for our magnificent country and the world as we know it.

We are a unique nation, and our identity stems from our landscape. We have developed our character through our values. We believe in mateship, we believe in backing the underdog and, importantly, we believe in a fair go. I ask my colleagues in this place to consider: is it fair to let our children inherit a nation with a diminished natural beauty and heritage? Is it fair to raise our children to always think of others, yet to permeate hypocrisy in this place? Is it fair to dump the burden of addressing our environmental challenges on the generations to come? With this in mind, I turn to the clean energy future package before this place and I ask my parliamentary colleagues one more question: is it fair to take no action on climate change?

Climate change has been a real cause for concern for our country and our planet for many years. Despite the small pocket of dissenters and the disagreement regarding the depth of the impact, the reality of climate change is irrefutable. In May of this year, the Climate Commission delivered the strongest evidence of this to date. It found that global temperatures are rising more quickly now than ever before, with the last decade being the hottest on record. In the last 50 years the number of hot days in Australia has more than doubled. Sea levels rose 20 centimetres since the 1800s and are projected to rise by another 20 centimetres by 2050. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered nine major bleaching incidents in the last 31 years. Prior to that it had experienced none. Clearly these incidents speak for themselves. Human induced climate change is not only happening; it is speeding up.

As a parent of two young children, I naturally worry about their future. I am concerned about the type of economy they will grow up in, about their education and about their job opportunities. But I am also concerned about the natural environment that they will inherit from us as this generation of decision makers. I believe that we need to take action to mitigate the human induced climate change effects for the sake of our children and of generations to come, and I am proud to be part of a government that is treating this generational challenge with the respect that it deserves.

As a nation we are responsible for about 1.5 per cent of global emissions and remain one of the world's top 20 emitters per capita. As individuals Australians produce more carbon pollution than the people of any country in the developed world. But we also have a reputation as a nation of doers, of people who are not afraid to step up when the going gets tough, and this is rightfully so. As such, the attitude of 'Why bother? We are too small to make any real difference,' is, to put it simply, not us. It is not who we are as a people. We are better than that, and this government is determined to remind every single one of us that we can make a difference. We will make a difference and, not only that, we will be better off for doing so.

Professor Ross Garnaut, along with many leading economists, has advised that carbon pricing is the cheapest and most effective way of dealing with carbon pollution. It is also the most effective way of developing our renewable energy sector, along with the associated new jobs, investment and business opportunities. Australia is uniquely placed to move our economy to a renewable energy future driven by solar, wind, wave and geothermal technologies, in addition to other clean energy projects like biofuels. At the moment around eight per cent of Australia's energy needs come from renewable sources. Compare this to a country like Spain, where 35 per cent of their energy needs are derived from renewable sources. These bills future-proof our nation, ensuring we have a strong, competitive economy with a healthy environment for our children and their children to live in.

From July next year this country's top 500 polluters will pay for every tonne of carbon pollution that they emit into our atmosphere. This is not a tax on hardworking families. It is not a tax on pensioners. It is not a tax on small businesses and farmers. It is a system that will ensure that companies pay a cost for the privilege of emitting carbon pollution that affects us all. The starting price under this scheme will be $23 a tonne and it will rise by 2.5 per cent in real terms over the first three years. The fixed price period will end at the fourth year, when we will move to an emissions trading scheme and a market based mechanism. This will nudge this nation's big polluters to drive investment in renewable energy and catapult Australia into a clean energy future, with a healthier environment, new jobs and other new clean energy industries.

As we move this nation from an industrial age into a renewables age, we will maintain that ideal of fairness. That is why we will return every cent of revenue to assist households, support jobs and tackle climate change. The government has released the Treasury modelling on the impact of the carbon price and it shows that on everyday goods and services the cost impact will be about $9.90 a week, or around 0.7 per cent in terms of the consumer price index. This needs to be put in context. When the GST was introduced it increased the consumer price index by 2.5 per cent. We are talking about an impact on prices one-quarter of the impact of the goods and services tax.

We will be using more than half of the carbon price revenue to assist those who need it most—low to middle income earners. Nine out of 10 Australian households will receive some assistance under this package. The assistance works out on average to be around $10.10 a week, meaning almost six million Australian households will receive the assistance they need to cover the cost increases passed on by industry. Sole pensioners will receive an extra $338 a year, and pensioner couples will receive combined additional income of $510. Self-funded retirees holding a Commonwealth seniors health card will receive the same as pensioners and may also be eligible for tax cuts or the low income supplement. Job seekers will get an extra $218 a year and $390 a year for couples combined, while students will receive an extra $177 a year and single parents will receive an extra $289 a year. All people earning up to $80,000 a year will receive a tax cut, and most will receive a tax cut of at least $300 a year.

We have also made changes to the tax system, lifting the tax-free threshold from $6,000 to $18,200, meaning an additional one million Australians will not have to fill out a tax return after this financial year. When this is combined with the low-income tax offset, people will not have to pay any tax until after their income exceeds $20,542. This is a massive advantage for people on low to middle incomes. This assistance to households will be permanent under our scheme, so when the carbon price goes up so too does the assistance. The rest of the revenue coming from the carbon price scheme will be used to support jobs in high-polluting industries that are exposed to international competition, and also to support clean energy programs. The $9.2 billion in assistance that we are providing to trade-exposed industries has been welcomed by many businesses and unions, particularly those working in the steel and aluminium industries. We have reassured coalminers that their industry will continue to grow under a carbon price, and we are supporting those gassy coalmines that emit much more carbon pollution than other coalmining operations with a $1.3 billion support package. This will provide financial assistance to help these industries transition to cleaner energy production.

The government will also establish the new $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation to drive investment in clean energy technologies and the $3.2 billion Australian Renewable Energy Agency to conduct research on and development of clean energy technologies and we will also call for tenders for the closing down of 2,000 megawatts of high-polluting electricity generation. There will be funding of $330 million under our Low Carbon Communities program for local councils and community organisations to access competitive tender grants to aid local communities to cut their carbon pollution and to reduce their energy costs.

Agricultural emissions have been excluded from the scheme, yet farmers and other landholders will be able to access commercial opportunities utilising their land through the Carbon Farming Initiative. A new and ongoing biodiversity scheme, worth almost a billion dollars over the first six years, will also be established for projects that protect the outcomes from carbon farming.

Australians have a deep seated connection with their land and its future health and prosperity. That is why the government has developed this plan. That is why the government is acting to protect our unique and deeply important national landscape while ushering in a more responsible and rewarding clean energy future for our country that will drive investment in new technology, new industries and jobs growth. The future of this country, its inhabitants and, most importantly, those who will inherit it from us is too important to ignore. Every member in this place has an opportunity to make a difference, an opportunity to stand up and say, 'I believe in this great nation and I believe in its future. Every member in this place has an opportunity to put on record whether they support a fair go for young Australians and generations to come. I urge all senators to support these bills.

Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think it is important to start by saying that the climate change debate is an ongoing debate. One moment ago we had the argument about caution, and I accept that, but to say that everything is concluded is ridiculous. That should not be accepted, and to start off I would like to quote Professor Judith Curry, who put out a paper recently saying that, although carbon dioxide levels are rising—she does not refute that—the temperature is not following the same path and whatever is driving issues pertaining to temperature rise it is not, to her mind, as someone with immense experience in this field, being driven in the form of carbon dioxide, as others presume it is. Also, I would like to look at other issues such as those in the latest work by Donna Laframboise, who has clearly pointed out—and I think this is important—that a third of the so-called 'peer reviewed sources' from the IPCC have not actually been peer reviewed. These sorts of issues need to be put on the table because people are getting away with making categorical statements that are not actually correct.

It is also very important to put on the record that those with a strong interest in a financial and pecuniary gain from a carbon trading permit system have been the greatest advocates of it. Quite obviously, banks are going to love this. Big banks are about to get a big bonus, a massive bonus, because they have the capacity to collect commission from trading permits. This is a big bank bonus that people are going to have to pay. When those opposite say, 'Oh, it's only the major emitters who have to pay this,' there is an assumption that they absorb the costs. But they do not. They pass the costs down by the powerline to every house in Australia, so through the skirting boards of every house every person pays for this. They pay for it through every fashion and through every mechanism of their life: when they heat their house during winter and when they cool their house during summer, when they cook their dinner, when they vacuum their carpet and when they watch television. No matter what they do this new broad based consumption tax will be collecting money from them.

This is a broad based consumption tax for which we have something that is completely new in this country—a mechanism to put up tax without it ever going through both houses of the parliament. That is something that I never thought we would be voting for. The Climate Change Authority will just say that in their war against the climate—and these people are always warring against people and things—they have to take more action, so they will make a recommendation which becomes a regulatory instrument—that means it does not have to be voted on—and they will just jack up the tax rate. And where do they want to take the tax rate to? It will be for an 80 per cent reduction in emissions. It takes you back to the levels we were at in 1910, so you would have come here on a horse! How are we going to have an economy then? That is $131 a tonne. We are starting at $23 a tonne and it goes up to $131 a tonne. What works? Where will we be? What we are doing to our nation with this is just so insane.

This is the most peculiar thing that I have ever seen. Why? Because you have got a choice. You can have cheap wages or cheap power if you want to be on the manufacturing side of production in a global economy where they move products around. So if you say, 'I'm going to have dear power,' are you going to have cheap wages or are you going to shut the show down? They talk about green jobs. Where are they? Where are these mythical green jobs that are going to come over the horizon? Where are these jobs? Where are they right now?

Are you relying on this? Are you going to take the person who is on a substantial income? There are only two types of jobs in this world. There are jobs that pay well and jobs that pay very, very badly, and where you are going to end up is with the jobs that pay very, very badly.

It is the most annoying thing. When I think about the images from the past weekend and now the first vision will be of flying down here on a Virgin airliner and seeing all the Qantas planes parked on the tarmac and becoming new homes for swallows because apparently we can cool the climate but we cannot actually manage to keep planes in the air. The second will be of us debating a mechanism in this chamber by which, apparently, single-handedly we can change the temperature of the globe from a room in this building. And the final vision will be one of Kevin Rudd dancing in Perth. This is the manic, mad world that we have now arrived in. This is it.

The Greens, to their credit, have taken over the show. They are driving the agenda. They have said, to quote Senator Milne, 'This is the beginning of a new wave of thinking,' and it is—their thinking. They are running the show. That is the new wave of thinking. It is completely naive, and in some instances the reality of what happens to our country and where the semblances of power will be moved to will be almost sinister.

I have just listened to them discussing a four-degree temperature increase. That is very similar to what Peter Garrett said when he was talking about six-metre sea level rises by the end of the century. Six metres! Even the IPCC says that at best it could be 60 centimetres. This is always their way. First of all, make you fear; make fear and loathing. Make you scared. Make you upset—impending doom. Then moralise: 'We mustn't have this. We must moralise. You must be better than that. You must be righteous. You must be good.' Then there is the third part of it. The third in the troika of course is to create the mechanism behind it. To feel good, to be righteous, to stop all these terrible things happening, you must have a new tax. A new tax will absolve you of all your sins. A new tax in this Greens confessional will make you righteous, like them. A new tax will allow you once more to assuage your guilt, and you will now be an honourable person.

But whenever we take them to the prickly issue of how much this tax is going to cool the temperature of the globe, obviously the answer is nothing. Not one person, not the most ardent supporter of global warming, says that this tax will do anything. It does nothing to change the temperature of the globe. It is merely a gesture. And the inconvenient truth is this: they never admit that this does nothing to actually change the climate. It will most definitely make you poorer. It will most definitely put manufacturing out of production. It will most definitely change the whole scale of the social dynamic and where the power is situated. It will most definitely bring in a new tax that does not need to go through the parliament. But it is not going to affect the temperature.

If we had a tax on malaria, as mad as that is, it would actually cure people of malaria. It would actually save someone's life. If we had a tax on polio we could actually do something. As mad as it is, you could actually do something. But we have a tax that does nothing; it just makes you poorer. Again, you will be sending $56.9 billion a year overseas to buy carbon permits—$56.9 billion to Prince Umfufu from western Nigeria. If you just send him your bank account details he will send you some carbon permits. It will be the greatest scam on earth. Even by 2020, it will be $3.2 billion a year. I want you to ponder on what you could buy with $56.9 billion a year, the roads you could fix for $56.9 billion a year. This is the greatest social engineering exercise and it goes beyond social engineering just in our own country. This is the divesting of the wealth of the Australian people to send overseas, and we are just sitting back.

It is going to happen because Mr Windsor did a deal with the Labor Party and there are ramifications of that deal. I will go through the document. You have to understand that in the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills the government are talking at times about sending people to jail for 10 years for breaches. They do not care about it. This is the new insane world, the world where the Greens now bring in the guillotine and do not give you leave to speak. They are now also bringing about a whole new sort of world. There are real ramifications for people in this legislation. People will be dealing in something that formerly was free. A colourless, odourless gas that you are all breathing now and that was formerly free is now going to be something that is monitored, checked and charged for, and if you do not do the right thing they can send you to jail. Why are you letting them do that to your country? It is just the most peculiar thing that we have sat back idly and let this happen. It has become enmeshed. Everything that was formerly free that was given to people by nature, by God, by whatever blows your hair back that you think is associated with you, they are now charging you for. Vegetation is now owned by the state. Water is now owned by the state. And now you have the ownership of air; it is now owned by the state. Why are we doing this to our country? What is the purpose of all this? Why are we getting sucked into this?

By 2050 how much this will affect the Australian economy is equivalent to the size of the Australian economy now. By their own modelling, we will go back from our opportunity size by what the actual size of our economy is at the moment. So when you go out the door and look around and say, 'This is the size of the economy,' that is how much you are going to compromise for something that is not actually going to fix the temperature of the globe.

What does this affect? Let us just look at this building. It is going to affect steel. We will really struggle to compete and have a steel industry in our nation. People say, 'I believe in manufacturing.' If you believe in manufacturing, why would you bring in a tax against one of the most vital inputs? Underneath us is concrete. This will destroy the concrete industry; we will not have a concrete industry. Things were brought here on trucks. I know the TWU brought these seats here. I know that Senator Sterle brought these seats here. It is on transport. It is on the transport of things to here. You say, 'It's not on agriculture.' Yes, it is. It is on fertiliser. It is on power. It is on wire. It is on steel. It is on everything. And, ultimately, it can come in on agriculture. It said so in the document itself.

Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves? To be honest, I think this has been a great mechanism by the left wing, led by the Australian Greens, to bring in a sense of guilt and then behind that guilt place the new agenda of where they want things to go. There are contrarian views out there. There is a massive number of contrarian views out there by reputable people such as Professor Judith Curry and even by one of the lead scientists for the IPCC, Professor John Christy. He is an atmospheric scientist. He is a person who actually studies the atmosphere. He said, 'Yes, the world is warming but not nearly as much as we thought it was initially, and there is nothing you can do about it.' Certainly in Australia there is nothing we can do about it—but we just ignore that.

So what is the purpose of this tax? What is the purpose of this social re-engineering exercise? Let me go back to the issue of democratic right—the right of the Australian people. The Australian people said that they did not want this tax. Other people might have said that they wanted it; however, you must respect the right of the Australian people. If an election means anything, then one of the warrants that you give on your formative policy positions should be respected. You have to stand behind it, otherwise the whole purpose of politics and what people say to you behind a camera on election night is a farce. It means that you cannot believe anything. You might say, 'I believe in global warming'—sobeit. But the issue is that if a person makes a promise, if they make a statement, you expect as a matter of honour that that office is respected and they keep their word, because if they do not keep their word then you cannot trust anything that is said here. It all becomes irrelevant. Why did we let our nation get to a point where we basically allowed somebody to say something and then completely and utterly abscond from their promise? Why was their absconding from that promise then endorsed by the Greens and by others? Why would we do that? It makes the whole position farcical.

Australia, by the way, is not actually going to reduce carbon emissions with this tax. We will just end up buying credits from overseas. The carbon credit market is one of the most volatile in the world. It is the worst investment situation you could ever put yourself in. What are we putting in there? We are putting our whole nation in there.

The government says that without this tax you will not have certainty. I will give you a classic example of certainty, and here are two arguments for it. I am certain that under a coalition government the price of carbon permits in 10 years time will be zero, because they will not be there. The price will be zero. You can plan on that with absolute certainty under a coalition government. Pick any one of those who support this tax and ask: 'What will the price on carbon be in 10 years time? What will its price be in eight years time? Yet a certain group of people say that this is their argument for certainty. I think it is the most uncertain thing we could ever be involved with. How are we going to manage this? Who are the arbiters? The arbiters on how long you can be sent to jail if you get it wrong are all in here. And for what? We will be sending people to jail for something that was formerly free, that was just there, that was just part of it. No-one ever thought that breathing in and breathing out had an implicit cost. They have not decided at this point in time to charge for it, but they were thinking about charging for animals on farms. Do not think it is beyond them. They were thinking about that. They pushed away from it. They were going to start charging for cows and sheep. These are the same people who believe that cows, sheep and people are all sort of equivalent. So I suppose it makes sense in the long course of things that you would have to start charging people. Every time you breathe in, as Senator Williams will tell you, that is 386 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and every time you breathe out it is 40,000 parts per million. There must be an implicit cost there. You are not morally righteous: you are warming the globe as you breathe. This is absolutely and utterly absurd.

Of course, it is worse for regional Australia because the further you go the more for transport you pay: the greater the distance, the higher the cost. Electricity in the regions will also be at a higher cost. For what? So that we can assuage the moral righteousness of a certain group of people who, by making you feel guilty, have now managed to manufacture a tax and enmesh it in every corner of your life. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been gullible and have swallowed it.

I would say that always the first job of the fourth estate is to be sceptical. What is the crime of scepticism? The job of the fourth estate is to be sceptical. One of the philosophical virtues of the fourth estate is its scepticism. We do not need a fourth estate if people are not sceptical. If people just take whatever we say as the truth, scepticism is purposeless. I get terribly annoyed when it is said that a certain media house is not complying with an edict given to them by the Labor Party and the Greens—that the fourth estate dare be sceptical; dare to question. Of course they have to question. That is their job. But the more questions that are asked, the more answers we seem not to be provided with.

We are going down this absolutely manic path at a time of total and utter economic uncertainty and when really the only thing we should be focusing on is how we quarantine ourselves from the turmoil of Europe. We know that Europe is just another report away from another market fluctuation and a downturn. How do we quarantine ourselves from the loss of manufacturing jobs to South-East Asia? How do we quarantine ourselves from the exposures that we are currently creating? What are we doing that is prudent? What are we doing that is actually putting our nation in a strong place? Are we being conservative and provident, or are we on a frolic that is highly dangerous. Is it something that we can rewind from?

I might remind you that last week the government extended the debt by $200 million on Friday and then on Sunday they just flicked in, under 'Australian government securities outstanding', another $1.7 billion. We are now at $215-plus billion in gross debt. Our ceiling is $250 billion. We have just extended our ceiling because we bashed through it, otherwise the whole place would have shut down when we got to the limit of our overdraft. Now we are only $35 billion from the next ceiling and we are borrowing about $2 billion a week. If they do not extend the ceiling, we have got big problems. In an environment like that I would not be going down the path of a carbon tax. I would be doing everything in my power to try and make the business as strong as possible. I would be doing everything in my power to make sure we have the money in the future to support hospitals, to support manufacturing jobs and to support agriculture. I would be doing everything to batten down the hatches. If we go down this path, we are doing everything in our power to make the future of our nation a very scary place.

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

At times all of us, in our communities and our societies, are faced with enormous challenges, challenges which go beyond the ordinary in history and challenges which reach into the future and call for action that those in the future may not or will not be able to undertake if we do not take safeguarding action for them now. At such moments, history shows us that we see generated in the public discourse not only great effort to rise to those challenges but also great silliness and irresponsibility. If we have ever heard an example of such an irresponsible, silly and doctrinaire contribution, we have just heard one from the Leader of the Nationals in the Senate. I have been in this place for 15 years and I have never heard such an uninformed diatribe based on false information and calumny about the global scientific community—that is, the global think tank of humanity—from a politician, let alone a leader of a political party. The more the public gets to hear of what Senator Joyce has just said, the more they will understand how fraught the progress of this nation, the wealthiest nation per capita on the face of the planet, could be into the future.

In his earlier contribution Senator Abetz said that the environment of Australia was threatened by the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and the related package of legislation. He did not elaborate on that because his contribution in turn was simply to make statements but not come through with a factual basis, which we must provide if we are to serve this nation and its future dutifully, honourably and based on the information we have available to us. As Senator Milne said in her contribution, climate change is an enormous challenge facing humanity and it is up to us to address that challenge.

Given the constraints of an opposition that we have just heard two remarkable contributions from, this package is a testimony to the much greater intelligence and spirit there is in this nation. Today we have outside the parliament people from Environment Victoria, the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales and Say Yes to a Cleaner Australia with their depictions of the globe and the optimism of youth that we collectively, as human beings using our intelligence, can rise to address the awesome problem of climate change. It is in response to the community that this parliament is acting.

It is in response not least to the scientific community that this parliament is acting. New Scientist, which has an enormous history of contributing to the thinking of humanity and of collecting from the wider scientific community of the world, has this very week, as luck would have it, front-page coverage of the state of the science and of what we do and do not know about the onrush of climate change. Let me read out what we do know about climate change, which is accepted by the scientific community generally, as we address the problem through the legislative package now before the Senate. We know that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. I quote from New Scientist:

From melting glaciers and earlier springs to advancing treelines and changing animal ranges, many lines of evidence back up what the thermometers tell us—Earth is getting warmer. Over the 20th century, the average global temperature rose by 0.8°C.

There are two broad explanations: more heat is reaching Earth, or less is escaping. The first option can be ruled out.

…   …   …

Studies of the Earth's past climate tell us that whenever CO2 levels have risen, the planet has warmed. Since the beginning of the industrial age in the 19th century, CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased from 280 parts per million to 380 ppm. Satellite measurements now show both that less infrared of the specific frequencies absorbed by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is escaping the planet and that more infrared of the same frequencies is being reflected back to Earth's surface. While many factors affect our planet's climate, there is overwhelming evidence that CO2 is the prime cause of its recent warming.

It goes on to say that we also know the planet is going to get a lot hotter:

Doubling atmospheric CO2 on a planet with no water or life would warm it by about 1.2°C. Even without the complicating effects of aerosols, things aren't that simple on Earth.

Take water. Water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. When an atmosphere warms, it holds more of the stuff. As soon as more CO2 enters a watery planet's atmosphere, its warming effect is rapidly amplified.

New Scientist goes on to talk about tipping points, and I will come to those in a moment.

First, here is another thing that we do know: the sea level is going to rise many metres. I was with my partner, Paul, walking by Southport Lagoon in far southern Tasmania just a week ago. The biggest impression I had—this is a lagoon that is fed by a wide canal to the ocean—was that a recent storm had massively eroded the sand dunes around the perimeter of that inland waterway, washing out middens built up by Aboriginal people over thousands of years. With trees which had been in place for decades, if not centuries, falling down there onto the beach and into the lagoon, I thought about the extraordinary meeting, on the southern perimeter of that lagoon in 1793, of the scientists of d'Entrecasteaux's French expedition and the Lyluequonny Aboriginal people. I wondered what those scientists would have thought to have seen that storm surge come through, or the Aboriginal people, who were facing their own denouement about which they could do nothing. But the scientists of the world tell us there is a lot we can do, and we are in a position with eyes wide open, unlike the unfortunate Lyluequonny people, about what is coming and that we have a means to address it.

Inside that lagoon is a very clear warning to all of us about the already evident impact of climate change on our planet and how it is going to affect us into the future. We may dismiss the fact that a city of 13 million is facing extraordinary flooding at the moment as being related not to climate change but to a recurrence of flooding that occurs from time to time. We may dismiss the fact that recent drought events have killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and that Somalia currently has millions of people facing extraordinary circumstances of being unable to feed themselves. We may dismiss the fact that we are in what scientists call the sixth age of extinction, losing species at a greater rate than ever before in the whole of human history. But collectively it is not for us to put our heads in the sand, as the last speaker has done so extraordinarily, and just dismiss all of this to look after the economy, because in dismissing all of this we fail the economy as well.

I go back to the New Scientist article on the fact that sea levels may rise by many metres. It says:

When oceans warm, they expand. When ice on land melts or slides into the sea, that also pushes levels up. If all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted, sea level would rise more than 60 metres.

Today we are in a warm period between ice ages. In comparable interglacials in the past half million years, when temperatures were less than one degree warmer than they are now, sea level was around five metres higher. I remind the Senate that, yes, we are less than one degree cooler than that now, but we have risen nearly one degree, and at the rate we are going—and it is accelerating—it will not take long before we reach this one degree warmer on current trajectories. Around three million years ago, when temperatures were just one to two degrees centigrade higher than the average of the past couple of millennia, before humans began warming the climate, sea level was at least 25 metres higher than at present. Studies of sea level and temperature over the past million years suggest that each one degree rise in global mean temperature eventually leads to a 20-metre rise in sea level. That makes the effects of a rise of at least two degrees centigrade rather alarming; how alarming depends on how quickly the great ice sheets melt in response to warming, and that is an unknown.

However, we in the Greens have a very clear philosophical difference to the previous speaker, Senator Joyce. We believe that where you do not know the magnitude of the catastrophe that may overtake the planet, including humanity, you act on it. We believe in insurance policies. As a person takes an insurance policy on her or his house not knowing what the future may be in terms of some catastrophe overtaking that house, we believe we should take an insurance policy on the planet when we do know that the catastrophe is unwinding but we do not know the degree of it. It is pure common sense.

After the last election, when the people of Australia voted for a minority government and gave the Greens the balance of power in the Senate, it was incumbent on us to approach both alternative governments to seek out an arrangement. In that arrangement we wanted to tackle climate change, despite the fact that both leaders had said that in this period they would not. I want to pay tribute to Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She stepped up to the plate when the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, did not. She has been hectored, vilified and, as we have heard today, calumnied by people who should know better. It was a change of political circumstances unprecedented in Australian history, and she had the gumption to take that vote and, at cost to herself, take on the proposal from Senator Milne that we have a committee to resolve how we might best progress tackling climate change in this great parliament. This package is the result. Whatever else may happen, this package is going to be a tribute to two very formidable women in Australian politics; Senator Milne and Prime Minister Gillard. I congratulate Prime Minister Gillard, her environment minister, Mr Combet, and her team, who have gone through a long, rigorous but very sensible process to come up with this remarkable piece of legislation.

I also want to congratulate Senator Milne, whose work has so largely configured the outcome to the benefit of this nation. It is a remarkable tribute to application, which goes back decades now, to foreseeing the future and to acting sensibly and with probity to try to address problems which we might otherwise cursorily hand over to those who come after us. Senator Milne has decided that irresponsibility should be replaced by a carefully balanced and considered responsibility—that is, we do what we can within the democratic system, based on the fact that 1.7 million Australians voted for us to take action on this matter at the last election. Senator Milne has also asked me—and I want to endorse this—to pay a special tribute to Ben Oquist, our chief of staff, who has unfailingly been there throughout this process and whose brains, intelligence and integrity have been important to us as we have worked to have this outcome, and of course to the member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, who is newly elected to this parliament but whose role in getting this outcome has been so positive and important.

This package speaks for itself. It will stimulate the future economy. It helps move us across to a renewable energy future at a time when the conservatives in this parliament might not understand it. We get a better view of a more responsible conservative view when we look to the message from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr David Cameron, to Prime Minister Gillard in July this year, on news of this package—and how different this is from what we have heard from Senator Abetz and Senator Joyce. Prime Minister Cameron said:

I was delighted to hear of the ambitious package of climate change policy measures you announced on 10 July and wanted to congratulate you on taking this bold step …

He said it 'will add momentum to those, in both the developed and developing world, who are serious about dealing with this urgent threat'.

Hear, hear to Prime Minister Cameron, who himself, on this issue, has put in place targets—that is, a 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025—that are well beyond what this package of itself aims at. Nevertheless, as Senator Milne outlined in her speech to the Senate a short while ago, in this package, unlike the previous CPRS package, is the ability for advancement, the ability for a cogent improvement on the targets that are involved and on the stimulus to the new economy coming down the line and the new productivity that will come from that new economy so sensibly built into this vital piece of legislation. This legislation is arguably—along with advances in native title—the most important piece of legislation in my 15 years in this Senate.

The Australian people will no doubt have fears about the legislation. Those are coming from an opposition and sections of the media who simply dwell on the dollar rather than the quality of life. But I have a very simple question to put: what is the better prescription? Is it that we cost the polluters for the damage that they are doing to our present and the future of Australians and give that money to compensate households, as this package does, for any increase in prices for energy that will come out of the legislation? And it does more than that; it actually gives extra money, particularly to low-income earners. Or is it the prescription of Mr Abbott, which would take billions out of the pockets of householders through the tax system and Treasury, reward the polluters and say to them, 'Here, take this money and see if you can't reduce your pollution'?

Common sense is totally with this package from Labor and the Greens. As I began by saying, the silliness and irresponsibility is in the opposition package. I predict that we will see growing support for this package as Australians see that the predictions of Senator Joyce, which we just heard, simply are not carried through, any more than his earlier prediction that this legislation would see farmers having their land taken from them. It is an extraordinary form of political behaviour which may have short-term traction but in the long term demeans the whole process of a polity based on intelligence, being informed and taking responsible action. I congratulate the government, my Greens colleagues and the Independents, Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott, for delivering this package to this parliament, through which it will pass, to the benefit of this great nation for decades to come.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Climate change is real. It is not conjecture. It is not a socialist fringe theory. It is not a global conspiracy dreamed up by academics so that they can get more dollars in research grants. It is the accepted scientific wisdom of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. Earlier this year the Climate Commission published an overview of the current and most up-to-date understanding of climate science and the implications of this knowledge for societal responses. In its report The critical decade, the Climate Commission concluded that there is a broad consensus amongst climate scientists that the earth is warming rapidly as a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases. In other words, climate change is real.

Faced with this challenge, there are two things that a major political party can do. They can bury their heads in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening—they can allow the polluters to go on polluting and putting our environment and our economy at risk—or they can take action. That is why the Gillard government is acting: it is the right thing to do. The only action the federal opposition took on climate change was to knife Malcolm Turnbull in the back when he reached agreement with the government to pass the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. In other words, Tony Abbott came to the leadership on a platform of not acting on climate change. As always, he put his narrow political interest ahead of the national interest. The Gillard Labor government—

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President, I raise a point of order. This speaker is clearly reading every word, even the attacks on Mr Abbott. I ask you to draw her attention to the standing order which requires that speeches shall not be read.

Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As you are aware, a very flexible approach has generally been taken to this issue in the Senate. It is not a point of order I intend to uphold.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Gillard Labor government has chosen to put a price on carbon because the best advice we have is that it will cut pollution and drive investment in clean energy. Pricing carbon is not only the most cost-effective way to cut pollution; it is the best scheme to have if you want to link in with the global trade in carbon credits.

Our preference is to have an emissions trading scheme and we have worked constructively with the current parliament to implement one. We established the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee to negotiate a scheme which would be supported by the parliament. The Liberal-National coalition were invited to join that committee, but they refused. Unlike others in the parliament who chose to engage constructively with the process, they chose not to be involved but to be wreckers again. What hypocrisy—they refuse to be engaged in the process but they then complain about the outcome. The federal opposition remind me of the kid on the cricket ground—when he gets out, he does not just walk off; he takes his bat and ball and wants to close the whole game down.

Mr Abbott is intent on tearing up the clean energy future plan. He will not just abolish the price on carbon; he will render worthless carbon permits purchased by businesses in good faith—trashing their investments. He may have to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money compensating them. He will wind back billions of dollars of investment in jobs, industry and renewable energy. This action will damage Australia's economy and destroy jobs while the rest of the world moves to a clean energy future. Even worse, he will betray the most vulnerable Australians—families, pensioners and self-funded retirees—by ripping hundreds of dollars out of their pockets. And that is before he slugs each household $1,300 to fund his own flawed direct action scheme, a scheme which will line the pockets of the big polluters. It is interesting that the Liberal Party, a party whose traditions lie in free market ideology, are now advocates for government intervention in preference to a market based mechanism. Their position on climate change is so neo-Marxist that it really makes you wonder whether the modern Liberal Party stands for anything.

Our carbon price is not one which has to be paid for by ordinary Australians; it will be paid by 500 of Australia's biggest polluters. From the money raised, we will fund assistance for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries, we will invest in clean energy and we will provide generous compensation for households. We have developed this household assistance package in recognition of the fact that, while households will not pay for a carbon price directly, the big polluters may choose to pass some of their costs on to consumers. Other polluters will invest in cleaner ways of doing business—minimising their carbon price liability and making them more competitive in the long term. The compensation will be targeted at those who need it the most, with the most generous assistance to pensioners and other low-income earners. Recent modelling by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling found that 68 percent of households would be better off after both the cost impacts of a carbon price and the benefits of household assistance were taken into account. That means that there is now evidence from both Treasury and NATSEM showing that about two-thirds of Australians will actually have more money in their pockets after the implementation of this policy.

Earlier I heard Senator Joyce ask, 'Where are the clean energy jobs?' Currently, there are about 400 altogether. There is total capital investment of $424 million, Senator Joyce might be interested to know, and we are avoiding around 423,000 tonnes of carbon pollution. This is equivalent to 60,000 homes being powered through clean energy. In the future, more jobs will be created, the total capital investment will rise by $385 million and we will be able to power around 138,000 homes. The reality is that Labor's clean energy future plan goes beyond cutting carbon pollution and supporting manufacturing industries. We are commencing a transition which will generate new clean technology investments and strengthen our economy by supporting Australian jobs.

Senator Joyce and others on that side have also previously asked, 'Given that Australia's emissions are only 1½ per cent of global emissions, by how much will this legislation reduce global emissions?' That question is fairly disingenuous. It is like an ordinary taxpayer asking: 'How are my taxes going to upgrade the Pacific Highway? How is my small contribution to the nation's total tax take going to make a difference? No-one would notice if I didn't pay my tax, so why should I have to?' I think a more relevant question is the one China and India might ask when they look across at Australia: 'They are wealthy and industrialised and have had the benefits of cheap power in developing their industry and wealth for over a century—we want that kind of wealth for our citizens too, so why should we take action to reduce our emissions when they won't?'

Another more relevant question is the one our neighbours in New Zealand might ask when they look across the Tasman: 'We have an emissions trading scheme in place, but Australia isn't taking any action to reduce their emissions—why should we bear the burden?' There are 30 European countries which might ask the same question. Those countries are looking to Australia, a country which usually shows leadership on the world stage, to catch up with the rest of the world. They are looking to Australia to join the developed world in accounting for pollution and they are looking to Australia to make up for 12 years of inaction under the Howard government and to finally put a price on carbon. While we will make the big polluters pay for every tonne of carbon pollution they produce and put the money towards assistance for households, jobs and clean energy, a Tony Abbott led coalition government would slug households $1,300 each and give the money to big polluters. Under our package, most Australians will be better off, meaning they will actually have more money in their pockets once the cost of a carbon price and the household assistance package are taken into account. Unlike our package, there is no compensation under the coalition's plan for their carbon tax. There are only two ways to pay for Tony Abbott's carbon tax—increased taxes or reduced services.

In Mr Abbott we have a Leader of the Opposition who constantly flip-flops on whether he believes in climate change; a Leader of the Opposition who professes support for a carbon tax and then pretends that he is vehemently against pricing carbon; a Leader of the Opposition who commits to the same emissions reduction target as the government and then questions why the target is necessary; and a Leader of the Opposition who thinks that the best way to reduce Australia's carbon emissions is to slug hardworking Australians $1,300 per household and hand it to big polluters.

The fact is that Mr Abbott and his colleagues will move whichever way the political wind is blowing. The only thing that they really stand for is winning the next election at any cost. At least Australians know what we on this side of the chamber stand for. We stand for moving to a clean energy future. I commend the bills to the Senate.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is interesting to note that Labor Party speakers cannot even use their 20 minutes to try to justify this tax based on a lie. This clean energy package of bills is all about bad policy based on a lie. Never will the Labor Party forget that, before the last election, their leader, Ms Gillard, promised Australians hand on heart:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

Her deputy leader confirmed that solemn promise to the Australian public but here we are in the Senate, just a little over a year later, debating the very tax that Ms Julia Gillard and her team—all of the speakers who have spoken so far this morning—promised would not be implemented. I might ask Senator Bilyk, while she is here, why she campaigned at the last election on a policy of no carbon tax, yet here she is today speaking in favour and voting in favour of the very tax she, along with her leader, promised not to introduce. I challenge every one of those senators sitting opposite me, in the Labor Party, to honour the solemn pledge each of them made to their constituency when promising never to introduce this tax.

This is a bad tax. It is a tax based on a lie. It will be opposed by the coalition and in government we will repeal it. The next election will be a referendum on the carbon tax and it seems likely that Labor Party candidates will be annihilated. Can Labor Party senators tell me here and now, today, whether the Labor Party in the Senate, or those few senators who will be left, will vote against the clearly expressed will of the Australian people? I challenge any of them to tell me, hand on heart, that they will oppose the will of the Australian people. But can you believe anything any member of the Australian Labor Party ever tells us, after the promise a year ago that there would be no carbon tax?

I am a senator for Queensland and this is a states house. The carbon tax is a toxic tax for Queenslanders. Queenslanders understand the impact this tax will have on jobs in Queensland and on the state government—which is already struggling because of its financial ineptitude, and it will be even worse off when this tax comes in and makes investment in mining industries, particularly coalmining, less attractive.

There are many arguments against this carbon tax. Senator Bilyk was telling us that climate change is real. Well hello, Senator Bilyk! I do not know who she is arguing with. Very few Australians do not acknowledge that the climate is changing. Indeed, the climate has been changing for millions of years and it will continue to change as it has done for millions of years. But has mankind impacted upon climate change? Quite frankly, I do not know. There are scientists who say it has but there are equally credible scientists who say it has not. I have referred on many occasions to a graph published by CSIRO which shows that 140,000 years ago our tidal levels were about where they are now. This graph shows that over 120,000 years the tides fell quite dramatically, until about 20,000 years ago when they were 140 metres below the current sea level. In the last 20,000 years, the sea level has increased back up to where it is today—and, I might say, where it was 140,000 years ago.

What caused that rapid increase from 20,000 years ago to today?

Was it man's industrialisation of the world? Of course not. Time and time again, I have asked the climate change minister, and anyone who can proffer an opinion, to explain to me why that has happened. But of course no-one has an answer. Professor Flannery, the Labor Party's hand-picked head of the Climate Commission, is so worried about tidal increases that he has bought a property on the banks of the Hawkesbury River! I was warned at estimates the other day that I should not attack Professor Flannery because he is a significant Australian and he does not deserve to be attacked. Sorry, Professor Flannery, when you inject yourself into a partisan political debate under the guise of some sort of climate expertise then you are the same as the rest of us, and you subject yourself to the rigours of parliamentary debate. If Professor Flannery is so concerned about tidal increases, I would like to know why he chose to buy a property on the banks of the Hawkesbury River.

We have heard all the arguments from the Labor Party and the Greens about how this tax is necessary. Of course with Australia emitting less than 1.4 per cent of world emissions, anything we do, particularly cutting our emissions by five per cent, is not going to make one iota of difference to the world. But the Greens and the Labor Party think that, because we go to Durban and say to the rest of the world, 'Look at us, we've introduced the world's first economy-wide tax at a price that nobody else is charging,' that is going to make a difference, and that China, America, Canada and Japan are going to say, 'If Senator Brown is leading a delegation and he says that this is what Australia has done then we are going to follow suit.' How ridiculous and how arrogant of the Greens and the Labor Party to believe that that might be the case. As we know, Senator Brown wants to lead Ms Gillard around by the hand at Durban and indicate just what a great fellow he is and how he is running the country—how he is destroying the economy of our country.

We all know that Australia's emissions will actually go up from 578 million tonnes to 620 million tonnes between now and 2020, even with this great new tax on everything. Far from Australia leading the world, we know that the Canadian Prime Minister was here the other day and his foreign minister, very diplomatically but no less succinctly, said, 'In Canada and the United States there will never be an emissions trading scheme or this sort of carbon tax.' All that the Greens and the Labor Party are doing to Australia is making our industries uncompetitive. It is shipping jobs offshore, as we have already seen happening in the steel industry and in the cement industry. You can name any industry that involves manufacturing and power and you will see the jobs going offshore. Is that a worry to Senator Brown and the Greens? Of course not. They have made it their goal to destroy Australian industries and you can see that with Australia's forestry industry, one of the best managed forestry industries in the world—a sustainable industry creating jobs, employment and wealth for Tasmania and for Australia that the Greens have single-handedly destroyed. They have made us rely on wood imported from countries which do not have the environmental regulations that Australia has.

In this debate, Senator Brown quoted all sorts of very clever scientists, but what he did not say and what he chooses to ignore is that the Australian people have innate common sense. They understand that you cannot keep taxing Australian industry and expect the country to continue to prosper. When nothing we do will have any impact on the emissions of other countries, why are we doing this? You can only infer that the Greens are on their goal to destroy Australian industry and make this a welfare nation that can be easily controlled, because the government controls every aspect of welfare payments and therefore every aspect of community life. Senator Brown tells us that people are very concerned about this, yet he chooses to ignore opinion polls. We do not always agree with opinion polls, but we do understand the trends and the trends are that over the last 12 months even fewer Australians have any confidence that a carbon tax will make any difference to the changing climate of the world.

The Australian people are quickly waking up to all of the scaremongering from the Greens and their climate-change hooray gang in the background. I want to mention some of the myths that the Greens continue to put out and rely upon. They tell us that putting a price on carbon will result in lower carbon dioxide emissions. They conveniently forget that Norway, for example, has had an effective tax on carbon dioxide since the early 1990s and the result has been a 15 per cent increase in emissions. So if we put a tax on Australia's emissions, is that going to reduce emissions? If we follow the Norwegian example then it will mean that they will continue to increase. The Greens tell us that we have to catch up with the rest of the world who are already taxing carbon dioxide emissions. As we all know, they are not. Sure different countries put in some small proposals and support renewable energy, as we do in Australia and indeed as the Howard government did. We know that neither the United States nor Canada, for sure, or China or India are ever going to have a nationwide tax on carbon emissions which will exceed $23 a tonne, which is where the Australian tax starts. People should not miss the fact that the $23 a tonne is only the start. It will go up and up until Australia becomes an economic wasteland.

I have already mentioned the Greens mantra that Australia should show leadership by setting the example for other countries to follow. Self-delusion does not come any stronger than that. We had all of these arguments before Copenhagen, you might recall, when the former failed climate change minister kept telling us, along with Senator Bob Brown and Senator Milne, that Copenhagen would be the be-all and end-all, that Australia would be leading the push. Those of us who follow these things with even a cursory interest predicted that Copenhagen would go nowhere, and it went nowhere. It put the lie to the proposition that the Greens and their mates in the Labor Party continue to put that, because Australia does something, everyone else will follow suit.

I am not convinced that man's actions have increased emissions that destroy our climate. I never argue that. I remain to be convinced. What I do say is that Australia should not be doing this in advance of the rest of the world. If India, China, the United States, Canada or the Europeans genuinely had done something in this way, then sure Australia should follow along, but to lead the charge is just economically illiterate and dangerous, and shows self-delusion coming through from some members of the Labor Party.

I know most members of the Labor Party and I say without any fear of genuine contradiction that most members of the Labor Party have this same view but they are locked into Ms Gillard wanting to retain the trappings of prime ministership. To do that she had to sup with the devil, she had to come with whatever deal she could get to retain the office of Prime Minister. One of those things was to break, without so much as a thought it seemed, her solemn promise to the Australian public that she would never introduce a carbon tax.

We have the Greens and the Labor Party saying, 'But John Howard changed his mind.' Sure he did on the GST, but he went to an election. He said to the people of Australia: 'I now believe that the GST will be a good thing. Here's what we're going to do. Here's our detailed proposal in black and white. We're going to an election. We think it's good for the country. If you agree with us, vote us back into government. If you don't agree with us, vote us out.' And of course history shows that the Australian public were convinced that that was a good idea.

If this carbon tax is as good as Senator Bob Brown says it is and if it is as good as Mr Combet says it is, let us go to an election. If so many people support it, as Senator Brown says they do, what fear does he have about going to an election? Let the people of Australia decide. Heavens: this is still a democracy, although we do not know how long it might continue that way if the Greens and the Labor Party continue to be in charge of the Treasury benches. Can anyone tell me why the Labor Party and the Greens do not take this to an election to let the people decide? I know why they will not—because they can read the polls. Any of them who bother talking to their constituency know what the people of Australia think—because people in their constituency offices, people at the markets, people wherever they go are telling Labor Party members of parliament—and I have heard it happen—that this is a toxic tax which will do nothing for climate change but will do everything about exporting Australian jobs and wealth overseas.

I want to talk about the impact of this carbon tax on tourism, an industry which is very important to my state of Queensland. The cost to the tourism industry is just astronomical. It will be cheaper to fly from Melbourne to Fiji than to fly from Melbourne to Cairns. Why? Because Australia will have a carbon tax on fuel used within Australia, but if you fly overseas there will not be a carbon tax. There are many examples, which time does not permit me to deal with.

I will continue repeating, until the people of Australia have a chance to give their approval or otherwise to this package, that this is bad policy which is based on a lie. Australians will never forgive Ms Gillard and the Labor Party for deliberately lying to the Australian public and then breaking that solemn promise the minute her future and her tenure at the Lodge came into question. This package of bills must be opposed.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I was in grade 5, I had a very forward-thinking teacher who taught us about what was known then as the 'greenhouse effect'. A number of years later—I am not prepared to say how many years—it gives me great pleasure to be standing in this chamber talking about a package of bills which will do something about climate change, as we now know it. I am also very proud that the Greens have been at the forefront, driving policy initiatives and policy change in this country that will have long-reaching, positive impacts not only on how we address climate change but also on the economy of this country. Far from the position that Senator Macdonald just put about the Greens destroying industries, this is about generating new, clean, green industries that will take us well and truly into this century and into the century beyond. What the dinosaurs of the past think about where we are going in the future in fact reflects a misunderstanding of not only the science and impacts of climate change and how we need to adapt and change our economy so that it meets the needs of our community into the future but also a planet with a low-carbon economy. The way that we do that is by changing things now so that we have those clean, green jobs or green collar jobs, as some people like to put it, in the future. Those industries that Senator Macdonald was talking about are industries of the past. They are not what is going to deliver us an economy into the future. That economy will also not be the thing that determines how we live, but how we live will determine our economy.

I would like to go to some of the issues of climate change. As I said, I have been aware of the issues around the greenhouse effect or, as we now call it, climate change for a very long time. You cannot help when you live in Western Australia but to know that the impact of climate change is real and is happening now. I was at a hearing not long ago of the grain inquiry that the Rural Affairs and Transport References Committee is conducting. We asked an infrastructure provider—in fact, it was CBH in my home state of Western Australia—whether they had been noticing the impacts of climate change and were planning to deal with it. They said, 'Not only are we planning to deal with it, we are dealing with it right now.' They are changing their infrastructure and investment in infrastructure and moving it because of the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Western Australia right now. This is not something that has happened over eons. It has been a shorter time frame in which humans have had an impact on our climate. This has happened over a generation. I come from an agricultural background. I studied agricultural science at university. I know what was happening to our agriculture then and I know what is happening now. This impact has happened over a generation in Western Australia.

I have raised some of the impacts of climate change innumerable times in this chamber. But just to remind people, we are seeing a rapid decline in rainfall in the south-west of Western Australia. We are in our third step-down in decline in rainfall in Western Australia. Fortunately, in the mid-1990s the Water Authority of Western Australia, as it was then called, and the government at the time recognised that something serious was happening to our rainfall and started planning for that. However, we are constantly having to play catch-up because we just do not have the resources to continue to manage the decline in rainfall properly. This has resulted in some catchments having a decrease in run-off by up to 60 per cent. We have seen average temperatures in Western Australia increasing significantly over the last 40 years. We have seen rainfall decrease and our run-off to dams decrease. We have seen the average sea temperature in Western Australia in the south-west region increase substantially over the last 30 or 40 years.

There is absolutely no doubt for those of us who live in Western Australia and pay attention to these things that our climate is changing. This has profound effects for everybody in Western Australia. It has profound effects for our forest ecologies, our ecosystems, our agricultural systems—and I will come back to that in a minute—our rainfall events, the way that we manage our rainfall in the north, the agricultural systems that we will develop in the north and health in the north, with the recognition that diseases are going to move further south. For example, encephalitis is going to move further south. We are stupid if we do not recognise, accommodate and plan for it now. It makes no sense not to.

While we are looking at our agricultural systems in Western Australia, it is acknowledged that Western Australian farmers are some of the most adaptable on the planet. They have had to be because they have had to cope with low fertility in their soils and the types of rainfall events that we get, with virtually all winter rainfall in the south-west. It is generally acknowledged that they are very adaptable, but it is also now acknowledged that they have passed the point of being able to adapt to the impacts of climate change without significant change to, for example, research to develop more crops and different ways of farming to adapt to the fact that they are suddenly getting frosts in some areas and their crops cannot cope with that and that in other areas they are not getting frosts and the stone fruits, for example, cannot cope with that. This is real and it is happening now. Those who do not acknowledge it have their heads in the sand. This is about moving into the future and giving our farmers and our communities a future. I am extremely concerned.

While I am focusing here largely on Western Australia, I was at the opening of CHOGM last week and it brought home again to me the impacts that our Indian Ocean island neighbours and Pacific island neighbours are facing. They are facing the real impacts of climate change now. On several occasions—and I will probably hear it again today, tomorrow or the next day—Senator Boswell has come in here and said that he has not seen the sea level rise. Maybe he should take a trip to Kiribati or Tuvalu and have a look at how their agricultural systems are failing because of salt water egress and to see the sea level rise and people's homes being washed away. I can recommend a very good documentary where he can see islanders having to move their homes off islands to other areas of Papua New Guinea. It is only about 12 minutes long. It should be a very informative time for Senator Boswell and his colleagues, who think that climate change is not real and that rising sea levels are not having an impact. Climate change needs to be addressed now. These bills will establish the framework to get that going.

In my portfolio areas I have been particularly concerned about the impact of climate change on families and households, in particular on low-income households, and how they will be able to adapt to the impacts of climate change, including the inevitable increases in the price of electricity, which has risen substantially in Western Australia—before people start carrying on about how these measures will increase the price of electricity and the cost of transport, because low-income households are very often on the fringes of metropolitan areas, many of which are served poorly by public transport. Excellent work on mapping some of those lower socioeconomic communities and their ability to access transport has come out of the University of Queensland. We need to address these issues. Access to food security is also a very important issue. Food is the most vulnerable area and it will be affected first by climate change. That is why I am very pleased that, in this package of bills, there is a package to assist families, and in particular low-income households. I am particularly pleased that low-income households will be eligible for assistance that at least offsets the expected average cost impact.

The package also includes support for individuals with a concession card or who have a medical condition resulting in a higher electricity costs. They will be eligible for extra financial resources. We know that half of the revenue from the sale of permits will be distributed to households. There are also the Community Energy Efficiency Program, the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program and the Household Energy and Financial Sustainability Scheme, which will help low-income households find more sustainable ways to manage their energy consumption, and the Remote Indigenous Energy Program. There are a number of these packages available to help low-income families address the energy efficiency issues that we absolutely need to be addressing.

We know that energy use is a high proportion of everyday expenses for low-income households. This package has enabled us to take a much closer look at the energy use of low-income households. We have a better understanding now about it—for example, people used to think that age pensioners used less electricity, but little thought was given to the fact that they are actually at home all day, so they are using power all day. We know that single parents with teenage kids use a large amount of electricity, because like any other household with teenagers they use TVs and computers. They need a different form of support to enable them to use energy more efficiently. We also know that it has been hard for low-income households to be able make changes such as using more energy efficient products, generating more electricity power on their own and taking advantage of the schemes that have been in place in the past. This new scheme will enable those low-income households to be able to do that.

What does concern me, however, and we have been very upfront about saying it, is that while this package does assist low-income households, and I am very pleased that it does, there is an issue around fairness. While the package does provide assistance to people on low incomes who will be exposed to price increases, it is not fair to unemployed people, sole parents and students. That is because of the inequitable way that income support payments are made now. There are issues around different payments to particular groups on income support, and we believe they absolutely need to be addressed. As part of this discussion process for these bills, it was raised with the government that the difference in payments needs to be addressed, because people will get different benefits out of this package. For example, the buffer for unemployed households without children is $101 per year for singles and $108 for couples, which is much less than it is for age pensioners, for whom it will be $134 and $226, respectively. That is a concern for us, because we know that the impact on those unemployed households will be just the same as for other households. We asked for that to be addressed in this package. It has been argued that the right place to discuss that was at the tax summit. We took it up at the tax summit. We have raised the issue on many occasions and will continue to. We are deeply concerned that those on Newstart, single parents and students will be disproportionately impacted because of the disproportionate approach to income support for those groups. That approach needs to be addressed. We have put on record our support for the call by the Australian Council of Social Services and other groups for the government to address that. I understand the argument that this particular package is not the right place in which to address an entrenched problem with our income support system, but I cannot understand why that issue is not being addressed as a matter of urgency elsewhere, because it is a systemic approach in our income support system at this stage. We support ACOSS's call to address this. We support its call for a $50-per-week increase in the allowance. That was recommended by the Henry review. It is an issue that has been raised repeatedly, because this differential in payments for those on income support in this country is becoming increasingly unfair. These families are going to have cost increases, and we believe these need to be recognised fully by addressing this differential between payments. We will continue to advocate that this issue be addressed.

Having said that, I am very pleased that this package includes support for low-income households. The cost to households across Australia will be more than adequately compensated for; in fact, there is a buffer in there. Not only is that issue addressed but, when you look at the big picture, this is about creating a better world for all Australians. It is about providing a solid, sustainable base for our economy into the future, and that will benefit all families—all Australians. So we are benefiting on both counts. We have families, individuals and households getting support through this package, and we also have a future in which we will be more confident that we can address the impacts of climate change and have a clean, green economy that is at the forefront globally.

Rather than just being behind this issue globally, we are at the forefront of this. We are positioning ourselves to be at the forefront of driving the new technology, of capturing the benefits of the new technology in a clean, green economy. We are at the forefront of that. If we continue to position ourselves well, we will gain maximum benefit for this country and for future generations in that new economy, rather than following behind and picking up the dregs after others have taken advantage of this particular time in history. This is a time that future generations will look back on and say: 'They actually made the change when they needed to make the change. They recognised that climate change is real, they recognised the need for change and they made that change at that time.' I commend these bills to the chamber.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In making a contribution to the debate on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills, I will be making most of my remarks about the great state of Western Australia, our economy and the impact of climate change. We know that WA is a very strong and prosperous state, but it is also one that is very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. However, the very good news is that our own Treasury's modelling shows that the WA economy will continue to grow, even after a carbon price is introduced, and that Western Australia will outperform other Australian states. Contrary to Tony Abbott's dire predictions, the Australian economy as a whole will also continue to grow after a price is put on carbon. While our economy continues to grow at a rate that is the envy of the rest of the world, we will also be doing something to protect the environment that supports life—all of our lives.

It would be irresponsible for Western Australians like me to put our sandgroper heads in the sand on this issue because we do not want to confront the fact that we have a highly successful but very carbon intensive economy. We must remove this link between our economic growth and emissions growth. After all, in my opinion, pricing carbon is not about putting WA's carbon intensive industries out of business—not at all. It is about giving them the very best possible opportunity to adapt into the future. It is about providing an incentive to make change and become more efficient and less polluting. Businesses are always keen to cut their input costs, so putting a price on pollution has been proven to be the best way of providing an incentive to create less of it. It is about getting Australian business ready for the future—a prosperous clean energy future. It is the same for Western Australia's households. Many ordinary WA households have already installed energy efficient light bulbs and hot water systems, and some have already installed electricity-generating solar panels.

There have been numerous hysterical claims that pricing carbon will have an unbearable impact on our cost of living, that industry and jobs will be destroyed. I have even had people writing to me and saying it will destroy the Australian way of life. This is simply not true—and shame on those opposite for contributing to this scaremongering. Overall, the price on carbon will see prices rise by less than one per cent. That is less than a cent for every dollar spent. In fact, for most items it is a lot less than that. The price of food will go up, on average, less than $1 a week and clothing by less than 10c; some prices will go up a bit more.

The carbon price is not a tax on Australians. It will be paid by around 500 of the largest polluters in the country. But, because some industries will pass on price impacts to their customers, we are giving people tax cuts and payments. In fact, nine out of 10 households will get a combination of tax cuts and increased payments. This assistance will mean that households that manage to cut their energy costs will be able to pocket the difference. That is more than I can say for the actions of WA's Premier, Colin Barnett, who has increased household electricity costs by more than 50 per cent over the past three years, with no support for even our most vulnerable pensioners, let alone families. So shame on you, Mr Barnett.

We know that much of the world is already taking action on climate change and that 90 countries, including all major emitters, have pledged action on climate change, including our top trading partners: China, Japan, the US, the Republic of Korea and India. Another six of our top 20—New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands—are all implementing or piloting carbon trading schemes. Ten states in the US have emissions trading schemes and an 11th, California—which is, I think, the world's eighth largest economy—is about to follow. In Canada, many provinces are also taking action. So I am sick and tired of hearing those opposite say on the one hand that they believe human induced climate change is real but on the other hand that what Australia does to reduce emissions does not matter anyway. It does matter.

If you accept the science, as I do and the government does, then we know we need to act on climate change and we need to start acting now. What Australia does matters very much. It matters because if a rich nation like Australia does nothing, having built its wealth from cheap, non-renewable energy, then the rest of the world can point to us as an excuse to also do nothing and certainly not more than they are already doing. It matters because we are among the first countries to suffer the very real impacts of climate change, with scientists telling us to expect longer droughts, continued acidification of our oceans, more severe cyclones, more natural disasters and the destruction of species and ecosystems. I cannot think of anything that could be a greater threat to the Australian way of life.

There is perhaps one greater threat, and that is Mr Tony Abbott's sham policy of direct action, which is nothing more than a plan to tax WA families about $1,300 by the year 2020, money he simply wants to hand over to the big polluters. It is a nonsense policy and it is not a policy that will work. Mr Abbott has been unable to find a single economist that supports his climate change policy, so frankly I am stunned that coalition members, who supposedly support a free market, would think that such a plan has any merit. Personally I am proud to be part of a political party that is taking action to ensure Australia has a clean energy future.

The Gillard government is acting on climate change. We are acting because it is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do for our environment, our economy and our society. It is sensible policy and it is in the national interest. That is why we are acting. We have listened to the scientific evidence that says climate change is real and that carbon pollution is contributing to it. We have listened to economists who tell us that putting a price on carbon is the cheapest and most efficient way to cut pollution. As I said earlier, we must remove the link between our economic growth and emissions growth. This change will not happen overnight. We need to give our economy and our community the opportunity to adjust to this change. That is what our clean energy future plan is designed to do. It will be cheaper in the long run if we start now.

For a state like Western Australia, with its high emissions profile, it is important that we price pollution now. Western Australia will still be mining, refining and exporting long into the future, and companies will now have a great incentive to do it more efficiently. The problem is that, if we do not act to price pollution, we run a very high risk of our local economy being dependent on out-of-date and highly polluting ways of doing things. This approach would be a complete dead-end for Western Australia, WA jobs and WA industries. It would be a terrible outcome for Western Australia, but it is not the worst case scenario.

Imagine a world where we do not act on climate change, where we do not price pollution, where we and the rest of the world do not do enough to help protect our fragile environment from climate change, where other countries point the finger at a rich nation like Australia—with a high standard of living and high per capita emissions—and say, 'If Australia won't act then why should we?' This would be a complete disaster for Western Australia. I despair to think what this would mean for our West Aussie lifestyle and jobs, not to mention farming and all of the plants and critters that form part of our wonderfully diverse environment.

Thankfully, I believe we can do this. We can price carbon. We can look after our environment and we can ensure Western Australians can look forward to a prosperous future. Western Australia needs climate change action. Despite our intensive economy, our fragile environment means we need a clean-cut energy future as much or even more than the rest of the country does. Climate change is a serious and imminent threat to many more of WA's unique natural assets, located through the breadth and length of our wonderful state, and a threat to our unique way of life, tourism, agriculture and many economic opportunities.

I believe scientists when they tell us that Western Australia is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change impacts in the developed world. Even after what has seemed a relatively wet winter, our thirsty land has soaked up most of the rain that has fallen. There has been very little run-off for Western Australia's dams. Our climate is getting hotter and the south-west of our state is getting drier. We have had a shocking decline in rainfall over the past 30 years.

Science tells us that climate change will lead to the loss of many native animals and plants. Larger changes could sound the death knell for WA's World Heritage listed Ningaloo Reef. We have already warmed the planet by a degree over the last century. There is nothing in the environmental record in terms of ice cores, tree rings or sediments that you will find that reflects the scientific record of today. You have to go back 15 million years before you can find a record of CO2 in the atmosphere that is as high as it is today. We will already have to live with the impacts of climate change. The window for action to prevent these impacts has sadly already closed.

Debate interrupted.