Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Brisbane for his question, and I know that this is a serious issue for him and for his constituencies. The challenge of climate change is all about taking responsibility—about taking responsibility for our contribution to global emissions, about taking responsibility for the impact that climate change will have on our environment for the future. That is exactly the approach that the Rudd government have taken as we rise to the challenge of climate change.

This morning I spoke in Brisbane at the opening of the International Conference on Ecology and there the government released the report Australia’s biodiversity and climate change: a strategic assessment of the vulnerability of Australia’s biodiversity to climate change. This report confirms the climate change risks to our iconic natural areas like Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef. The House may have seen recently a report commissioned by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation which showed that the likely costs to the Australian economy, if we have increasing climate change impacts on the Great Barrier Reef, is some $30 billion over the next century. The report released today also shows that Australia has an extremely high proportion of species, our unique biodiversity, that will be at risk from climate change impacts.

The Rudd government understands these risks, and that is why we brought forward significant reform in the shape of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to begin the task of bringing down Australia’s carbon pollution for the first time. That reform was blocked by the coalition. We brought forward reform with the largest energy efficiency rollout in Australia’s history, the Energy Efficient Homes package, helping Aussies reduce their energy bills at home for decades to come. That reform was opposed in its entirety by the opposition. This is the same opposition that, as a coalition, had a last minute conversion to a cap-and-trade scheme before the recent election and then last week voted against the same cap-and-trade system in the Senate. So in some ways we can say that the song of the coalition remains the same, that not much has changed since the last election. In fact, we did hear from Senator Minchin earlier this year some of the lyrics of the song when he launched an extraordinary attack on the ABC—

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