Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Payne) to a question without notice asked by Senator Rice today relating to climate change.

This government just doesn't get it. It just doesn't get the seriousness of the action required to tackle our climate crisis. We have an opportunity now with President-elect Biden and his commitment to tackle climate change—with his assertion and absolutely realistic description of the climate crisis as the No. 1 issue facing humanity. I think it is excellent that our Prime Minister had a conversation with President-elect Biden this morning, and it would have been a wonderful opportunity to actually talk about the opportunities of how we could be increasing our ambition to properly tackle our climate crisis with the urgency required. We know that an incoming Biden government is going to take much more action than Trump has been taking, and we know that, given the level of ambition that President-elect Biden has already put on the table, there is the opportunity for us to take some amazing steps forward in getting the level of reduction in pollution that is necessary if we as humanity are going to have a future on this planet. But unfortunately it doesn't seem that the opportunity was there in our Prime Minister's mind. I'm not actually that surprised, given what we know about what laggards we have been on the world stage when it comes to climate over the last seven years.

We've got more out of President-elect Biden's report of the conversation than I got out of my question to Minister Payne today. We are told in the report from President-elect Biden that the discussion included confronting climate change. Interestingly, as I had already noted, the report of the equivalent conversation with the Japanese Prime Minister noted their shared commitment to tackling climate change. Call me a cynic, but the fact that we didn't get a report of the shared commitment to tackling climate change makes it sound to me as if there wasn't a sense of that shared commitment.

I questioned the minister about the conversation. Come on! What did they talk about? Let's put climate on the table. Let's make it an issue. We know, given that President-elect Biden says it's the No. 1 issue facing humanity, surely it's something worth talking about. But, no, it seems that there was no discussion of the need to increase our ambition when it comes to targets for 2030. In fact, all that Minister Payne was able to tell me was that they were talking about the long-term targets, the long-term ambition, and the use of technology. Of course we're going to be using technology to be tackling climate change, but we need more than that. We need ambition and we need targets.

We know that President-elect Biden has already committed that, under his presidency, the US's target will be to get their electricity emissions to zero by 2035. We already know that, even before he comes to office, the US's ambition for 2030 is much higher than the pathetic targets that Australia have, because they've got same target for 2025 as we've got for 2030. We know that we've got a President-elect who is committed to increasing that target. So where does that leave Australia? It's clear from discussions and the reports of that discussion this morning that Australia is left where it has been for the last seven years—that is, being a complete laggard on the world stage and completely not paying attention to the importance of this issue. It leaves us there with Russia and the petrostates as being the ones that are beholden to the fossil fuel companies, not willing to do what is necessary so that we have a safe future. Australia is being totally left behind, and yet there is such an opportunity here.

The COP 26 conference is coming up in Glasgow next year, where Australia is going to be asked to significantly increase its ambition for 2030. We know that virtually every other country in the world is going to be coming to that conference with a significantly increased ambition so that we can be doing what's necessary to try and keep global heating below two degrees. But where's Australia? There's no willingness to commit—a complete failure of public policy.

Question agreed to.