Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is worth reflecting on why we are even having this debate. We are having this debate because the scientists have told us with certainty that the planet is heating up. The last decade, from 2000 to 2010, was the hottest on record. We also know, with as near to certainty as one can get on questions as complex as the planet’s weather system, that humans are contributing to it and that there is a tipping point not far away from us, after which we will not be able to predict the effects of runaway climate change. But we do know that in some sense the effects are going to be potentially catastrophic. In the same way that we would not get on a plane if it had a 50 per cent, a 20 per cent or even a 10 per cent chance of crashing, it is incumbent on us now to manage the risk we know is there that we might exceed that climate change tipping point.

What do the scientists, especially Professor Will Steffen from the ANU, tell us about how close we are getting to that tipping point? They are telling us that, as a planet, we have a carbon budget that we can spend between 2000 and 2050 to give us a 70 per cent chance of staying under that tipping point. They have also told us that, in the first 10 years of that 50 years, we have spent 30 per cent of that budget and, if we keep on going the way we are going, within a couple of decades we will put ourselves at risk of exceeding the climate change tipping point, after which we do not know what the effects will be. Feedback loops will increase. As Arctic Sea ice starts to melt and exposes more of the dark surface of the sea, the process will speed up. We know that the same feedback loops are likely to occur elsewhere in the Arctic. As more ice melts, the permafrost is exposed, more methane is released into the atmosphere and the process speeds up.

It is this guardrail that we have to avoid—and at Copenhagen all the leaders from all around the world committed to staying below it—and firmly keep in mind when we are having this debate. This is not about whether something that was announced as a scheme by one party during an election amounts to a tax. It is not about the confected outrage from the party that invented the distinction between core promises and non-core promises in terms of whether a statement is being met. It is about what we are going to do to address the looming climate emergency.

In that context it comes as no surprise—and indeed it was the hot topic during my election in Melbourne—that there are distinctions between the Greens and the Labor Party on the question of how best to deal with climate change. For example, despite the confected outrage from the opposition, I note that the coalition and Labor are in agreement that all we need is five per cent pollution reduction targets by 2020. That is nowhere near the range that has been recommended by scientists and by the Bali roadmap, which says we need to be looking at 25 to 40 per cent. We will also continue to say to the Labor Party and the Labor government that, just as the market has never built a single piece of infrastructure in this country that has lasted the country, we are also going to need significant government investment to make sure that the renewable energy grid is up to speed, a feed-in tariff that will encourage a solar and large-scale renewable energy industry in this country, and continue to find appropriate amounts of money for research and development.

But despite those differences the occasion is on us and this parliament gives us the opportunity to start to find areas of common ground. One thing that is absolutely clear and that the Greens stand very firmly on is that putting a price tag on pollution is an essential element if we are to tackle climate change. Without doing that, none of the other measures will have enough effect. We need to put a real price tag on pollution. Part of that means having an honest debate about what it means to put a price tag on pollution. Not a misleading debate, but an honest debate. What it means is this: up until now, we have treated the atmosphere as if we could put as much pollution into it as we would like without consequences. Big polluters have continued, and still do continue, to put carbon dioxide and other polluting gases into the atmosphere and imagine that it has no consequences and pay no cost for the privilege of doing it.

We have dealt with this problem as a community before when companies used to pollute rivers, and we said, ‘Although it might save the company a bit of money, it has a detriment to the community so we are going to do something about it.’ Now, by putting a price tag on pollution, we will do the same with carbon dioxide and other polluting gases. We will say that those big polluters, if they are going to put pollution into the atmosphere, must pay for doing so and they must do so in order to reduce the amount that is going in there so that we stay below that guard rail. If they choose to pass some of that cost on to consumers, then consumers will be compensated for it from the revenue that is raised,. But overall it will have the effect of driving Australia’s transition to a renewable energy economy—an economy that has an enormous number of clean energy jobs, the kind of jobs that can set Australia up for the 21st century.

The Climate Institute recently said that with a $45 a tonne carbon price there will be 8,000 permanent jobs and 26,000 temporary jobs created as we move Australia to that clean energy future. But we do not have a rational debate about that; we have a debate that is reduced to cheap political point-scoring about lies or not lies. And we have a manufactured scare campaign, the likes of which we have seen many times before. We have seen it from big tobacco and we have seen it from the big mining companies. Just as the big mining companies and the ‘Rolex revolutionaries’ took to the streets of Perth in their billionaire protest, so too are we going to see the big polluters pretend to be proletarians again over the next few month. They will no doubt take to the streets, arm in arm with the radio talk-show hosts and the opposition, as they seek to confect outrage.

The Leader of the Opposition has come out swinging on this as hard as one could imagine, but as every prize fighter knows, you have to be aware of the rope-a-dope. You have to be aware of punching yourself out too early and getting to the point where your warnings become increasingly shrill. That is what is going to happen over the coming years. Certainly in my electorate of Melbourne and right across the country—and especially amongst our young people, who read the science and understand the threat that is coming to them, that they are experiencing now, and that they will have to deal with in their lifetime—people understand that we need to take urgent action and that Australia needs to do its fair share to commit to the global effort to combating climate change. There is growing support. I am confident that, once the Australian public has the science in front of them, understands that low-income earners and households are going to be compensated, and that this is going to have the effect of making Australia’s 21st-century economy a clean-energy, renewable-energy-jobs economy, there will be support for this.

In the same way that there was howling from the rooftops that the flood levy was going to be the end of this government and how could anyone support it—no-one talks about that any more—yet that seems to have sailed through, so too will this be in place. If we can reach an agreement for an environmentally and economically effective outcome, this will be in place and people in Australia will see that the opposition is full of so much hot air on this question. The opposition has made this about a number of questions—about integrity, about truth and about what was said—but there is one question that the opposition has not addressed, and that is: what if the mainstream science is right? What if the science is right and in 20 years time people are reading the Hansard of this debate and looking back at the opposition’s contribution to the single greatest issue facing our planet at the moment and realise that it was not about putting an alternative plan about how we are going to get Australia on the road to a clean energy economy but it was one about cheap political point-scoring.

They may not have realised it yet, but the debate is moving on. And as I said—and I will conclude on this—many people, especially young people, in my electorate come to me every day and they say: ‘We’ve been taught the science at school. We understand that we only have 10, 20 or 30 years to act. Why aren’t we doing it? Why are there still people who even want to debate whether the science is real? Why aren’t we getting on with it?’ It is that tide of history that is moving and is going to sweep the opposition away, and there are many on the opposition benches who know it.

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