John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It is not customary in this place, I suppose, to thank oppositions for moving censure motions, but I do feel like thanking the opposition for having moved this motion. It does give us the opportunity to try to put into proper context the growing debate in this country about climate change. Let me start by replying to the arguments advanced by the Leader of the Opposition. Let me start where I believe any political leader should start in a debate of this kind, and that is with the immediate national interests of our country.

The immediate national interests of our country require us to understand one thing above all else, and that is that the Kyoto model is essentially a product of European thinking, originally conceived to accommodate the interests of European countries. Although it has been extended to include many other countries, we should keep that very much in mind. If those opposite think that is just my invention for the purposes of the debate then I remind them of some words that were uttered on 16 January this year not by the member for Batman on this occasion but by somebody else when he said: ‘Kyoto is basically a European model and it is true that it is flawed. It is not without its difficulties. It is pretty much dead in the water.’ That was the member for Hunter, the opposition spokesman on small business. He is somebody, I might point out, who represents a constituency that has very close links with the resource industry in this country.

So my opening plea to all who are interested in the Australian national interest is to understand that our interests in this debate are not necessarily the same as those of Europeans. They are not necessarily the same as those of Americans and we must understand that, if we do anything in this area that throws away the great natural advantage this country has from its resource sector and all the endowments that it brings, we will be doing a great disservice to the people of this country. We heard a lot from the Leader of the Opposition about our children and our children’s future. Our children’s future is still very much bound up with the economic prosperity of this country and there is nothing more critical at the moment to the economic prosperity of this country than the continued health of the resource industry in this country.

This motion is, of course, brought out of the publication of the report and the analysis by Sir Nicholas Stern. I do not pretend to have read the whole 700 pages. I have, however, read his accompanying press statement. I have read the extensive executive summary and it is very clear that he is of the view, as most thinking people are, that climate change does represent a challenge to the world and there needs to be a multipronged response to it. There is no one single solution and there is no one single response. He also makes it very clear that if the world does not act then the economic consequences in some decades time and certainly by the year 2050 will be very serious indeed. Whether or not you believe his very pessimistic scenario that it will be the equivalent of two world wars and the Great Depression—nobody can prove that; that is just pure speculation on his part—we can all accept for the purposes of this debate that it is a major challenge.

The question is: what do we do about it in the future? We can debate the sins of omission or commission of the past. We could argue about whether we should have ratified what is now the old Kyoto. The real issue, the real challenge for this nation, for this parliament, for this world in 2006 is to agree on a path forward that has a measurable impact on greenhouse warming. We have to ask ourselves: what is that path forward? I agree with Sir Nicholas Stern that that path forward must involve all nations agreeing to establish a framework that will enable the creation of an international emissions-trading system. I have no argument with that; it makes sense and this government will support an international framework for emissions trading provided it has everybody in it. What can possibly be wrong with that? But I do insist it has to have everybody in it. I am not going to lead a government that sells out the jobs of Australians, sells out the jobs and investment that are so important to our future. Unless we have the world’s emitters in the framework, it will not work. If we sign something that does not have the world’s emitters, we are betraying the interests of all of our resource industries and we are betraying the future of our children.

We keep hearing all this rhetoric from the Labor Party about the Kyoto protocol. The mantra is: ‘Sign the Kyoto protocol and a new dawn will descend on the world. All of our worries will roll away, the clouds will disappear, the world will be a beautiful place and there will be no more global warming.’ The problem with that theory is that it is false. It is false because Kyoto does not include the major emitters. How can an arrangement which does not include the United States, China and India, which account for 50 per cent at least of the world’s emissions, be effective? We are told that if only we ratified Kyoto then we would solve the problem. It does not embrace the major emitters. It has been acknowledged that, if there had been no Kyoto, the greenhouse gas emissions would have risen by 41 per cent but with Kyoto, and with everybody behaving and meeting their target, they would rise by 40 per cent, which is a gain of just one per cent. That does not represent the simple solution.

Let us move on from the old Kyoto. In question time, I coined the phrase ‘a new Kyoto’.

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