Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by Senator Waters today relating to climate change.

I asked the representing minister about the UN Environment Program report released overnight, which is not very happy reading, I have to say. It says that countries now, in fact, need to reduce emissions by 7.6 per cent every single year for the next decade to have any chance of globally, us collectively, meeting that 1.5 degree aspirational target that the world signed up to in 2015 in Paris. Some of the language used in the report is quite scary. It describes the scale of that effort—considering that we've just wasted the last decade to reduce emissions—and says that 'unprecedented transformative efforts by all' is what's required, according to the United Nations.

Sadly, we got the usual response from this government that we are 'meeting and beating' targets, and there was crowing about how we are meeting our Kyoto target—conveniently ignoring that Australia was the only country that got an increase in allowable emissions in that first Kyoto period. We were allowed to increase emissions by eight per cent. So it is no wonder that we met that target—it was an increase! The audacity of this government to be proud of that is a national and international embarrassment. So I am afraid that really doesn't fly.

The next premise that the minister went to was that we're going to be beating our second target. Again, the only reason that Australia is potentially anywhere near meeting that target is that we are using carryover credits from that first Kyoto period. So, essentially, we're cooking the books. We were allowed to increase emissions, we've banked some of that and we're now going to deduct that from our existing emissions. No other country is doing that. Other countries, including France and, I think, Germany, have said that they will voluntarily relinquish those carryover credits. They won't seek to use dodgy accounting to try to swindle the world's climate. They will genuinely just seek to meet their targets without using these carryover credits. Australia is the lone country that still seeks to rely on those carryover credits—again, the arrogance and audacity of this government in trying to describe us as a leader in climate policy!

The actual wording of the United Nations Environment Program overnight was that Australia had no major policy tool to encourage emissions reductions, and this government is trying to say we're a global leader. The point I made was that, yes, we are a leader—in per capita emissions. We are, at the minute, the highest per capita carbon emissions polluter in the world. Even if this government's anti-science, weak targets were met, which it doesn't look like they're going to be, we would still be the world's largest carbon emitter per person. So this government has absolutely not a leg to stand on when it comes to climate policy, and the world knows it.

That criticism from the UN overnight was absolutely stark: no major policy tool to encourage emissions reductions. In fact, the UN took the approach of quoting back to this government its own department's evidence, which shows that in the next 10 years—that now really critical decade, since we just wasted the last critical decade—in fact emissions would remain largely unchanged. These are the department's own figures saying that this government's useless climate policy won't make a difference for the next decade. Emissions won't come down. The UN has picked up on that data, and the minister simply refuses to accept the facts. I think they're in a parallel universe, because he talked about meeting the science. If the science were to be met, you'd be taking action to reduce emissions by 7.6 per cent per year, as the UNEP has just said that, globally, we all need to do. But no. What they will do is continue to take the donations from the fossil fuel companies—from big oil, big gas and big coal. They'll take that to the bank, they'll use it to get themselves re-elected and they will continue to do absolutely nothing to address the climate crisis. This is despite the fact that the nation is on fire. We're still not in summer, yet in my home state of Queensland we've had those fires for months already. We've seen half the coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef permanently die thanks to those two back-to-back bleaching episodes, which are climate induced, and this government still just takes money from big coal, big oil and big gas, ignores the science, uses dodgy accounting and has the audacity to call itself a government.

Question agreed to.