Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

That is a very good intervention from the member from Kingsford Smith. He said, ‘What about per capita?’ This again is where the Labor Party’s position on climate change fundamentally betrays Australia’s national interest. The member for Batman knows I am dead right. Because if you buy the argument that we should wait until China has the same per capita levels of emissions as Australia, emissions will be at a level not even imagined by the most dire scenarios. This of course is what I suspect the member for Kingsford Smith would like, because he cannot wait to get that hairshirt on and to suffer a bit—or at least get others to suffer. If we were to reduce our emissions to the per capita level of China’s it would devastate our economy. The fact is that the problem with Labor’s climate change policy—there are two main planks—is, firstly, the Kyoto protocol, as it stands, is a mechanism that has failed. By the way, everybody now recognises that except for the Australian Labor Party. At the G8 summit, which the member for Kingsford Smith referred to, the largest developed nations of the world endorsed a new approach and it is exactly the same approach that the Australian government has been pursuing bilaterally and multilaterally through the AP6—that is, a process of engaging the developing countries and recognising that they need to be part of the solution because we have to get global reductions. The communique said:

We recognise, however, that the efforts of developed economies will not be sufficient and that new approaches for contributions by other countries are needed.

Again, Labor do not understand that. They think they can continue with the same old failed approach because it is a sacrament. It is like putting a ‘Save the whales’ sticker on your car and not being prepared to do anything about it. It is empty symbolism, but it is very expensive symbolism.

If we as a nation were to follow Labor’s policy and commit ourselves to a very large cut in emissions by 2050 unilaterally and unequivocally—and that is what Labor proposes—then that would mean we would be putting a substantial cost on our carbon and energy intensive industries. Remember that thousands of Australian workers have jobs—many of them belonging to members of trade unions who pay for the advertising of the Labor Party—that depend on low-cost energy from coal. If we impose an additional cost on those industries which is not matched by the countries with which they compete, all that will happen is that the industries will move offshore with the emissions, so the world will be no better off, and we lose the jobs. The phenomenon of carbon leakage is a fundamental economic factor that the member for Kingsford Smith simply does not understand.

If you look at the industrial growth in China, you will see that in the last five or six years China has become the producer of nearly half the world’s cement, nearly half the world’s flat glass, 35 per cent of its steel and 30 per cent of its aluminium. What has been happening is that developed countries, particularly in Europe, have been deindustrialising, thereby reducing their emissions, and, instead of making the cement themselves and having the emissions go up into the atmosphere from their own countries, importing it from China. Now, the world is no better off. The men and women that worked in the cement plant have lost their jobs, but the world is no better off from a climate point of view because the emissions have still gone up into the air.

That failure to recognise the global reality of climate change and the dire economic consequences Labor’s policy could impose on Australia is again a reminder of how you cannot trust the Labor Party with economic management—because climate change is an enormous challenge and probably the biggest one our country faces, the world faces, at the moment.

By contrast, the government’s emissions trading task force in its report says that the targets must be set after careful economic analysis. And, while a long-term aspirational target can be set—and that will be informed in the course of the next year by the G8 discussions and the discussions that are going to happen between the 15 largest greenhouse-gas-emitting economies, including Australia and led by the United States, at the meeting in Bali—every target along that time line has to be reset and calibrated in light of the cost of technology, the economic consequences of setting it and the reactions and attitudes of other countries. In other words, meet the challenge, reduce our emissions, but do so in a way that ensures we do not indulge in a futile, self-destructive exercise in moralising, which is what the Labor Party’s policy is all about. It is all about sacrificing Australian jobs, sacrificing the Australian economy, in an effort to be pure by the member for Kingsford Smith’s lights, regardless of how poor we must become to do so.

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