Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pride that I rise today to commend the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and associated bills to the Senate. I was a teenager at high school, just forming my political views, when Senator Brown here, the Leader of the Australian Greens, first brought the issue of global warming into this place and spoke about rising sea levels. That was in 1996. I witnessed a lack of response from the federal parliament, from the major parties, from business groups and from the media. Like many young people, I resolved to follow the lead of Senator Brown and my other Greens colleagues, including of course Senator Milne, in demanding more from our nation's political leadership.

My peer group and I grew from students into adults and brought with us our clear and constant concern about the impending crisis of climate change. To us, it was not a far-off rumour or a laughable myth. There were reputable scientists telling us that greenhouse gas emissions were causing ice to melt, warmer climates, increased ocean temperatures and acidification, damaged ecosystems and species demise. But for many years it appeared that the major parties were not listening or were not willing to boldly tackle the problem—global, complicated and challenging as it was.

How fortunate, then, that the Australian public saw another way. In a wonderful twist of fate, the last election saw five new Greens MPs, four in this place and one in the other, and a minority government, allowing us to put this issue squarely on the political agenda through the formation of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. The work my colleagues put into that process was very welcome and I give great thanks to them. The end result of that 10-month process is the raft of clean energy legislation before the Senate today. It comes to our chamber sculpted and reinforced by long hours of intensive consultations with scientists, economists, business stakeholders and community members, all willing to do what they can to make sure we do not continue to delay taking action. It is a great thing indeed to be a senator at the time the federal parliament is finally taking this historic reformist step in the defence of our biosphere and all the creatures living within it.

However, it is not just Senator Brown, Senator Milne and all those involved with the multiparty committee who should stand up and take a bow. Young Australians have been particularly vocal on this issue and their involvement, the raising of their voices and their demand for action have been crucial in bringing forward this momentous reform. As the Greens spokesperson for youth, I have watched with interest, and often admiration, as the case for urgent and immediate action has been prosecuted in diverse ways by the next generation of Australian leaders. From online campaigns to parliamentary delegations, from forums and workshops to rock concerts and flash mob dances, a whole generation across the Australian community has told us, the law makers, that they expect Australia to address climate change and to stop delaying action. It will be the fulfilment of our obligation to them and to future generations when the clean energy legislation takes effect in July 2012.

The urgency of this action stretches far beyond Australia's sovereign borders. It directly involves the lives and livelihoods of the world population. As a proud migrant country with flourishing multicultural communities, we should be more aware than ever of the risks posed to our fellow nations. Climate change will ultimately affect people as much as environments and ecologies. Unfortunately, it will most affect the poorest of all. Back in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that the greatest single consequence of climate change could be on human migration, with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruption. This prediction is already coming true. Just two weeks ago, Sir John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government, made the alarming observation:

Since 2008, on average, 25 million people a year have been displaced by extreme weather events, and that's in a world of relatively benign climate change.

The effect of climate change on migration patterns and regional economies has been significant so far. Even with immediate action by the international community, it will only worsen. Any developed and geographically well-situated nation which is not willing to take action on climate change will have to be fully prepared to support and assist environmental refugees who may be displaced from highly vulnerable localities such as Singapore, Shanghai, Calcutta, Dhaka and much of the Vietnamese delta.

There will of course be many people who will be too impoverished, politically disenfranchised or ill-equipped to seek haven elsewhere. The peer reviewed report Migration and global environmental change, released two weeks ago by Sir John in association with 350 specialists in 30 countries, says that by 2060 up to 170 million people will be trapped in low-lying coastal floodplains subject to extreme weather such as floods, storm surges, landslides and rising sea levels. Further complications like food and fresh water scarcities, border disputes and economic and social tension would create conditions ripe for instability and conflict. For our public discourse, at least, Australia is permanently oversensitive about the arrival by boat of a few thousand asylum seekers per year. How will we cope when the numbers of desperate people are much higher? We need to put this all into perspective.

As a good global citizen Australia has a responsibility to other nations to do what it can, and so it is exciting to see that the clean energy legislation before the Senate today. It has been widely admired as one of the most effective and well-structured programs for transforming the Australian economy for a cleaner, greener future. It will place us as a leader in the world. It will place our next generation on a good footing to know that we are taking the action necessary and it will give them the opportunity to participate.

Australia does not emit its fair share of greenhouse gases—it is far above that. It is the world's 15th largest total emitter and has the highest amount of emissions per person among the major pollutors. As a wealthy, developed and highly liveable nation, we owe it to our less fortunate neighbours, such as those Pacific nations currently fighting for survival, to do all we can. It is not good enough to simply pull down the shutters and pretend that it will all go away.

All people have the right to clean water, good shelter and health but these inherent human rights will be compromised by catastrophic climate change unless all nations start to work towards bringing down emissions within the next five years. No one is suggesting that there is not a long and difficult road still to travel before this goal is reached, but at least Australia will no longer be seen to be avoiding its responsibility.

Just as the environment has changed, community attitudes have also changed. No longer do we accept the false dichotomy between the economy and the environment. In 21st century Australia we cannot have economic growth and job creation that is not environmentally sustainable. The common misconception when discussing the need to transition to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy is that there is a slash and burn approach to jobs. The reality is, however, that those industries that are environmentally sustainable are guaranteed to survive in the long term. For young people this is absolutely paramount to our long-term prosperity.

As a South Australian I am only too aware of the vulnerability of some of our local industries to climate change. For instance, when I first began my term in the Senate, I had the opportunity to visit local communities along the Murray-Darling Basin and see first hand the corrosive damage of droughts. Not only was the drought destroying jobs and robbing farmers of their incomes; it was also strangling entire communities—infrastructure and the environment.

Who could forget the iconic South Australian production of Storm Boy that showcased to the nation and to the world the natural beauty of our Ramsar listed lower lakes? This natural beauty, which was on the brink of destruction at the depths of the drought over the last decade, shows us that action must be taken.

As Australia's driest state, South Australia will experience devastating outcomes from unchecked climate change. My fellow Greens member Senator Wright has already raised the dire predictions for our state as expressed in the Climate Commission's Critical decade report. Those ominous outlooks are reflected elsewhere. The Bureau of Meteorology indicated that by 2030 days will get even hotter and drier in Adelaide than they are today, with more days above 35 degrees, more extreme fire danger days and longer fire seasons. I happen to live in the Adelaide Hills and I know the concern our communities have every summer in relation to bushfires. These concerns and fears will only grow.

Climate change also threatens one of our most precious resources: water. The Murray-Darling river system, which is already experiencing problems with salinity, will suffer further reductions in water quality by 2050. We are about to see a final plan from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority for how to tackle the overallocations of the Murray-Darling system. The big fault in this plan is that it has not considered the impact of climate change, the drying climate and the lower rainfall. Declines in rainfall will lead to a greater frequency and severity of drought, with decreased flows in water supply catchments. However, research also shows that despite a drier average there may also be an increase in flood risk due to an increase in extreme rainfall.

It is a terrible irony that floodwaters, while destroying some communities, have revived others in the last couple of months. This should not serve as an excuse for complacency in tackling these issues. We know that communities must be working with government and we must have leadership to tackle these issues. This bill goes some way towards doing that. A small window of opportunity is open and we must not allow it to shut. We must not allow it to shut for the sake of some people who are arguing for delay.

As well as being the Greens spokesperson on early childhood and child care, I am mother to a four-year-old girl. Aside from all the crucial environmental and economic reasons for passing this legislation that have been raised consistently in this chamber for years—since Senator Bob Brown first entered this chamber in 1996—I only need to look at my daughter to be reminded that securing a cleaner future for her is one of the most important things that I, and my colleagues, can do as in this place. We must do this as responsible members of our community and as elected members of our community. I join with the sentiments of parents around Australia arguing that we have to take action, if not for the sake of our river systems, our clean air and for our food security, then for our children. I commend these bills to the Senate.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I last spoke on the merits of the policy behind a similar package of bills when they were defeated by the opposition back in December 2009. I therefore do not intend to cover all the ground but instead want to concentrate on the impact on local government of this clean energy legislation. Local government, as we all know, form a large part of the top 500 polluters—not only because of their landfill responsibilities but also because of the significant pressures on their operating costs. I have spent a considerable time on this issue with local government in Western Australia and they have been effective in having had their case heard in Canberra. In summary, the concerns of local government relate to the increased operating costs for the conduct of council business, including electricity for streetlighting, fuel for heavy vehicles and other council transport, consumables for road construction, and other infrastructure outlays.

The long-term capital costs of investing in clean energy initiatives—those activities necessary if advantage is to be taken of the new, low-cost energy regime—include new, energy efficient streetlighting; upgrades to community facilities; and the impact of landfills, which are large producers of methane gas in particular. These are very reasonable concerns and, while they are readily answered, they reflect local concerns regarding the likely cost of services provided. They are also consistent with a very longstanding commitment local government have toward environmental management across the board—a direct reflection of their grassroots community responsibility, of course. It reflects the level of concern expressed at the community level about local action on local issues. This is especially the case with environmental controls.

It is now accepted that improved, liveable urban areas and the continuing viability of local industry production are dependent on good local administration—and that includes not just waste management but also control over stormwater, transport, building design and siting, industrial growth and investment, and general land-use planning, in which environmental criteria are largely predominant. It is local government which actually makes it happen and where the consequences of high-level policy change is first felt.

With respect to the first and major matter, increased costs, provision is already made through the indexation of financial assistance grants to local government. The indexation will reflect increased operating costs. On top of normal cost increases incurred by councils, Treasury estimates the cost inflation caused by this legislation across the entire economy will be only 0.7 per cent. For local government that same estimate will be less, at 0.5 per cent. For road construction costs in particular, the estimated impact will be only 0.2 per cent. That should be compared with the impact of the GST, which was 2.5 per cent—an increase which was quickly absorbed by the economy.

I should also make it clear for those councils where general rates can be 50 per cent of their income that state based rate-pegging policies should not be a disadvantage. I am advised that rate-pegging is generally linked to increases in the CPI. Ultimately, this is something to be negotiated between councils and state governments. Nor should the new costs affect the capacity of ratepayers to meet increased rates. For most—that is, more than six million people—they too will be compensated for any cost increases.

Within these costs for councils, it should also be pointed out that increased fuel costs for heavy vehicles and earthmoving equipment will not eventuate until 2014. It is at this time that carbon charges will be applied to transport fuel across the board—that is, except for LNG, CNG, LPG and ethanol, all of which will continue to receive the full fuel tax credit. Also, the current fuel discount provided to heavy vehicles and off-road equipment will be slightly reduced, although it will remain at a discount compared with ordinary road users.

This brings me to the implications for local government in converting their business to be more carbon efficient, especially energy efficient. The largest single energy cost for many councils is the cost of streetlighting. It s estimated by the Australian Local Government Association to be 50 per cent of councils' electricity bills. With projected increases in power costs of 10 per cent in 2012-13, ALGA estimates that this will increase councils' costs nationally by $29 million. Streetlighting will account for $17.5 million of the increase. However, as ALGA also acknowledges, energy use has great potential for abatement.

To help manage council energy costs, the government announced the Low Carbon Communities Program in 2010. This program has now been expanded to $330 million. The new package includes $200 million in funding for the Community Energy Efficiency Program. This program will help local government and community organisations upgrade the energy efficiency of their facilities, including streetlighting. I am very aware many councils have made great strides in recent years to better control their costs. Of course, electricity usage has always been high on that agenda. Shortage of capital has, however, been a constant problem, hence the need for this program. A further $100 million will be available to consortia of local government and community groups to improve the energy efficiency of low-income households. Additionally, the government has also provided a new Clean Energy Finance Corporation, funded to $10 billion. This will clearly assist councils and community groups wanting to invest in clean energy options.

Finally, I want to address the difficult issue of landfill sites. ALGA asserts landfill sites comprise 191 of the 500 identified major polluters, the subject of this legislation. Landfills generate methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas with the most significant effect on the environment. What is worse, landfills continue to produce methane for up to 20 years after closure, making this a significant imposition for landfill operators. Briefly, the policy for landfill in this package is as follows. The new carbon price in this legislation will only apply to the emissions from waste deposited after 1 July 2012. It will only apply to large facilities which emit more than 25,000 tonnes of CO2. Smaller sites will not be considered until at least 2015-16. I should note that this should remain unchanged unless there is evidence of waste diversion to smaller sites. Further, initiatives at these landfills to reduce and capture emissions such as methane will qualify as credits under the Carbon Farming Initiative. These can be used to offset up to 100 per cent of the carbon price incurred, not five per cent as it is now.

Where energy is generated, renewable energy certificates will be issued under the Renewable Energy Target. These can also be used as offsets. This will create a greater incentive to better manage waste through recycling, composting and the capture of methane for power generation. Many of the managers of these landfill sites are local government authorities. For some, these initiatives are not new. However, we need to acknowledge that, in response to ratepayers' concerns, the management of landfill dumps has been radically reformed in the last decade in particular. I should mention here local government's enthusiasm under the former Greenhouse Friendly program when investments were made to obtain carbon offsets. This sometimes entailed considerable investments, which were not realised in some cases when the program was cancelled in June 2009. That investment has included not just sophisticated approaches to recycling practices and composting of garden refuse; it is also the better management of toxic substances and the collection of methane gas. It has led to the generation of bioelectric generators of which there are currently 66 in operation.

Local governments around Australia should be applauded for their leadership. That is why they are so well placed to take advantage of the new Clean Energy Finance Corporation, to be chaired by Ms Jillian Broadbent AO. The clean energy fund will drive innovation through commercial investments in clean energy through loans, loan guarantees and equity investments from the private sector. Local government is well placed to take advantage of this fund, especially when combined with the potential of other carbon credit initiatives now magnified for existing landfill facilities and newer ones. Innovative work at the local level is progressing quickly and will now accelerate.

Income generated from the current generation of initiatives can be increased from new investment and hence be fully applied as a direct incentive to clean up polluting emissions as a direct cost offset. Indeed, this model is the essence of the entire policy. Its aim is to encourage investment in clean energy, to better manage and minimise emissions, as a real element of our economic system—that is, a self-funding model minimising punitive charges normally levied under the old-style regulatory regimes.

For many this legislation represents a brave new world with many uncertainties for some. However, that will dissipate as knowledge improves. ALGA recently expressed very fulsome support and that is appreciated, but I am sure there is a lot of detail yet to be worked through with local government. I know from my own contact with local government in WA that there is some way to go before all of the detail and the implications are understood. Among those are details of applying for grants, priorities, scale of grants and the processes of applying for investment finance. There are some questions too about the reliability of measurement of emissions—currently being dealt with in detail. There are also new streamlined reporting obligations being developed by COAG. There is interest in the new biodiversity scheme. This scheme is available for carbon farming initiatives on private and local government land to support the protection of biodiverse carbon stores.

I conclude by assuring local governments the government will continue to work with you and to consult with you. We will ensure that your support for this package is maintained and strengthened through your participation.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this debate as a person who has had a longstanding commitment to action on climate change; as a person who has always been prepared to accept the science of climate change and the predominant consensus that climate change is real and is affecting the world environment in an adverse way; and as a person who not only has maintained those convictions over a long period but has actually acted upon them. In 1997, as the ACT's minister for the environment, I was responsible for introducing Australia's first greenhouse gas emissions targets for any jurisdiction—obviously for the ACT. Those targets had the ACT aiming to stabilise its emissions at 1990 levels by about now and reducing its emissions by about 20 per cent on those levels by approximately the end of this decade—targets which incidentally were later dropped by the Stanhope government, but that is another story. So I come to this debate as a person who is serious about climate change and has been prepared to put my actions where my mouth is.

I rise to indicate that I do not support the carbon tax legislation which this government has brought forward. In doing so, I emphasis the non sequitur which many people in this debate have maintained: that, if you do not support this package of bills, this carbon tax which the government promised not to introduce but is now bringing forward for debate and vote, you therefore cannot be serious about climate change. That simply is not true, any more than it is true to say that if you do not support the government's mandatory pre-commitment arrangements for poker machines that you are not serious about reducing harm from poker machines. Or there is the most spectacular lack of logic: if you do not support the government's Malaysian solution, you are not serious about stopping the boats. All of those things are illogical and irrational and in this debate they have a very severe consequence for the quality of life that the Australian people enjoy.

I do not think that this package of bills is the best way to reduce carbon emissions in Australia and I certainly do not think that, even if it were the best way to reduce emissions, it is a step Australians should take. I want to come to my reason for saying that in a moment. Let us assume that this package of measures does reduce carbon emissions in Australia. I think there are a great many inefficiencies in the way that this package has been developed and framed, but I am prepared to concede that it may actually reduce emissions in this country. Let us put aside in that argument the fact—it is not speculation—that in getting an emissions reduction Australians will have to take a cut in their standard of living. On the government's own figures, some three million households in Australia will be worse off, will have a lower standard of living, because they will be forced to pay higher energy costs and other costs by virtue of this carbon tax.

That shaving of the standard of living of Australians will be particularly severe in my home jurisdiction of the ACT where, on the estimates of the ACT Labor government, some 60 per cent of ACT households will be inadequately compensated for the effects of the carbon tax and 22 per cent of households will have no compensation whatsoever for the effects of the carbon tax. All of those people—the majority of people in the ACT—will have a loss of income and a loss of living standards by virtue of this package.

But let us suppose all of that were somehow to be viewed as a worthwhile way of getting Australia to reduce its emissions. Why would you then say that we should not support this package? The reason is that almost certainly Australia's contribution to reducing emissions by virtue of this package will be cancelled out not once, not twice, but dozens and dozens of times by the growth in emissions of other countries in the world. Australia's efforts through this package will be quite useless in actually reducing the emissions profile of our planet. I say that with no sense of triumphalism or pride. I say as a matter of great sadness that we are unfortunately living in a world where other countries simply are not taking this issue seriously and where the overall picture is one of very serious decline in the level of effort by many nations around the world to do something tangible about this.

Professor Jeff Bennett from the Australian National University's Crawford School of Economics and Government summarised these arguments well in March this year. He said:

The Prime Minister said we've got to do something or else we're going to be left behind—it's important to realise that first of all, very few countries around the world are doing much about this …

And secondly, even if everybody did something about, if all nations in the world did what Australia's doing, still the impact on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be so small, [it would] not have any real or meaningful impact on the pattern of climate across the planet.

What that means is that the Australian economy is going to have this quite substantial cost imposed on it, with very little to show by way of benefit."

A good, hard, dispassionate view of the evidence demonstrates without any shadow of doubt that that is true. As the Productivity Commission said earlier this year:

… no country currently imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse gas emissions or has in place an economy-wide ETS.

Looking at the evidence across the world, it is painfully clear that that is the case. There is no carbon tax or ETS at work in China, India, the USA or the European Community. If action is not evident in those places, it is very hard to see how the world can meaningfully reduce its emissions. There is zero chance that China or India will adopt any form of serious carbon tax. The United States, Canada, Japan and Korea have all either ditched or indefinitely deferred carbon tax systems.

I want to go through some of the experiences in some of those countries. I make the point here that in the course of this debate many senators such as Senator Wong and Senator Faulkner last night have talked about the initiatives being taken in some other countries. I acknowledge that some countries are doing some quite exciting things in selected areas with respect to emissions. China, for example, is shutting down a number of coal fired power stations. Good on them. But the overall picture in every one of those countries is that these acts of emissions reduction are in enormous contrast to what is going on across the rest of their economies, such as that no country is making a net reduction in emissions now or into the foreseeable future.

Let us talk about Europe. We have been told that Europe has an emissions trading scheme which is something that Australia should emulate in some way and that we should go down this path as well. But let us have a close look at what the Europeans actually do. They do have an emissions trading scheme which raises approximately the equivalent of $500 million a year in Australian money. Let us just think about those figures. Australia's carbon tax is due to raise $9 billion a year when it is fully operational. That is $9 billion compared to the European Union's half a billion dollars. The European Union has 500 million people in it. Its population is 20 to 25 times the size of Australia's. And yet with that huge population it manages to raise just half a billion dollars a year in carbon tax. What kind of impact would that be having on the emissions of Europe? Not very much. The impact on each citizen of the European Union from its emissions trading arrangement is approximately $1 per year. The impact of Australia's carbon tax will be at its outset, when it is lowest in price, $400 per person per year. How much more advantage do companies producing emissions in Europe have over Australian companies when they have such a light tax burden compared to what will happen in Australia?

The picture gets no better wherever else you look. In China we are told that exciting things are happening. China's emissions are projected to increase from 1.4 billion tonnes per annum in 2002 to approximately four billion tonnes in 2015. Chinese emissions are expected to grow—this is the estimate of Professor Warwick McKibbin—by 496 per cent on their 1990 levels by 2020. That increase is so massive that in each year on the march towards 2020 it will cancel out everything that Australia could possibly do to reduce its emissions. If we cancelled every emission from Australia tomorrow the benefit to the world's emissions profile would be cancelled by increases in the Chinese economy alone in the space of less than one year. The United States toyed with the idea of an emissions trading scheme, using a cap and trade system. That was indefinitely deferred, some would say abandoned, some time ago. President Obama has stated openly that electricity prices in America would skyrocket under a cap and trade scheme. A senior Republican member of the Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee of the US House of Representatives said any kind of carbon tax is dead in the US. Of course, he is right.

The picture in other countries is much the same. In India, which contributes 4.8 per cent of global CO2 emissions, emissions are increasing at the rate of 8.7 per cent per annum. It went to the Copenhagen conference a couple of years ago promising to reduce the emissions intensity on their GDP by 20 to 25 per cent, but the analysis of that offer is that it would mean an increase in India's CO2 emissions by 350 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020. Japan contributes 4.3 per cent of global emissions. It has postponed consideration of the start of an emissions trading scheme until after 2013. Russia contributes 5.5 per cent. Its offer at Copenhagen was, on the face of it, an emissions cut of 15 to 25 per cent, but when you look at the detail you will see that it would increase its emissions by 26 to 43 per cent in the period 2005 to 2020. Other countries are not taking steps to reduce their emissions on a scale that would make anyone believe realistically that Australia's contribution will make any difference whatsoever.

People can interpret those facts in different ways. Some people have said that Australia needs to be in the vanguard, that it needs to be on the crest of a wave of change and even that it needs to be able to demonstrate leadership. They say we need to do something that will inspire the rest of the world to follow our lead. Arguments like that turn the disciples of science, the adherents of objectivity in this debate, into people who are relying on effusion and emotion to be able to get to the point of reference. They engage in a leap of faith that, by doing this, somehow Australia will generate the change it wants to see happen in the world. It is possible that other countries will say to themselves, 'Look at plucky little Australia cutting its standard of living in order to show us how it is done, how to reduce our emissions. We feel ashamed of what we're not doing in the face of what Australia's doing. We'll go down that path as well. We'll start to cut our living standards. We'll start to put up our energy costs. We'll start to make our businesses a little bit less competitive by doing what Australia is doing.' Or those other countries, particularly countries like India and China with fast-growing economies, could say, 'Well, the countries of the West, countries like Australia, have got to their very high standard of living over several centuries by despoiling their environments, by cutting down their trees, by ruthlessly exploiting their mineral resources and by pumping carbon into the atmosphere. It's only fair that they should now take a bigger hit than we do when it comes to reducing emissions. We want to reach their standard of living. Let them do the heavy lifting on carbon reduction for a couple of generations, and then we might think about following suit.' Of course, on the side of that argument is self-interest. Someone once famously said that you should always back self-interest in any debate.

I do not see anywhere the evidence of Australia's making a difference by reducing its emissions in the way proposed in these carbon tax bills. I think there is a very plausible and very powerful argument that says Australia should go back to the rest of the world and say that we all work together to reduce the scale of this problem, to attack this issue, that we all make sure we are all on the same page and that we all subscribe to some kind of global scheme that will actually reduce the trajectory of emissions, not notionally and not in a token way, and then we force the rest of the world to say, 'If we do not act together we do not act at all.' That is a gamble; I acknowledge that. But the fact is that at the present time we are fooling ourselves and deceiving the citizens of our country by suggesting that by passing this package of legislation we are going to make a difference to the warming of the world. Even with, as I have indicated, my strong belief in anthropogenic global warming, I do not see how unilateral actions by Australia in this way, coming at the cost they do to the standard of living we enjoy, can actually make the difference that needs to be made to address this issue.

There are of course other alternatives. The coalition's alternative is to invest directly in measures that will effectively go into the marketplace and buy the level of emissions that we want to see happen. I am confident that those measures would produce a reduction in Australia's greenhouse targets of five per cent on 1990 levels by 2020. I prefer those measures in this debate, because the cost of those measures is not at the cost of Australian's standard of living in circumstances which do not produce benefits to the world as a whole. Australia should stand ready to take action to be part of a global movement to take action that will make a difference, but it is quite pointless, in fact it is counterproductive, for Australia to pretend to be acting on this when, in fact, it is not. A carbon tax, in the absence of comparable action elsewhere in the world, provides an incentive for jobs to go offshore, for us to lose the benefits of a competitive marketplace and for us to be left behind. I am all in favour of symbolism when appropriate, but not on such a stupid scale.

I think it is important for the government to be able to explain on a more mundane and domestic level how it is proceeding with such a major reform to the Australian economy when it does not have the support of the Australian people for that change. The point has been made in this debate already that the government introduced this tax after it expressly said before the last election that there would be no carbon tax under this government. The Prime Minister went on to say after that that she would act to move forward on this issue when she had built 'a deep and abiding consensus' on the need for this kind of action. It is evident from the most recent opinion polls and from the talk on the streets of Australia in which all of us, I am sure, have been engaged that there is no deep and abiding consensus. In fact, if there is a deep and abiding consensus, it is in favour of not going down this path at this point in time.

So on all those counts—on the count of its being ineffective, being a breach of trust with the Australian people and not being thought through—this carbon tax package is wrong. The coalition has indicated—with perfect justification, I think—that, if it goes to the next election promising the Australian people that it will repeal this tax and it wins the election, it has a mandate to remove that tax. I hope that those opposite, in the hubris which goes with having done deals to impose this tax on the Australian people, would at least acknowledge that the honourable thing for them to do would be to support such a repeal if it transpires that that is the result of the next election. (Time expired)

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

This is the third time in as many years that we have been called up to speak on a package of carbon price bills in this chamber. Unlike on the first two opportunities, I am delighted to rise to speak on this occasion.

What a difference an election makes. This package, the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills, is a credit to Senator Christine Milne, who brought great appreciation of the policy imperatives and seized a moment of opportunity last August for Australia to change course. The package is also, of course, a credit to the leadership of Senator Bob Brown and a credit to our member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, his team and all of the people who fired up around the country last year to deliver a historic win and a very finely balanced parliament. So I take this opportunity to thank everybody who pitched in last year, because this is your win.

To the extent that the Hansard record survives the shocks to come over the next few decades, I hope the future has a sense of humour. The contributions from opposition MPs in this debate have ranged from carefully measured but ultimately pointless, as Senator Humphries's contribution just was, through carefully cultivated scientific illiteracy to the purely infantile. In particular, I reject some of the more embarrassing contributions of my Western Australian Liberal colleagues that I, as a Western Australian MP, think paint us in an extremely negative and regressive light. Western Australia is not just a quarry, an expanding hole in the ground out of which the surplus can be magically restored. We are also the state that elected the nation's first Greens MP, the state in which Greens state MPs held the balance of power for a decade and a place where community activism has rescued old-growth forests, waged a successful 30-year campaign against uranium mining, saved the Ningaloo Reef from unrestrained development and is in the process of taking the Kimberley coast back from the gas industry. When we set our minds to it, Western Australians know how to get things done. That is what makes me all the more ashamed of some of the contributions by my Western Australian opposition colleagues.

Just to pause for a moment on the politics of these bills as we in this chamber stand poised to pass this historic package of legislation, the government have taken on the carbon mafia and they are being punished for it. But I say to government MPs: this too shall pass. There is real political courage here, and I acknowledge it. The carbon price, as Senator Humphries reminded us, is unpopular. Why would that be? It is because Tony Abbott, Senator Barnaby Joyce and their colleagues have been criss-crossing the country telling people that the carbon price is going to give them leprosy. Of course it is unpopular. The campaign that they have run is essentially a thin facade of mad, self-interested hysteria stretched altogether too tightly over a framework of complete fiction. It is in the process of being demolished by reality. The three-word arguments that you have been running work beautifully on bumper stickers, but they bear no relationship to the structure of the package, and that is where you are going to come undone.

Senator Humphries gave us a sketch of their laughable direct action policy that even they cannot find a single credible economist to support. My question to coalition MPs, particularly the just under 50 per cent of you who voted for Malcolm Turnbull last year and who do have a clue about the genuine public policy issue of climate change, is: if this delusional so-called direct action policy delivers a five per cent emissions reduction target, as you insist, what are you going to do about the other 95 per cent? Or are you really that far in denial?

The challenges in front of us are severe. In Western Australia, our electricity grid is sparse and is premised on depleting vulnerable point source coal and gas supplies. Regional communities and industries are heavily exposed to rising gas and distillate prices, and the Varanus Island gas plant explosion vividly demonstrated to us the risks of highly centralised fossil fuel infrastructure. Premier Colin Barnett has been doing his bit to put our natural resources in hock to a regime playing a much longer game than us, in his great tour of China. So now Western Australia's coal resources and much of our gas resources are in the hands of an Indian industrial conglomerate and soon perhaps a Chinese sovereign energy company. Well played, sir! Towns like Collie and Karratha in WA have a perilously narrow economic base. They will need genuine transition planning within the present generation, as the iron laws of resource depletion and the far more serious imperatives of climate change take hold.

The greatest liability that we have, particularly in this building, is the institutional mindset that holds that the present state of exponentially-increasing resource extraction and the consequent political paralysis that comes with it must remain the case forever. Snap out of it. The challenge before us is this: to turn Western Australia's sundrenched hinterland into a national resource—to turn our windswept coast and farms into generators and our unmatched wave resource into an energy asset. We have long had the desire to do it. The passage of these bills gives us the tools. I tip my hat to Professor Ray Wills of the Sustainable Energy Association, Australia's largest and most diverse sustainable energy business chamber. Professor Wills's relentless advocacy on behalf of green energy entrepreneurs and some pretty big energy incumbents over many years has laid the foundation for the period of unprecedented innovation and investment that must now follow. This is because, for the first time, this package of bills gives industry the tools to start that job in a serious and systematic way.

Consider the Western Australian goldfields, a hub of engineering and fabrication skills drenched in one of the best solar resources on the planet, day in, day out, with a high capacity transmission line running back towards the Perth metropolitan area. Goldfielders know a few things about success in the face of unlikely odds and ambitious infrastructure projects. So let us set a date for the commissioning of the CY O'Connor solar thermal power station and bring utility-scale baseload solar power to Western Australia. The design will be based on plants already up and running in California and Spain, but the fabrication and the maintenance must all be local.

The start-up of one, single, large power station of this kind will do more than anything else to blow away the tired myth that this cannot be done, and the fossil industry knows that when the baseload myth disintegrates in the face of an actual commissioned plant in Australia, their arguments will not really have a great deal left. We can finally cut our ties with an economy based on digging up and burning stuff. Concentrating solar thermal plants in the goldfields of the mid-west and the Murchison Gascoyne are the baseload platform on which a whole range of variable renewable energy technologies can at last take their place.

I could not miss the opportunity to remind the Senate of the work of Carnegie Corporation in my home town of Fremantle, who are rapidly moving to commercialise their brilliant wave energy system that promises to produce electricity or fresh desalinated water around the clock—free from the ocean. Fremantle is also making great progress towards its own wind energy generator to power Fremantle Harbour, demonstrating that not all the jobs and investment will be in regional areas. But, of course, we know that most of them will.

In particular, I point out another project that has been stalled and is starving for funds until this package is able to pass this parliament. It is the Narrogin bioenergy endeavour, which has been under study in the wheat belt for many years now and has just lacked that final kick to get it over the line. It is my firm hope that this package will give that project and many others the funds and the institutional support that they need to get up and running. This package obviously will not get us to 100 per cent renewable energy status, but it will start us along the way. That is the important thing, and it is the key difference between this package and the friendless CPRS that this parliament rejected twice.

We know that climate change, if it is not addressed, will have grievous impacts on Western Australia. Many have spoken, justifiably, about the Great Barrier Reef. I speak up now for its Western Australia equivalent, the Ningaloo Reef on the north-west coast, which rivals the GBR in beauty and biodiversity. It also supports a multimillion-dollar tourism industry. It is under threat from warming and acidifying oceans. If current trends in the climate continue, the south-west of Western Australia will potentially experience 80 per cent more drought months by 2070, and that will wipe out one of the world's most biodiverse botanic regions, at enormous cost to us all. In Western Australia up to $30 billion in assets—that is, more than 20,000 residences, 2,000 commercial buildings and 9,000 kilometres of roads—are at risk from sea-level rise. Along the west coast and southern coast, the sea level is actually rising faster than most of the world average or the average around Australian coasts.

We do not believe that this package or that Australia acting unilaterally will fix all of these things. This goes to the more ignorant comments from some of the coalition participants in this debate about what will happen if we pass this package. For example, there was Senator Joyce asking by how many decimal places this package will reduce the temperature of the world. That completely misreads what is going on here. The whole planet needs to join this effort, and I certainly would not want to be stuck in a lifeboat with a hole in it with coalition MPs, who would be sitting up the back with their arms folded, demanding that they would not be bailing until everybody else was.

We know that the package is not perfect. As Senator Milne acknowledged, the transport aspects of this package are a real missed opportunity. There are perverse incentives and there are things in it that will be need to be fixed. I think it is extremely unfortunate that the government has not listened to groups like the Australasian Railway Association, the Bus Industry Confederation and other transport advocates who have analysed these flaws and proposed sensible solutions that in no way undo the basic architecture of the package.

We know, however, that other things will be needed. There are some promising signs, for example, in the National Urban Policy. This shows the way, I think. We have the beginnings of major institutional reform outside the price instrument so beloved of economists, but we will not know if these things are worth anything until we see substantial resources shifted into public transport, cycling and urban consolidation and renewal—not little $20 million pilot projects but large-scale, sustained investment.

The freight task is still planned, as far as I can tell, essentially in a fossil vacuum. There is very little institutional appreciation of the importance of rail in tackling a much larger fraction of our freight task, and, if the government does not see fit to fund the infrastructure by, as they have done, excluding petrol from this package, then funding will need to come from consolidated revenue instead of vastly expensive and obsolete urban freeway infrastructure.

Many, many people have contributed to this win. I have already mentioned Professor Wills at the Sustainable Energy Association, but I want to pay particular tribute, as Senator Hanson-Young did, to young Australians who have absolutely stepped up into something of a campaign vacuum and really taken this campaign forward. I am speaking in particular of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, the people who have been storming this building and visiting electorate offices around the country. In my home state, Ellen Sandell, Jane Stab and Nick Taylor from the AYCC are just doing the work. It is not all particularly glamorous but they are getting out there, banging on doors and making sure that the voices of the people who will actually be bearing the brunt of the policy decisions we make in the here and now are heard in this building and in electorate offices everywhere in the country.

I also mention groups like Micah Challenge, who have taken the very important step of recognising the importance of climate in abolishing global property, groups like Oxfam, who have also taken the lead, and, of course, the Australian Conservation Foundation and climate action groups all around the country who have played such an important part of bringing this campaign forward. I pay particular tribute to Matthew Wright and the team from Beyond Zero Emissions for showing us that it can be done. Maybe the model for a 100 per cent renewable Australia will not be precisely as they have proposed, but they have taken the bold step of just doing the engineering work that should really have been done by state and federal governments and of putting a serious challenge on the table in front of policy makers to say: 'The engineers and the technologists say this can be done. Over to you, policy makers—make it happen.' In WA the folks at Sustainable Energy Now, a wonderful group of engineers and energy advocates, have simply done what Western Australian energy authorities should have done a long time ago: come up with a model for how to get to 100 per cent in Western Australia on the south-west integrated system. It is a superb piece of work and it deserves to be resourced.

Other groups such as Doctors for the Environment—and, in particular, I single out Dr George Crisp in Western Australia—are reminding us of the consequences of getting this wrong. And there are people like Kamala and Alex, from Safe Climate Perth, who are doing the grassroots work. They are really quite tireless in linking these issues to larger issues of global poverty and global inequality.

The Greens know that this package is only the first step but that this is the real thing. It is the first turning of the ship away from a fossil dependent economy towards a society whose prosperity is founded on the gigantic and essentially infinite flows of renewable energy. That tortured, groaning and shrieking sound coming from below decks is Mitch Hooke and the Australian Coal Association recognising that this really is the first turning of the ship—that the world has changed and that it will not be changing back.

Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is an honour to have the opportunity to speak to the Clean Energy Future package in this chamber after so much debate on the pressing issue of climate change in Australia not just over the life of this government but for more than two decades now. We need only look at how long ago it was that state and federal governments created climate change departments and ministries—a portfolio I once proudly held in my time as part of the Tasmanian state government.

The recent debate on this issue has been especially fierce, and I acknowledge at the outset the contribution of organisations which have continued to advocate for action on climate change such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, Climate Action Network Australia, the Climate Institute, the Say Yes campaign, Micah Challenge, Al Gore's Australian Climate Change Ambassadors, Oxfam, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and, of course, the ACTU. This package is testament to their community action, and it is an honour indeed to be part of a parliament which, because of the leadership of the Prime Minister, will be responsible for beginning the essential and urgent process of bringing on the next great stage of Australia's economic development.

There is no doubt in my mind that both the current and the emerging challenges of energy generation represent among the most substantial considerations for businesses and communities all around Australia. Since the Industrial Revolution our economy has shifted to being energy intensive. For too long, however, it has not adequately taken into account the effects of industrial activity on the environment. Industry has emitted greenhouse gases, those carbon dioxide and equivalent emissions, at a rate far beyond that which our planet would naturally release and far beyond what it can cope with without something having to give. The kinds of climate change we are experiencing and which the best science tells us we are going to experience—the transformation of local climates and extreme weather events—is something that we, across the world, have caused in significant part. It puts at risks agricultural production, coastal properties and iconic parts of our natural environment such as the Great Barrier Reef. It threatens small islands around the world such as Kiribati and Tuvalu and therefore is likely to mean new waves of people seeking the sanctuary of dry lands as their homes are swamped by rising sea levels and, in the process, their cultures and histories lost. It changes the habitats of our native creatures and threatens biodiversity.

But human economic and social development is a story of monumental achievement. While we have risked, we overwhelmingly have gained—in improved living standards, in greater connectivity between cultures and community and in our scientific and technological mastery of our surrounds. We have created this problem, there is no doubt; but we have also created the means and measures by which to respond to it if only we are willing and have sufficient drive to apply the spirit of human creativity to the challenge of climate change.

This package is about translating that motivation we have in science into a motivation in economics. This package puts a price on carbon pollution and creates an incentive for all businesses to cut their pollution by investing in clean technology or finding more efficient ways of operating and thereby cutting costs. It provides an opportunity for clean producers of energy and goods—those who have taken into account their impact on their environment—to have a competitive advantage commensurate with their social contribution to the effort to reduce the world's carbon emissions. It encourages businesses across all industries to find the cheapest and most effective way of reducing carbon pollution rather than relying on more costly approaches such as government regulation and direct action. It is a package that provides the spark for Australian ingenuity in responding to climate change.

The scientific evidence of climate change and the case for action to both mitigate anthropogenic climate change and adapt to its effects have been mounting for decades, and for some time now the need for action on climate change has been beyond reasonable doubt. This is attested to by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Academy of Science. I want to explore briefly some of the ideas about the intersection between science and public policy by reflecting on approaches taken by international organisations of which Australia is a member, including the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, whose secretariat is based only a stone's throw from my office in Hobart. This organisation, which is charged with managing environmental resources, is based on the precautionary principle. This principle holds that:

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible—

Environmental—

damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing … measures to prevent environmental degradation.

What this means is that measures which would mitigate threats of irreversible environmental damage cannot be put off by a minority view, nor by the idea that a measure of change might be inconvenient. What it means is that we have to take threats of severe environmental degradation seriously and that we have to be mindful of the effect that we are having and the effect that we are able to have in redressing environmental damage. It says that we should use the tools we have at our disposal before it is too late.

There is another important component when we are talking about science and public policy, and that is the ecosystem approach. I think it is worth mentioning a few words from the Food and Agriculture Organisation's definition with regard to fisheries:

The ecosystem approach … strives to balance diverse societal objectives, by taking into account the knowledge and uncertainties about biotic, abiotic and human components of ecosystems …

The ecosystem approach means a number of things. It means that we need to take into account the full effects of our actions on the environment. It acknowledges that humans unquestionably have an impact on the world around them, often in unpredictable or unanticipated ways. It explains that an ecosystem is an interdependent thing and that human communities are firmly part of it. But it also recognises the significance of serious environmental degradation, now and into the future, and the effects that recklessness towards our environment have on human prosperity. It says that, when we risk our environment, we risk our own prosperity.

I mention this because it is essential that the decisions which a good government takes be based on an understanding of the way that science and public policy responsibly interact. The bar for preventative measures should be set at that level of precaution. For the longest time, when it came to climate change, the wilful ignorance and scepticism that continues to typify the coalition meant that these principles were ignored. Humans are divorced from the world around them, they argued, and nothing in our actions constitutes responsibility for the environment. The coalition would rather mischaracterise not just the Australian and global scientific community but also the very properties of elements such as carbon itself. They would rather play disingenuous semantic games with words like 'pollution' and 'natural' than face up to the issues that a responsible public policymaker would take account of.

The fact is that climate change is threatening enough to require serious reform to the way we all think about the effect our activity has on the environment. But the changes which will come from the transition of Australia's economy into an economy which puts a price on pollution also have the potential to unleash amazing economic opportunities. In the early twentieth century, in 1914, the Tasmanian government set up the Hydro-Electric Department, later the Hydro-Electric Commission, to create the first state-owned hydroelectricity generator in Tasmania. Renewable energy has a long and proud history in Tasmania, though it is not without controversy and not without its caveats. But this history has at its heart a recognition of forward-thinking investment in the infrastructure of the future and what that can create: the opportunities of sustainable development. In Tasmania, the early adoption of hydroelectricity paved the way for industry to come to the state and access our cheap energy. In these days of the national energy market, hydroelectricity continues to provide Tasmania with the opportunity to sell premium clean energy and gives further credence to our reputation as a state of pristine beauty.

Of course, Tasmania was one of the first. Now these adopters, which represent a diverse range of political persuasions across the globe—a huge body of global wealth and capital—continue in that vein through an understanding of the challenges of climate change. New Zealand, the European Union and California have all adopted an emissions trading scheme. Other states, such as Japan and China, are planning either provincial or national trading schemes. China commenced its scheme in some of the most populous cities in the world, such as Beijing and Shanghai and those in Guangdong. We know other states and nations are taking other measures, whether it is the Indian coal tax or energy efficiency obligations across Brazil. All of these nations realise that a new wave of economic development is coming and that they need to be a part of these opportunities.

The kinds of jobs that we will create from this, of course, are many and varied. They are new jobs that look and feel like the kind which we have been familiar with for a long time. The difference with the clean energy jobs of the future is that they do not have a use-by date—they will not be rendered obsolete when commercial, environmental and technological pressures mean that only the innovative will be able to survive. What I want to say is that only Labor has ever had the courage to introduce the kinds of broad economic reforms that are necessary to ensure that jobs in Australia stay competitive, that conditions stay decent and that the opportunity to find and keep work remains open to this generation of workers, their children and their children's children.

Putting a price on pollution is about sustainability. It is about rewarding forward-focused businesses and giving traditional industry an incentive to think ahead. It is about making sure that Australia is prepared for the new types of industries and jobs which will allow us to maintain our economic prosperity. But most importantly it is about a sustainable environment: making sure we pass on a world with clean air and clean water where future generations can breathe, grow and live, where the quality of our surroundings contributes positively to a quality of life and where, in generations from now, our descendants might still take in the sublime majesty of our natural world.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise to make my contribution to the debate on this package of bills, but the first thing that I would like to mention and reinforce is that we all know that this whole package of legislation is built on a huge political lie. That political lie is owned by every single member of the Labor Party, and that lie is, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' Senator Singh, who has just preceded me, would be one of the key beneficiaries of that lie, having been narrowly elected at No. 3 on the Tasmanian Senate ticket on the basis of it.

David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

She wouldn't have been there otherwise.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are right: she very well may not have been there otherwise. So Mr Sidebottom, Mr Lyons, Mr Adams and Ms Collins—all the House of Representatives members in Tasmania—own that lie just as much as Prime Minister Julie Gillard owns the lie, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' Senators Sherry, Urquhart, Polley, Bilyk, Carol Brown and, of course, Senator Singh, who has just left the chamber, all own that lie just as much as the Prime Minister does.

That is one of the reasons that the Australian community is so angry with this government. They were misled by the Prime Minister before the election not once but twice: six days out and then again the day before, when the attraction of votes in a very close election was so crucial that the Prime Minister was prepared to come out and say, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' We know there is some question as to whether she is actually leading the government—there is a strong perception amongst a lot of people that the Greens are really leading the government—but the Prime Minister wears the mantle. Every single member of the Labor Party and all of those Tasmanians I have mentioned are equally culpable. They all own the lie just as much as Julia Gillard does. There were plenty of signs and photographs of Julia Gillard at polling booths around Tasmanian during the election campaign. In fact, in some cases there were more photographs of Julia Gillard at polling booths than there were of the local members who were seeking election. So there is no question that they were using the image of Julia Gillard and her promise that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led as part of their election campaign last year.

I want to talk more broadly about the general investment message for this country that this package of legislation sends out. The government members all talk about certainty, but one thing that is quite clear is that, in the way this government has been managing its efforts over the last three or four years, they have generated something that I have not heard in the lexicon of Australian comment for a long time, and that is 'sovereign risk'. With their mining tax and their carbon tax there is such uncertainty about their financial management of the economy, the pink batts scheme, the school halls debacle. All of those things are combining to generate a real perception around Australia that it is a sovereign risk for investment. It was interesting to talk recently to a northern European company that was looking to invest in Australia. When they were told that we were opposing the carbon tax and would repeal it, it gave them much more confidence about the sensibility of what might be occurring in this country as far as policy was concerned. They, despite all the words that we have heard from other senators in this place—particularly those on the other side of the chamber—about what is happening in Europe, are not happy about additional cost and were much comforted by the fact that we might be considering repealing the tax, as Tony Abbott has quite properly promised to do.

When you look at the actual impact of the European scheme on their economy compared to the impact of the scheme that is being proposed by the government here in Australia, you get a strong understanding of why that company was comforted. The European scheme has a very minor effect on their emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries. Their export industries are very minimally impacted. In fact, their scheme, as Senator Humphries said earlier, raises about half a billion dollars per annum. Our scheme will raise $9 billion per annum. Over the first 6½ years of the European scheme it raised $4.9 billion. Over the same period, Australia's will raise $72 billion. You talk about the impact on the economy and why countries are concerned about investing in Australia. You are having this huge hit placed on the economy that is not being imposed on other countries around the world. We heard the Canadians only last weekend saying that they are not going anywhere near this.

But we know—because the Productivity Commission report says so—that we are about the middle of the pack at this stage The government tries to give the impression, and the Greens certainly do too, that we are not doing anything. We know that we are already playing our part. The Productivity Commission report says that we are about the middle of the pack as far as our efforts in reducing carbon emissions are concerned. Then, when you bring it down to the price per taxpayer, the EU figure is $1.53, the US figure is about $6.50 and in Australia it is $391 per taxpayer per year. That is an extraordinary impost on the Australian economy at the taxpayer level. Even the raw numbers—half a billion dollars per year through the European scheme and $9 billion for the proposed Australian scheme—really say enough.

The previous speaker, Senator Singh, spoke of Tasmania and its hydroelectric scheme. What she neglected to say was that the Tasmanian government no longer buys any of its energy from the hydroelectric scheme; it buys all its energy from a Queensland-based power company on the national grid because it is cheaper to do so. That is fine. But when you sit down to talk to that company and talk about the potential cost impacts of this scheme in that contested market where companies are buying larger chunks of power, often raw, and are therefore paying a lower unit price for the energy—somewhere around 9c to 11c per unit—the 2.5 base-price increase for energy that is going to come on across the country is a much larger percentage increase to your energy costs. You are talking a 25 per cent to 30 per cent increase in your costs. These are the sorts of energy increases the Tasmanian government is about to suffer because of this legislation, which their federal counterparts are about to support and put through. We all know the perilous budget condition that is occurring in Tasmania at the moment, so you wonder where the cuts are going to have to come from to compensate for this. We have just seen $100 million carved out of the health sector in Tasmania, with elective surgery lists cut in half and all of the concern about that running through the Tasmanian economy, but what about the additional cost that this is going to impose on the Tasmanian government because of the way that they are purchasing their energy at the moment?

Look at the general figures, where the government says that there will be a 10 per cent increase in the cost of power for general consumers. That is about right, looking at the numbers. The 2½ cents represents about 10 per cent of the 25.132 cents per unit that Aurora Energy advertises on its website today as the cost of general power to the home consumer in Tasmania. I can see that that 10 per cent is the general number which is going to impact the local consumer. What about the larger power users who buy their power through the contested market? They buy it raw. The percentage increase to a lot of them is going to be much, much bigger. A Queensland energy company told me that they have about 250 customers in Tasmania who they sell energy to. They are all going to be subject to a much higher energy price increase, and there is no compensation for them. So these medium sized businesses are going to pay a much higher energy increase. I have done a little bit of work this morning on a couple of them. One of them has an energy bill of about $1 million. At 10 per cent that is a $100,000 increase in their energy bill for nothing. There is no compensation or assistance for that business. They are a vegetable processor—part of the growing fresh vegetable processing sector in Tasmania—and they are starting to employ quite a few people. If it is 25 per cent, their bill goes up $250,000 because they are in that contested market. Another one, which is also in the contested market, has a power bill of $600,000 a year. At 10 per cent it is $60,000 and at 20-plus per cent it is over $120,000. There is no compensation for these businesses.

Another example is the large business Simplot, which is a major buyer of vegetables for processing in Australia and is based on the north-west coast of Tasmania. They are about to spend $17 million on a co-generation plant to convert from coal. Based on a promise from both the government and the opposition at the last election, they are getting $3 million to assist them with that co-generation plant. But, even after they have spent $17 million to convert their energy type, they still face an extra $1 million a year in energy costs after this piece of legislation is passed. They will spend $17 million but they will still have an additional $1 million energy bill based on this legislation.

Then, of course, we go back to the dairy and the farming sector generally. There are farmers in some of the irrigated dairy businesses who have power bills of $200,000. They will be adding another $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000 a year onto their energy bills. Of course we also know, because the modelling tells us so, that they are going to take a hit back from the processing sector. Dried milk powder is about 30 per cent energy. It is very energy intensive to manufacture dried milk powder and 30 per cent of its cost is energy. The modelling tells us that, on average, there will be about $10,000 per dairy farmer in costs back to the farmer from the processing sector—so they take a double whammy.

The government said that they put in the Carbon Farming Initiative to provide assistance to the rural sector, but the regulation and the design of that package is so bad that there is very, very little assistance to the rural sector. In fact, the National Farmers Federation said that you cannot even put in a windbreak under the Carbon Farming Initiative. That is one way you could actually sequester carbon—by planting trees in windbreaks on farms—yet, because it is 'common practice', you cannot undertake that under the government's Carbon Farming Initiative. So, despite what they say about their intentions, the practical application of this legislation is not going to do what the government claims.

Then we come to the forestry sector, which is the one sector in our whole economy that can play an important role in sequestering carbon. The blind prejudice against forestry that exists, particularly among the Greens, cuts out opportunities for this sector to provide positive prospects. Biomass, for example, can create energy at the rate of only four per cent of the emissions of coal. You could generate an extra 3,000 gigawatt hours of energy in this country today using biomass without touching another twig; without harvesting another tree. But, because of the blind prejudice of the Greens, this has been struck out of this package of legislation. It is just absurd. The government say they want to reduce our carbon intensity. Here is an opportunity to do that. Biomass is recognised as a renewable energy.

The WWF and the European Biomass Association have a target for all OECD countries of 15 per cent of their entire energy being produced from biomass. So the WWF is on board with Europe. European countries will have 15 per cent of their energy coming from biomass. The last time I looked we fitted into that OECD category, yet here we are completely ruling it out. The lifecycle figures show that biomass produces energy at four per cent of the emissions of coal. The government's decision is absolutely absurd and is based on the blind and ridiculous prejudice of the Greens. So I go back to the comment that I made earlier about who is actually leading the ship at this point in time.

In regard to the impact of this legislation on regional Australia, the government's broad modelling says that the impact on the economy will be less than one per cent. When I recently spoke with some constituents on King Island, where the Prime Minister visited on her way to a conference in Hobart recently, they did not believe the impact on their economy would be less than one per cent. They know that their energy prices are going to go up, and they already have higher energy costs than anyone else. They know that everything that comes on and off the island has to be shipped or flown in. If you talk to a small airline that operates into King Island, Flinders Island or any of these remote communities, that 10 per cent increase in the cost of aviation fuel represents 30 per cent of their overhead costs. So there is going to be a much more significant impact in these remote and regional areas, yet the Prime Minister expects these communities to believe that the impact will be less than one per cent. She is talking from the city perspective. Last week we had the revelation that the Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries spends more time in the city than he does in the country. Perhaps that is a demonstration of the regard the Labor Party have for regional Australia. They run out into regional Australia and say that the impact of this tax will be less than one per cent, yet they are using broad based modelling which has no feeling at all for, and which gives no recognition at all to, the impacts on regional communities. They dumb everything down to that broad number so they can go out and quote that the impact is less than one per cent. But I can tell you that the people on King Island understand. They do understand that the impact on their community is going to be greater and they are not happy about it.

Recent polling released in Tasmania shows that only 17 per cent of Tasmanians support the carbon tax; 51 per cent do not support it. The government cannot even get the support of half of Tasmania for the carbon tax and that is because there is one thing Tasmanians remember—they remember the lie. They remember that Mr Sid Sidebottom, Mr Geoff Lyons, Mr Dick Adams and Ms Julie Collins all went to that last election behind a Prime Minister who said, not once but twice—six days before and then the day before:

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

They said, along with Senators Sherry, Urquhart, Polley, Bilyk, Carol Brown and—one of the key beneficiaries—Senator Singh, that there would be no carbon tax under a government led by Prime Minister Julia Gillard. They are all just as culpable. They all own that promise just as much as the Prime Minister does.

When you go around and talk to small businesses about the impact of the tax on their operations, they all know that the promise they were made at the last election was that there would be no carbon tax. Even when I was talking to a small rhubarb processor and grower in the north-east of Tasmania, it was clear that they knew, along with everyone else, that as their business grows so too will the cost of energy and inputs to their business—because of the carbon tax. All of these elements I have been talking about are only for the first year. We know that this cost will go up each and every year, because the government tells us that the carbon tax is going to be indexed. They all come back to the promise. They all remember the lie: 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' That is what the Prime Minister said to the nation six days before the election and she repeated it the day before what turned out to be a very tight election. Mr Sidebottom, Mr Lyons, Mr Adams and Ms Collins all own that promise. All are equally culpable, as are Senators Sherry, Urquhart, Polley, Bilyk, Carol Brown and Lisa Singh. They all know that they went to the last election promising that there would be no carbon tax. (Time expired)

John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not here to talk about the science of man-made global warming or to announce support for the so-called consensus which is supposed to exist for this destructive tax. Over my lifetime, I have heard numerous references to changes in climate that have caused floods, fires, droughts, cyclones, heavy frosts, hailstorms and whatever. We all know that these things have occurred, but they have also occurred throughout history. We only have to read Dorothea Mackellar and it is there—art reflects life. Some years ago we were told that we were going to be entering a new ice age. Now what we are experiencing is referred to as global warming or, for the non-committed, climate change. When I speak to people—working people, people in the suburbs or people in small country towns—they are terrified. There are some, I will admit, who are quite accepting of what is being put to the people. But I also speak to a lot of people who are not and those people are predominantly what I would call rusted on ALP voters.

Whether it is the carbon tax or direct action, both put an impost on the Australian people—the average people, working people, family people. The effect on business has been covered in the House within an inch of its life, but I do not hear much spoken about the effects on families and on elderly people. The people this tax is going to affect are pensioners—the people who cannot afford to pay their power bills, who cannot afford to heat or cool their homes. It will affect the people who are already struggling to pay their mortgages as things currently stand, who have to travel from the western suburbs of Melbourne to the far side of Melbourne and who cannot get a train at the right time of the day to commute to work. Most Australians would agree that we have to be smarter; that we have to be more innovative and find smarter ways to do things. Most businesses in this country and most people do look for ways to consume less and save a bob, because the less you consume the less it costs you.

Many years ago, the DLP was the first party to introduce a conservation policy into the Australian parliament. It was based on good stewardship of our natural resources. That policy involved practical solutions that did not impose a guilt or punishment tax that this carbon tax policy is based around. Since I first arrived here in the Senate in July, numerous lobby groups have come to my office to discuss a number of issues, but the one that I remember most is a group of five young girls who came into my office distraught at what was going to happen to the planet and they thought that, somehow or other, it was their fault. I assured them that the sun was going to come up tomorrow—and it did. I said that if they wanted to talk about practical things that we can do to help the environment I was all for it, but I was not there to attribute blame. The only way good policy will be implemented in this country is to take all Australians with it by winning their hearts and minds with facts and the truth. I believe this carbon tax in its present form will have untold repercussions for this country for decades to come. The people of this country deserve more than the poor standard of debate and schoolyard name calling we have seen over the past few months.

There is no doubt that had the ALP been able to form a majority government this bill would not be before the Senate this week in its current form. Make no mistake about it, this is a Greens inspired bill and ALP voters all over this country know it. If this bill passes, every ALP senator will have shown that staying in power is their number one principle and any other principles they may hold come a poor second as does their responsibility as elected representatives of the people. In his 'light on the hill' speech 62 years ago Ben Chifley warned about making someone Prime Minister or Premier at any cost. And, ultimately, the cost with this legislation as it stands will be to the people.

As I have said already, I will not speak on the science; it is dealt with elsewhere. I also do not intend to speak to the government on it. We have had visits over time about this issue. Lord Monckton was mentioned yesterday in debate. He visited my home town of Ballarat. We live in a free country where we believe we value and cherish free speech. But when Lord Monckton's visit was announced in Ballarat, people contacted St Patrick's College, the venue where his talk was to be held, to try to buy out the booking. People advised the college that it was not the best thing to do.

No matter whether or not I agree with somebody, I believe that everybody has a right to free speech. I encourage people to have their say, whether I agree with them or not. But, apparently, some people are not entitled to have their say. I have spoken to scientists in academia who have told me that unless they go with a preconceived outcome that suits an agenda they will not get funding. Their academic career is, let us say, held back. I believe we need good, open and honest debate. We need to win the hearts and the minds of people and present to them the truth.

I hear about the green jobs that are going to be created. I do not doubt that there will be some jobs, but will those green jobs equal the jobs that are lost? I see industries that have developed intellectual property and are at the cutting edge in green jobs. These are Australian companies but they do not seem able to get a fair cut of the cake. There seems to be a disposal towards some foreign owned companies, but not towards Australian companies.

People in the Tasmanian timber industry tell me that the majority of the timber areas are locked up or will be locked up. In Australia—and I have friends at home who are sawmillers—they believe in selective felling, not clear felling. But they no longer operate their sawmills. The people who worked in those sawmills are now told to learn how to become a bouncer. Well, there are only so many nightclub and pub jobs. To ask a man who has worked in the timber industry for 40 years to become a bouncer is not realistic. There is terrible clear felling of timber in some Asian countries, such as in our not-so-far-away neighbours Indonesia and New Guinea. A lot of the outdoor furniture we see in Bunnings is made from this timber. We can control and encourage selective felling on our shores, but we cannot do so in Asia. Yet we are happy to buy furniture from places where they denude the earth.

It is not enough for Labor to don the colours and wear the tie and then desert the principles of the labour movement. What is being considered here before us today cannot be justified by any of the principles held by former Labor governments. I do not believe Chifley or Curtin would have considered this legislation in its current form. I find it hard to believe that even Hawke and Keating would have allowed their policy to be determined by a non-Labor party. I know some of you may think that I delve too much into history, but those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Sixty-two years ago, Chifley gave us his prediction and here we stand today and it is coming to pass. The lessons of the split and the destructive forces that caused the split have not been heeded. The names may change, the costumes may change but human nature does not change.

We must look to the past to guide us in the present and into the future. It does not give me any joy at all to see the great ALP being reduced to a hollow shell of its former self. I believe this alliance is not one that many of them may have wanted and it possibly galls them that the present bills before this parliament have been forced upon them as a bargaining chip to keep them in power. In the early 1980s, Bob Hawke introduced the asset test on pensioners. It took considerable time to prepare, but when it was prepared he got an enormous backlash. I did not think I would ever say this, but all credit to Bob Hawke because he took it back to the drawing board after hearing the people's concerns.

Last week, I visited the Latrobe Valley—Moe, Morwell and Traralgon. People attended that meeting whose families were former nemeses of the DLP, but they came to listen, to talk and to express their concerns. People in the Latrobe Valley in the power industry took an enormous hit with the Kennett government's privatisation of the former State Electricity Commission—an organisation, I might add, that had a forward plan. They delivered economically, they delivered socially and they delivered environmentally. We are often told about dirty Hazelwood—yes, it does emit pollution, we all know that—but if we had the SEC, it would not be there today. The foundations exist in the Latrobe Valley adjacent to Loy Yang for the building of a new power station that has never been acted upon since that privatisation.

From speaking to people in the Latrobe Valley, the greatest industry in the Latrobe Valley now seems to be welfare. The St Vincent de Paul branch in Moe in the past three months distributed some $17,000 in food vouchers. We are told that nine out of 10 people are getting some $10 a week from them. These people are struggling now and they are having to get that welfare. There is also the amount of money that St Vincent's and other welfare organisations give out in help for utility bills. These people are suffering. These people are terrified.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don't terrify them.

John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not terrifying them; they are telling me this. It is not my job to sell your policy. I cannot even get the answers when I sit in the Senate Committee on the Scrutiny of New Taxes. We were told that we cannot get a copy of the model. I have asked the question in the house: 'Did the government model the impact of this on regional Australia and places like the Latrobe Valley?' They said, 'No, there was no specific modelling done.'

These are the sorts of concerns that these people are raising. I hear you say that there are going to be new jobs. People ask me, 'Where are they?' I am told that there are people out there explaining these new policies and selling the tax to the community. But they have not been seen. The average people have not seen them. They are confused and they are scared. These are not my words; they are their words. They tell me about the people who committed suicide following the privatisation and the loss of their jobs. They tell me about the drug abuse. They tell me about the domestic violence. They tell me about the whole social re-engineering in the Latrobe Valley. I cannot dismiss their claims. There are many empty shops in the Latrobe Valley. Go down there and have a look at the sorts of shops there because they are all the $2 shops. The thing about those sorts of shops is that they do not help the environment. One well-made article is better than 10 poorly made articles. If you want to help the environment, we need industries that manufacture and produce good articles. You help the environment, you help people and you help the economy that way.

Despite the supposed aim of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, we are told that emissions will increase. We have heavily subsidised wind farms and clean energy alternatives, and who knows if they are ever going to produce what is claimed. We have power companies that are now telling us that they are going to close down if they get enough money. I hope for everybody here, knowing how much power this place uses, that wind farms will produce the energy that is claimed. If these things shut down, what is going to replace them? Talking to former and current people in the power industry, they doubt these things—I do not know. What I do know is that they are people who live, work and produce the power that we all need. I believe this bill is a watershed for our community and our nation. I plead with people who have some integrity to please stop this bill now. Do not abandon it. If you feel it is something we truly need, work with it, get the figures right and open it to genuine, honest public debate and a forum which involves real people like the people in Moe, Morwell, Gippsland, Wendouree West, Doonside or wherever they may be. Be the leaders you were elected to be. The people of Australia did not elect a coalition government—neither a Liberal-National nor an ALP-Green government. On this and other issues, work with the Greens, not for them. Demonstrate that the ALP senators in this chamber are not only ALP members but members of the Australian Labor movement.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the introduction of the clean energy bills package into the Senate and I welcome the opportunity to make a small contribution to the debate. It was a day to celebrate when this package of bills passed the House of Representatives. It is a measured and sensible package in its response to the challenge of climate change—a challenge the world has known about for decades, a challenge that Labor has committed to deal with for years, a challenge the Liberal Party committed to deal with through an emissions trading scheme in the 2007 election and a challenge which has been squibbed by the current Leader of the Opposition, to the dismay of many Australians, to the dismay of many Liberal voters and to the dismay of many who sit opposite us in this chamber.

The challenge of climate change is being addressed right across the globe in absolute contrast to what you hear from some who sit opposite—and I say 'some' advisedly. This recent debate in Australia has been appalling, to say the least. The language of the debate from those who sit opposite ranges from disingenuous to downright lies. For them it is the politics not the policy that drives them. Let us first go to the science.

I am a proud North Queenslander. I am lucky to have the Great Barrier Reef and the wet tropics right in my backyard. They are fully deserving of their status as World Heritage icons. They are well managed by the Wet Tropics Management Authority and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, but the impetus to take action on climate change is evident, given the threats they face. The science is absolutely clear: climate change is real and it is caused by the pollution created when fossil fuels, including oil and coal, are burnt. Every decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the last in Australia and 2001 to 2010 was the warmest decade on record both here and worldwide.

Scientists tell us that if we do not act now average global temperatures will continue to increase and place natural ecosystems under significant stress. By 2050, climate change induced coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef is likely every year if average temperatures increase by just two degrees. Higher ocean temperatures and increased acidity levels will cause major changes to coral reefs and reef life. I have talked before in this chamber about ocean acidification.

The threat to our wet tropics rainforest from more intense cyclones and other extreme weather events is very real. We only have to see what has happened in the last five years—very real in a region already too familiar with the impact that seasonal weather events can have. We have strong calls from the Torres Strait to assist them with the increased tidal inundation which, in many respects, may be related to climate change.

Let us now go to the economic imperative. To tackle climate change we need to move away from our dependence on fossil fuels and to find cleaner ways of using them. The advice from economists is clear: putting a price on pollution is the cheapest and most efficient way to reduce our impact on the environment. Presently, emitting carbon pollution is free. While this continues to occur, there is no economic incentive or advantage for cutting pollution. Nothing will change. A carbon price is about changing the behaviour of our country's biggest polluters, making them pay for the emissions they put into the atmosphere and the impact they are having on our environment. Delay will only make our transition more costly and difficult. We need to give business certainty into the future. Doing nothing effectively gives a massive subsidy to polluting industries and that means that renewable energies find it very difficult to compete.

Tourism, more than most sectors, has a real and direct interest in reducing carbon pollution—particularly in North Queensland. The reef, for example, contributes approximately $6 billion to Australia's economy and provides full-time employment for more than 50,000 people. Many local businesses and jobs in the tourism industry depend on keeping our environment in the state it is in currently. Treasury modelling shows that the tourism industry has a strong capacity to manage the modest impact from the carbon tax. Services in the accommodation and hotel sector, a key element of the tourism industry, will continue to grow under a carbon price. The impact of a carbon price on the airline industry will also be modest. For example, Virgin Australia and Qantas estimate the carbon price will add $3 and $3.50 to the average ticket price.

Tourism is an industry that depends on discretionary income. When the carbon price is introduced next year, the government will provide generous assistance to households. Nine in 10 households will receive tax cuts, payment increases or both. This is expected to boost discretionary income. These are the very same families we want to encourage to our region to take holidays and spend their money in local businesses, and scaremongering will not assist in ensuring that our economic situation in North Queensland becomes viable.

We have a great range of opportunities in front of us with the introduction of a price on carbon. The clean energy trade is a huge and growing market and it is where many of the jobs of the future will be. Already we are seeing geothermal work underway on the Atherton Tablelands and incredible work being undertaken at James Cook University about the use of algae as a biofuel. Farmers and Indigenous landholders have great opportunities through the Carbon Farming Initiative, and our research capacity will continue to expand. Our university, James Cook University, is the only Australian university to be recognised as having well above world standards in environmental science and management.

I commend our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and our Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Greg Combet, on managing to deliver this policy through the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. I contrast that with members of the House of Representatives from North Queensland whose commentary can only be characterised as scaremongering, misleading and, to be frank, not based in fact. Yes, climate change is complex and so the response to it has to be complex. That means you have to get your head around it. Labor is up to the challenge. I was terribly disappointed to hear the commentary from Mr Entsch, Mr Christensen and Mr Ewen Jones in the House of Representatives. It could only be described as scaremongering.

I also note that the contribution from Senator Macdonald in the Senate flies in the face of the science that I referred to earlier. I have been concerned throughout this debate that the language characterised by this debate has denigrated science and scientists. I stand here to support the principles of the scientific process. I also stand here to support the hardworking scientists who research the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, James Cook University and other institutions. They do the hard work in our region to seek the truth and to find the facts that they can then provide to us as policymakers to inform the policy development process. I stand here to support them and not to denigrate them. I thank them for their diligence and their academic endeavour. I commend these bills to the chamber.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

These are very dark days, indeed. Before those on the other side say I am scaremongering, I do not think of myself as somebody who scaremongers or exacerbates situations. I look at myself as a mother, a wife, a farmer from central western New South Wales and a pretty balanced person when it comes to my approach to how I look at things like the carbon tax. I still come to the conclusion that these are very dark days, indeed.

What we have here is legislation that is based on a lie. We have legislation that is based on probably the biggest lie this nation has ever been told. I know colleagues before me have also raised this issue. That is because it is central to the fact that the Australian people have been misled. I know my colleague Senator Cash yesterday raised this issue in her excellent contribution in the chamber—that the Prime Minister lied to the Australian people. Let us just go back and have a little look at this. Before the last election what was it the Prime Minister said at the time? She said:

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

To me, that is pretty clear. That is pretty simple. That is pretty straightforward. If I was setting out across Australia during the election campaign to cast my vote, I would be thinking, 'Okay, the Australian Labor Party are not going to bring in a carbon tax.' I am pretty sure that is what people would have thought. I am almost certain that is what they would have thought because they were told by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, that there was not going to be a carbon tax under the government she led. So they went to the ballot box and they voted.

Let us step forward a little bit. What do we see now? We see the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, giving the Australian people a carbon tax. I do not think you have to be a rocket scientist or even a kindergartener to figure out that the Prime Minister lied to the Australian people. What we have now is a government that was elected on a false pretence. We have a government that was elected on a false promise to the Australian people. And it was barely elected. We have this cobbled together Labor-Greens-Independent government because the Prime Minister was far more concerned about getting into power than forming a government that could actually run the country properly. She simply had no desire to form a government that could do it properly. The reason I say that is that, sitting here today, it is obvious the government cannot run the country properly because we are dealing with this legislation.

Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, was asked on 15 August 2010, just before the election, about the carbon tax. He said:

Well, certainly what we rejected is this hysterical allegation that somehow we are moving towards a carbon tax from the Liberals in their advertising. We reject that.

Hysterical? We were spot on. We were right on the money. We were right on the money when we said to the Australian people, 'Beware of what you are about to buy. This Labor Party will give you a carbon tax.' We got told we were hysterical. We were absolutely right. That is not something I am happy about. I am really sad about that. I did not want to be right about that. I did not want to be right about that because we should not be having a carbon tax. Yet we have in front of us the carbon tax that the government promised the Australian people it would not bring in.

I am not sure whether it makes me completely furious or incredibly sad that we have a government that, on an issue of this nature, would tell the Australian people one thing and then do completely the opposite. Even if we take into account the fact that it was a mistake and the Prime Minister did not mean to do it—I do not think that was the case, but let us give her the benefit of the doubt for a moment—let us go to another election. Let us not introduce the carbon tax until after the next election. We could do then what we are doing at the moment: we could have the debate, we could have the vote and we could determine the future of this legislation. I simply say to the government, 'Say that you will not bring this carbon tax in until after the next election.' Why wouldn't the government do that?

Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Because they'd lose!

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It just seems to be very sensible. Senator Cash says it is because they will lose. That is the reason this government does not have the courage to stand up for what it believes in and take this legislation to the next election—it knows it will lose. We know it will lose because I and my colleagues on this side of the chamber and in the other place have been out there on the ground speaking to people on the streets, in the villages and in the communities for years and years about this issue. They tell us overwhelmingly that they do not want a carbon tax.

On the North Coast recently I conducted a poll in the newspaper. Of course it was not a detailed poll like some of them are, but I thought it might give us a bit of an indication. We asked people to vote on a simple question: do you want a carbon tax? Two people were undecided, 136 wanted a carbon tax and 1,591 people did not. I know it was not conclusive poll, I am the first to admit that, but you do not have to be a kindergartener to figure out that it gives you a reasonably good indication of what people on the ground are thinking. Those people who want a carbon tax had just as much opportunity to respond to my poll as those who do not want one. So if it is the case that people want a carbon tax, why did they not respond? It is because they know that this legislation is not going to achieve what the government wants it to. They know it is going to be a whacking great tax that will not make the slightest bit of difference to the climate. They know that. The Australian people are not stupid; they know what is going on here.

When you look at the Clean Energy Bill 2011, you can see that among its objects it intends:

(b)   to support the development of an effective global response to climate change, consistent with Australia’s national interest in ensuring that average global temperatures increase by not more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels;

Support the development of an effective global response! Nobody else in the world is doing what we are about to do. It is a fact. The Productivity Commission even said recently:

… no country currently imposes an economy-wide tax on carbon emissions or has in place an economy-wide permit scheme.

So why are we doing this? Why are we the ones who have to be out there on the world stage leading the way, when no other country is doing what we are about to do? Even back in 2007, the Productivity Commission said:

Independent action by Australia to substantially reduce GHG emissions, in itself, would deliver barely discernible climate benefits, but could be nationally very costly.

You think? You only have to look at what the government is putting forward to see the cost impact this is going to have. You know that this is going to have an enormous impact on our families, and our families get it. They get it. Why are we doing this? I take senators back to 16 June, when Senator Boswell asked during question time:

My question is for the minister for climate change. Can the minister explain what purpose it will serve for Australia to enter into a carbon tax when our emissions are only 1.4 per cent but, in comparison, China's carbon emissions will rise by 496 per cent and India's emissions will rise by 350 per cent by 2020?

Do you know what the minister, Senator Wong, said in response?

The answer to it is this: because Australians are not slackers.

There is a good reason for us to impose on the Australian people a massive great tax that is not going to change the climate one little bit: because, apparently, we are not slackers. I am sorry; I actually require a bit more than that as a reason for the government of a nation to impose a carbon tax that is going to reconfigure our economy and hit regional communities harder than anywhere else but will not make the slightest bit of difference to the climate. The legislation before us is probably the worst piece of legislation we have ever seen in this place.

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

And that's saying something.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is saying something. We emit 1.4 per cent of the world's emissions, but we are going to have this whacking great tax that will not change the climate one little bit. No amount of debate—I do not care how many hours of debate we listen to in the other chamber and in this place—can take away from the fact that this piece of legislation is not going to change the climate one little bit. The government says, 'Oh, we're going to compensate,' because we on this side of the chamber are giving the Australian people facts. We are not scaremongering when we tell them exactly how this is going to hit their hip pocket. Electricity, fuel, transport—it is going to hit their hip pocket, there are no two ways about it. As my good colleague and leader, Senator Joyce, says, it is going to come at you out of the shopping trolley and it is going to come at you out of the power point. The Australian people understand that the costs will be passed on. And the government admit that, because they have put in place a compensation package. By the very fact that they have put a compensation package in place, they have admitted that those companies will pass the costs on. How is it actually going to change the behaviour of those companies, which is what the government are trying to do, if they are going to pass the costs on and not bear the cost burden?

The compensation is very interesting, because guess what, colleagues? It is not ongoing. It is not going to go on forever into the future. It is not going to be rolling compensation that goes on for decades. This carbon tax is going to go on and on and on, which means the costs are going to go on and on and on. So the compensation in its theoretical form, from the other side of this chamber, is going to be very short lived. What is even more astounding—I should not actually be astounded by this, colleagues; we should not be at all surprised—is that the government have done part of their compensation as a one-off, upfront, lump sum payment before the commencement of the carbon pricing scheme. This advance payment is designed to cover a period of six to 18 months, depending on the type of welfare payment that a person is receiving.

Does this government learn nothing? A lump sum payment—let me see, colleagues. Let us go back to—oh, I don't know—maybe the $900 payment that went out from the government during the global financial crisis. What did we see then but a splash of activity, and the feedback coming from clubs and shops—for example, places selling plasma TVs—was that their profits went through the roof. Does the government really think that giving a one-off payment to tide people over for the next 18 months is really the smartest thing to do? Does it think that is a really clever way of dealing with compensation? The more important thing is that it is not ongoing, and under this government the carbon tax will be—and that is the very difference.

The impact on the regions is going to be enormous. While the government keeps saying, 'Agriculture is not included,' we know that down the track, when there is a review, there is capacity for agriculture to be included. This is not going off into the never-never of 'agriculture is going to be out forever'. It is simply not true. Putting that to one side, that is a separate issue anyway, because even if agricultural emissions are excluded, farmers are still going to bear all of those associated costs—fuel, transport, electricity, fertiliser. Farmers are going to get hit harder than those in so many other parts of our economy, much harder. What is extraordinary is that this government thinks that is okay.

Farmers are at the bottom of the food chain, and so often we have absolutely nowhere to pass costs on. But this government thinks that is fine. This government thinks it is fine for regional communities to be harder hit than anywhere else. This government thinks it is fine for farmers to bear the brunt financially of a whacking great new tax that is not going to change the climate one little bit. If I could come up with a better word for it, I would, but at the moment all I can come up with is 'stupid'. It is just stupid legislation from this government because it is not even going to achieve what the government is trying to achieve. The cost to farmers is going to be huge. Jock Laurie, the President of the National Farmers Federation, recently said:

Food processors are facing millions of dollars in higher costs as a result of the carbon tax, particularly through increased electricity prices, and many have said that the only way they can recoup this cost is to pass it on to their suppliers—our farmers.

That is precisely what is going to happen, colleagues. We have examples.

Under a carbon tax, the Murray Goulburn Co-operative's costs are going to go up over $5,000 per farmer, paid for by farmers. We are going to see rice farmers' costs, on average, increase around $10,000 a farm. The power increases are going to sit with our farmers. The power and gas bill for an average horticultural farm in the central west of New South Wales is going to go up to $50,000 a year. These are just tiny examples of the very real effect that this tax is going to have on people not only in our regional communities but right across the regions.

The end result: by 2020, what is going to happen? Our emissions are actually going to increase from around 578 million tonnes to 621 million tonnes. We are doing all of this, putting all of this pain on the Australian people, for an increase in global emissions. I am back to that word again, colleagues. It is stupid. It is simply stupid.

I and my colleagues on this side of the chamber will not give up. We have fought this fight for a long time, even back when we had the initial debate around the emissions trading scheme that the government wanted to bring in. I commend my colleagues on this side of the chamber for having the guts to stand up and say, 'This country does not want an emissions trading scheme.' Some of them are here in the chamber with me at the moment: Senator Joyce, Senator Bernardi, Senator Cash. There were so many of my colleagues on this side of the chamber who fought and fought to allow the Australian people to have their voice because they did not want an emissions trading scheme.

And now, today, we have this carbon tax legislation before us. To anyone listening out there, I can only say: please don't stop. Contact the Prime Minister, contact your local Labor member and contact the ministers. If you do not want this carbon tax, you tell them, and do not stop telling them. Let them know exactly what we think. We know what you think about it, people out in the Australian communities. You make sure you tell the Prime Minister of this country that you do not want a carbon tax.

I know that on this side of the chamber we will not step back one moment from trying everything we possibly can to ensure, under this government, that we do not have a carbon tax. But we can absolutely promise the Australian people that if the coalition is in government we will rescind this tax. There will be no carbon tax under a coalition government, and the reason we are so resolved about this is that we know it is wrong. We know the Australian people do not want it, and our job is to make sure we do the right thing by them. We know that this tax is not even going to do what the government intends it to do, and how stupid is that! It is a whacking new tax that is going to affect all Australian people and it is not going to change the climate one little bit.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not intend to speak for a long time.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Why not?

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The reason is that I have been speaking on this for nine years. We have been talking about the impact of climate change ever since I have been here, in opposition and now in government, and finally we are at the point where we are actually going to stand up and do what needs to be done. I am very proud of that and that is why I am going to speak. I am not going to mount all the scientific or economic arguments that we have talked about over the years. I am just going to make a few points because it is important, I think, to put my position again in general terms in this debate, which is that we are going to do what we have known for decades needs to be done.

I want to start my contribution with a quote from my good friend Senator Chris Back. On 30 November 2009 he said:

Certainly we want to see action on climate change. Anyone who says that we do not is an idiot; a complete idiot.

Of course Senator Chris Back is a member of the opposition. I bet he wishes he could take those words back now because as he looks to the left of him in the opposition, and to the right of him and in front of him and behind him, he sees those very people who do not want to take action on climate change, the very people he described as idiots—complete idiots. I am sure he really seriously wishes he could take those words back. I am sure his colleagues wish that he had never said them in the first place.

We have spent enough time on this. The first government review of emissions trading was undertaken almost two decades ago. During this excessively long deliberation there is little that has been left unsaid on the matter; therefore, I wish to make only a few obvious points. As I have said already, I have spoken on this issue many times over the nine years that I have been here, and there is little left to be said. The science is clearly decided: climate change is happening now. This is not a matter of opinion. The science is there. The consensus of scientific professionals across the world is so strong as to be irrefutable. Continuing to debate this point is akin to debating the existence of gravity. I have not heard anything in the debate in this chamber that we have had over many years that has changed the position of the science one iota. What I have heard is a debate about political opportunism, not about science. It is about political opportunism for the opposition to mount a debate, a scare campaign, to galvanise political support based on ignorance, and I think they should be ashamed of that.

The economics of what we are doing are good. The mechanism that is central to the government's plan to reduce carbon pollution, putting a price on pollution, is supported by the IMF, the Productivity Commission and the federal Treasury as being the most effective way to reduce carbon pollution, and I have not heard anything in this debate that questions the economics of what we are doing. But again what we have heard is political opportunism, a scare campaign to try to galvanise political, opportunistic support against what this government is doing.

Given that the scientific and economic arguments are decided, we have to ask: why is the opposition persisting in this debate? Again, that only goes to reinforce that the debate is not at all about the issue. It is about the opposition abrogating their responsibility to do something and using a political opportunity to try to win support against a government that is prepared to make the hard decisions to do the right thing by the economy and by future generations of Australia. I believe that will ultimately backfire on them.

I do not want to be judged by history as belonging to a wilfully ignorant and obstinate group within this chamber whose legacy, if they had their way, would be to leave an uninhabitable planet for our children and our children's children. I do not want to be part of that legacy and I am not going to be. Our generations have consumed more of the world's resources than any generation before us, and this pattern cannot continue unabated. We know we need to act, and people who continue to stick their heads in the sand, as the opposition does and would have us all do, commit what may well be the greatest negligent act ever visited on humanity.

History will catch up with those who oppose these important bills. In 2011 ignorance is no longer an excuse. Political opportunism is not a responsible course of action for people who have the responsibility to look after this generation, the next generation and generations to come. That is the responsibility we have in this place. I would not be numbered amongst those Australian politicians who once opposed the enfranchisement of women and Aborigines, I would not be numbered amongst those who opposed the introduction of universal healthcare or superannuation and I will not be amongst those to be condemned by history as opposing this important reform.

We do not do this because it is fun; we do it because it is the right thing to do. We know we have to act, we know why we have to act and we know what it is we have to do. We are going to do this because it is the right thing to do, not just for this generation but for the future generations of this country. I commend these bills to the Senate.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a dark day for all Australians. The debate on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills is evidence of Labor's monumental betrayal of the Australian people, a monumental betrayal by a government that stole the election based on a lie. It is a government that is captive to an extreme green agenda. It is also a government that seeks to implement a policy that will not achieve its aims and intentions, a policy that is informed by incomplete and biased science. I am constantly amazed how every member of this Labor government can step into this great house of parliament and honestly say that they are representing the will of the people. The evidence is there that they have deceived Australians, and by making these statements they are deceiving themselves. They are blind to their failures and are led by an extreme green party who are taking them into their world of skewed priorities and poisonous policies. Frankly, it is an absolute disgrace. Labor's deception began just days before Australians went to the polls. Julia Gillard promised Australians, on national television no less—

Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! You know the correct title to use when you are referring to a member of the other house.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Their name? Sorry, I missed that, Mr Acting Deputy President.

Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi, you know the correct way to refer to a member from the other house.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Did I refer to 'Ms Gillard'? Is that incorrect?

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

She's the Prime Minister.

Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister or Ms Gillard.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Okay. Well, the Prime Minister told a blatant untruth on national television when she said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' People may indeed be sick of hearing us say that, but we have to repeat that promise again and again and again because it was such a huge betrayal of the Australian people. Would Ms Gillard be Prime Minister today if she had told Australians the truth before the election? Just days after she made this false promise she reinforced her deception by saying repeatedly, 'I rule out a carbon tax.' The Prime Minister misled the Australian people to get their votes, and now that she is in the top job Australians are quite rightly questioning whether she could care less about what they think. I have to say, it is no wonder that politicians are held in such low esteem by the public when the leader of a country can tell blatant falsehoods in order to get what she wants.

So I would say to the Australian people that this Labor government is based on a sham. It gained power by hoodwinking Australians and it has held onto power by continuing this ruse and by getting into bed with the Greens. It is entirely right that so many Australians feel so outraged by this. They should feel outraged, too, because the alliance between the Greens and the Labor Party that formed government fills everyday Australians with concern. The Greens party cares only for an extreme left-wing ideal. It has ideals that are rife with hypocrisy and it will do almost anything to see them become a reality. The Greens party has repainted old-fashioned Marxism with a pale-green brush and convinced a section of the Australian public that its agenda is cuddling koalas and saving trees. But make no mistake: this is a radical party that seeks to fundamentally change our economy and our society, and this party is pulling the strings in the Prime Minister's office and unfortunately it holds the balance of power in the Senate.

Any Australian who is seriously concerned about the future of our country owes it to themselves to take a deeper look at what the Greens believe, because I can assure all of them that when they examine the context of their policies it will surprise and horrify them. The Greens manifesto effectively wants to reduce humankind to just another species amongst species. We as human beings are just the same as any other animals, in the eyes of the Greens. The Greens want to tax all of us to the point of exhaustion. Their economic policy agenda lists tax after tax after tax. They want to take more money out of the pockets of everyday Australians and yet they want Australians to also pay more for electricity. They want to get rid of coal fired power stations and replace them with technology that simply cannot deliver the level of power that this country needs. This is yet another demonstration of the Greens party's complete lack of grasp of reality.

It is like they are living in a twilight zone, putting aside any semblance of common sense in order to realise their green dreams. This is a party whose leader wants to see one world government—long the domain of conspiracy theorists. Senator Bob Brown proved just how ridiculous his policies are when he said, 'Why shouldn't we now join vigorous moves in Europe and at the United Nations for a global people's assembly based on one person, one vote, one value?' Along with his band of green minstrels, we see further evidence that the Greens have their priorities all wrong. Senator Brown once issued a press release calling for a register of businesses based on the religious beliefs of their owners, and yet at the same time members of the Greens party promote and support boycotts of businesses that do trade with Israel or that are owned by Jews—actions that sicken most normal Australians.

The Greens have also developed an audacious reputation for hypocrisy. Senator Bob Brown was reported as saying that 'people do not make large donations to political parties without having in mind favour in return'. Yet that purity did not stop him and his party pocketing the largest ever individual donation in Australia's political history—$1.6 million. What about the suggestions and accusations that could have been aimed at Senator Brown and his party when they then asked a number of questions in this place that were directly relevant to the business interests of that donor? Any cursory examination gives it an aromatic scent of dodgy Third World politics. This is a party big on grandstanding and small on substance. It is a party with an extreme agenda that is very damaging to all of Australia. The Greens are an alarmist movement that will seek to trade in and profit from human misery because that will suit their political agenda. Why on earth, I and the Australian people ask, are Labor letting the Greens run the country? It is because they are scared of losing power. The Labor Party spent 11 years in the opposition wilderness and when they finally got into government they stuffed up on a monumental scale. Labor know they are incapable of running the country effectively. We have seen it with the bungled Home Insulation Program, the BER, cash for clunkers, the citizens assembly that never saw the light of day, green loans, Fuelwatch, GroceryWatch and I could go on. Labor are scrambling. They are scared and they are clinging to the Greens as the only hope they have of surviving in the short term. But make no mistake, just as a female praying mantis bites the head off its mate after copulation, so too will this grubby alliance with the Greens destroy the Labor Party.

Labor is letting the Greens call the shots and Australians are going to pay dearly for it. The first thing they are going to pay dearly for is this carbon tax. This carbon tax will have a detrimental effect on Australia. It will move Australian businesses and jobs offshore. It will cause thousands of Australians to lose their jobs. It will have a destructive impact on our country's international competitiveness. It will push up prices for already struggling Australian families and it will not provide any benefit for the environment. Even the government's own people have admitted this. Former climate change minister Penny Wong was quite adamant that a carbon tax was not effective. I will give you some quotes from Penny Wong:

A carbon tax is a less efficient way in the Australian Government's view of dealing with this issue.

This too was Senator Wong:

Unfortunately a carbon tax is not the silver bullet some people would think.

So said Senator Wong:

You can't have any environmental certainty with a carbon tax.

Once again Senator Wong said:

The introduction of a carbon price ahead of effective international action can lead to perverse incentives for such industries to relocate or source production offshore.

This carbon tax is based on false assumptions and dubious science. It is based on science muddied by self-interest. Why, we ask ourselves, is this government seeking to impose this ridiculous tax on us? What have they actually based it on? They have based it on the IPCC, that bastion of independence and impartiality—I only wish Hansard could detect the sarcasm in my voice when I say that. This government, time and time again, has used information from the IPCC to justify its misguided policies on climate change. Yet last year the IPCC was exposed as a deceptive and incompetent organisation. It claimed that its reports were based on conclusions by thousands of scientists, yet only a relative handful of scientists contributed to its climate change sections. Many of the leading authors of the IPCC reports are graduate students in their 20s. One co-author was a previous Greenpeace campaigner and became an author at the IPCC at the age of 25. Another one became a lead author well before getting her PhD and was co-authoring reports 10 years before even that. Some unkindly suggest that these youngsters were chosen based on their malleability and compliance or on their precommitment to climate change alarmism, but at least they actually did some research. The IPCC attributed reports of Himalayan glaciers melting to a scientist who actually never made those claims, yet this did not stop the Chairman of the IPCC using this falsified information to justify a research grant going to his own organisation.

The fraud continues with the IPCC's claim that natural disasters would increase due to global warming. Third World nations use this as the basis to seek millions of dollars in compensation, yet this IPCC claim was based on an unpublished report that had not been subject to scientific scrutiny. What about that fairytale that IPCC reports are solely based on peer reviewed research? It is exactly that: a fairytale. For example, in its 2007 assessment report, 30 per cent of the citations were not peer reviewed. This is despite the IPCC Chairman, Dr Pachauri, saying to legislators in 2008:

We carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry (the) credibility of peer-reviewed publications—w e don't settle for anything less than that.

That is a blatant falsehood and not one single person corrected his statement, not one scientist. Such dishonesty is mind-boggling, yet that is what this government has built this outlandish and outrageous tax upon. Our government has swallowed the IPCC information hook, line and sinker and they have employed their very own mouthpieces to perpetuate more of the same.

Take for example the PT Barnum of climate science, Tim Flannery. Why should we believe what he says about the impending threat of rising sea levels when he owns a low-lying waterfront home on the Hawkesbury River? This is a man who, despite all of his alarmist comments about sea levels rising and global warming, has said on the ABC that he cannot explain why we have gone through a slight cooling trend for the last 10 years, just as the alarmists cannot explain recent best research that confirms there has been no statistical warming for 10 years, despite an ongoing increase in carbon dioxide emissions. This is why the alarmists and this government will not answer some fundamental questions. By how much will this carbon tax, which will disadvantage every Australian, reduce global warming? How many droughts will this carbon tax avoid? By how much will this carbon tax stop sea levels rising? How much more rain will fall due to the this carbon tax being imposed? How many fewer climate change refugees will end up coming to our shores in leaky boats? They will not answer these questions simply because they cannot. The government also cannot answer this simple question: why is the three per cent of human caused emissions driving climate change and not the 97 per cent of natural carbon dioxide emissions? The amount of complete and utter nonsense that this government have swallowed is staggering and now they are forcing the Australian people to digest this nonsense too.

This package of bills began with political falsehoods of monumental proportions. It is built on a succession of lies, falsehoods and distorted science. These bills are based on alarmism rather than prudence. They are based on spin rather than substance. Why should that surprise us, given the track record of this government? This carbon tax proposal is sustained and endorsed by rent seekers, extremists and government funded propaganda. I am here to tell you Australians have had enough. They have had enough of the mismanagement. They have had enough of the deceit. They have had enough of the waste of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars. They have had enough of Senator Bob Brown and his Greens party pulling the strings while the hapless Prime Minister dances to his tunes. Australians do not want this carbon tax. It is a tax that will fundamentally change our economy, raise prices for families, push our jobs overseas and cripple business, and all for no environmental gain. It is a tax that is a child of this unholy Labor-Greens alliance. It is a tax that is grounded in dubious and self-interested science. Australians do not want this tax. This Greens-led Labor government does not deserve to be called the Australian government, because it continually fails to represent the interests of the Australian people and the interests of the Australian nation.

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

Having listened to some of the contributions from the coalition in this debate on taking this country forward, I wonder what it would be like under the type of scientific nonsense that they are pushing. They are anti-scientific; they just do not believe in the science. We have heard the arguments that climate change is not really happening from those opposite—'What is this issue about carbon dioxide?'—and I would invite any of the coalition senators to talk to the CSIRO, to the Australian Academy of Science and to our own eminent scientists within Australia who understand the issue, and not to listen to the nonsense and rhetorical flourishes that we hear from the likes of Senator Bernardi in his attempt to discredit the scientists of this country and scientists overseas.

I have said on a number of occasions that even the Pope is concerned about the issue of global warming. I am not normally one to be quoting the Pope in the Senate, but his Pontifical Academy of Sciences has said there is a real problem out there. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences says the icebergs are falling into the sea and the sea level is rising, and if we do not do something about it we are in for really big problems. Yet all we get from the coalition is the nonsense that this is the view of extremists. I do not know what has happened to the Catholic Church, but I am not sure that you could argue the Pope is an extremist in relation to climate change.

Another 'extremist' out there is David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the UK. He is no relation of mine; he must be from the 'black' Camerons if he is a Conservative. David Cameron has personally congratulated the Prime Minister on her carbon tax policy. He sent a letter from 10 Downing Street to say that the Australian government's move on climate change was bold and ambitious. He said the government was dealing with one of the most pressing threats to our nations' prosperity and security. That is what a Conservative Prime Minister who seems to care about the environment says. But in Senator Bernardi's view he would be another extremist. All these extremists—like Margaret Thatcher, John Howard and Peter Shergold—are out there saying there is a problem. You would not say that they were leading the left-wing charge anywhere in the world, but there we go; these are thrown in as extremists by Senator Bernardi. If they are extremists, I have not seen one yet.

There is yet another supposed extremist: Malcolm Turnbull. And what does the former Leader of the Opposition say in terms of the opposition's policy? The opposition have a policy called 'direct action'. It really is just an excuse to do nothing, it is the 'do nothing' policy. It is saying, 'We will pay the polluters to stop polluting, and every family in Australia will pay $1,300 to pay for us to look after the polluters in this economy.' And what does Malcolm Turnbull say about that? He says, 'It is what it is.' That is how he describes the policy—it is what it is. It is a policy where, yes, the government picks winners. There is no doubt about that. It is a policy where the government spends taxpayers' money to pay for investments to offset the emissions from industry.

There are two virtues of that from the points of view of Mr Abbott and Mr Hunt. One is that it can be easily terminated. It is the coalition's con job on the climate. That is what this is: it is a coalition con job. They never mean to do anything. They say: 'Yes, we will set similar targets to the Labor government. We will set targets and try to reduce pollution, but we will set up this scheme that will do nothing. We will set up a scheme that we can just get rid of easily.' That is the position of the coalition. The hypocrisy just oozes out of the coalition every time they get on their feet. They know the best way to deal with carbon pollution in this country is to let the market deal with it, not to try to pick winners, or to try to have the government and ordinary taxpayers pay polluters to reduce carbon pollution. Putting a market price on it is the proven way to do it. Yet all of those on the other side, who have been lecturing me about how the market should operate even though I was a union official, run away from it.

We have people like Senator Bernardi who is continually running the line that has been run by the extremists. He is an extremist on carbon pollution. He does not think there is a problem, and that is a problem for my grandkids. I have two beautiful grandkids, Amy and Scott, and I want them to have a decent life in the future. One of the most important things you can do to give your grandkids a decent life in the future is to make sure they have an environment that they can live in. We need to give them an environment where they can bring up their families in the future in the same way we have done, where they are not worried about rising sea levels, global warming or mosquito borne diseases because the temperatures are increasing. We on this side want them to have a decent life in the future, and that is what this package of bills is about. It is about Australia playing its part in a global attempt to reduce the temperature of the world so that we can have a decent environment in the future. Mr Acting Deputy President, look at some of the speeches that have been made. I will not say much about Senator Joyce's speech. I got the Hansard and had a look at it. I tried to make some sense of Senator Joyce's speech in the Hansard. It was almost incomprehensible. For someone who thinks he might one day be the Deputy Prime Minister of this country to go on with the garbage that Senator Joyce spewed out in here on climate change is an absolute disaster for this country. It was incomprehensible, unintelligible and just plain dumb—absolutely dumb.

Then we had Senator Abetz. Senator Abetz led the debate off for the coalition. He did not say much that we have not heard him say before. We know that he is a climate change denier. We know that he is not in touch with the scientific reality of where we are.

The one that I liked was the speech by Senator Back. Senator Back made a fantastic contribution. He actually channelled Alan Jones. He was in here with all the questions about percentages of carbon dioxide in the air: it is less than 0.04 of one per cent; it is one twenty-seventh of one per cent; it is only one molecule in 90,000 molecules in the air—all absolute garbage, absolute nonsense. He really does need to get some re-education from the scientists of the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology or the CSIRO, because this stuff was just so much nonsense.

What they do not say is: 'We don't really understand this. We've listened to Alan Jones and we've just come into the Senate to regurgitate Alan Jones.' Let me tell you what he also said:

Governments of all persuasions cannot pick winners. If they are good enough to survive in the commercial world, they do not need a subsidy. If they need a subsidy, it is because they cannot survive. Examples can be given of companies that have failed to the tune of $400 million and $500 million simply because they had the wrong economic model. Who on the Labor government side is going to pick these winners? Who is going to spend the taxpayers' money to try to pick winners which industry, business and commerce nationally and internationally cannot?

Senator Back, nobody is picking the winners on this side. We are saying the market will reduce the costs. Senator Back, in going out into that little area, demonstrated that this 'strong voice', this false 'look at me; I really know what I'm talking about' is just so much garbage. What did Senator Back really do? Senator Back, in that paragraph of his speech, actually destroyed 'direct action', because direct action is about picking winners. Senator Back actually destroyed the coalition policy. He obviously does not know what the coalition policy is, because he came out and hammered exactly what the coalition policy is: using government funds to pick winners. That is exactly what direct action is, Senator Back. I would ask you to go back and have a look at what you said, and then tomorrow you will need to go and say to your leader: 'I'm sorry, I've blown your cover. What I said in the Senate destroys direct action. I've just exposed to everybody that direct action is an absolute farce. It won't work because we are picking winners and we are using public money to pick those winners.' That is the very thing that Senator Back says we should not be doing.

So what do we know today from those across the floor? Those on the other side do not believe in the science. They are anti-scientific. They attack scientists—they will attack the CSIRO; they will attack the Academy of Science—because they are backward in their thinking. And they are short-term in their thinking. They do not care about the future of this country and they do not care about the children and future generations in this country. All they want to do is run a fear campaign based on falsities and nonsense.

We have Senator Sinodonos here. Welcome. Now you can tell them exactly what John Howard said about climate change. You know John Howard said climate change is real. You know John Howard said we had to do something about it. You know John Howard said we cannot wait for everybody else; we have to do it now. Well, Senator Sinodonos, get up and tell us here what you advised John Howard to do. We know what you did—you advised him to deal with climate change. Now advise the lunatics on your own side to do the same thing.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On a point of order, Mr President: it might be nice if Senator Cameron were to learn Senator Sinodinos's correct name. Whatever accent he is using, it might be nice if Senator Cameron were to address the senator by his correct name.

John Hogg (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senators are entitled to be correctly addressed in this place.

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

I apologise, Senator Sinodinos, but that does not move me one bit. You must do exactly what you advised John Howard to do. You must, in my view, stand up and educate the coalition on climate science and on decent economics. That is the task you have got, because they are an absolute—

Debate interrupted.