Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to begin by sharing a letter I received earlier this year from a group of primary school students in my electorate: the Vardy's Road year 4 reading group. It reads:

Dear Ms Rowland

We are worried about our future. We want you to help our country to reduce greenhouse gas production. Climate scientists tell us that we only have ten years to turn things around. If we don't, by the time we are adults in 2020, it will be too late.

We will still be alive when your life is over. We want to have a good life like you have had. We don't want to live in a mess.

On 3 May I had the pleasure of meeting with and spending time with these young students. These young people, the future leaders of this country and the future mums and dads of Australia, wanted to know what I am doing to address their concerns. I told these young people that I am committed to taking action to safeguard our environment from the effects of climate change, to sustain our society, to support our economy and to create the jobs of the future. I could tell these children that I am a member of a government that cares about their future; that I believe climate change is real, that human activity contributes to it and that it has a detrimental effect on our environment, which will only get worse if we do not take action now; and that I am committed to doing something about it, something that is economically responsible as well as environmentally sound, that recognises that the most vulnerable in our society need a helping hand and that creates and grows jobs in the future. The biggest polluters in our economy will now pay to pollute, something that today they do for free. The cost of that pollution is borne by the environment and in turn by each of us.

I speak today in support of the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills. I do so as a proud member of this government, as a local member and as a mother-to-be. Everything has a cause and effect. Everyone in this place knows that if we drive our car recklessly we endanger society and we should pay a price for it. If we rely on obtaining energy by burning irreplaceable fuel and the consequences threaten the safety of our society then surely those doing the polluting should pay a price for it also. It is the right thing to do for this country both environmentally and economically.

Western Sydney is already embracing a clean energy future that recognises the environmental and economic realities. You can see it in action. The TAFE New South Wales Western Sydney Institute's GreenSkills Hub in Quakers Hill is revolutionising the way our tradespeople are being trained. Last year I was honoured to officially open the GreenSkills Hub, which was later visited by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency to see how the green jobs of the future are being created in the fastest-growing region of Sydney. The Western Sydney GreenSkills Hub was funded under this government's Training Infrastructure Investment for Tomorrow initiative. It is a living laboratory designed to model sustainable practices and provide innovative training in subject areas that include green electrical engineering, plumbing, refrigeration and information technology.

For anyone in this place who wants to see how the new green-collar jobs are being created under this government, I strongly recommend a visit to the Quakers Hill GreenSkills Hub. It is the first vocational education and training facility of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. The young apprentices there are literally the first of their kind to become qualified in the green skills trade.

Speaking of young people and jobs of the future, I also have a special obligation to support this legislation because of the reality that exists in my electorate of Greenway. I often refer to our region in west and north-west Sydney as Australia's nursery and that is because in nearly every age category the electorate of Greenway ranks as one of the youngest in Australia. As an example, 8.2 per cent of Greenway's population is aged zero to five years old, making it the second youngest electorate in the entire country.

There is a particular demographic in our society which occupies the time and energy of many a marketing consultant or public office holder—young people who feel disenfranchised from the policy and legislative process that impacts on them and their future and indeed the non-franchised young people who have not yet reached voting age. We spend hours in this place making decisions that affect these young people. Any public office holder worth their salt struggles to find mechanisms to communicate and engage with them. The problem is that by and large these young people do not have the loudest voices on the airwaves or the opinion pages of the newspapers.

As I said in my first speech in this place, I recognise my obligations to these young people. There are occasions when I spend more time with them, their parents and their teachers than any other single group in my electorate. That is why I know that the Clean Energy Future package encapsulated in these bills, which is about transformational change for a positive future, is what these young people, their parents and their families are focused on.

We do not have to look far outside our region to see why we must act on climate change. Countries in our region stand to be hurt the most by changes to our climate. Indeed, Pacific countries such as Kiribati are already being impacted by rising sea levels brought on by climate change. As documented by the World Wildlife Fund:

The people of Funafti in Tuvalu and on Kiribati island are lobbying to find new homes: salt water intrusion has made groundwater undrinkable and these islands are suffering increasing impacts from hurricanes and heavy seas. In the village of Saoluafata in Samoa, villagers have noticed that their coastline has retreated by as much as 50 metres in the last decade. Many of these people have had to move further inland as a result.

Not only in the Pacific are nations being adversely affected by man-made climate change but Asia's low-lying nations are subjected to sea level rise also. The impact of climate change in these parts is well-documented, including as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2010:

The low-lying delta region that makes up much of Bangladesh and the neighbouring Indian state of West Bengal are acutely vulnerable to climate change.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts rising sea levels will devour 17 per cent of Bangladesh by 2050, displacing at least 20 million people.

…   …   …

The Bangladesh non-governmental organisation Coastal Watch says an average of 11 Bangladeshis are losing their homes to rising waters every hour.

These regional examples demonstrate that not only is it in our domestic interest to tackle climate change but it is also in our national interest, for Australia holds itself out as the leading nation in the Pacific region. We must take the leading diplomatic steps to tackle climate change. These bills will reinstate our authority on this issue and reflect our leading economic, environmental and social status in the Asia-Pacific.

The Australian economy even in these challenging global conditions is diverse and dynamic. Sixty years ago it would have been inconceivable that the agricultural sector, for example, would shrink to where it is today as a proportion of GDP—a topic that rightly continues to occupy many debates in this place. Conversely, nobody would have predicted even 20 years ago what the ICT sector in Australia would look like today, how it would become the primary driver of GDP growth in our economy and the way in which it would spawn new markets we had not even dreamt of.

As has been noted time and again, the single most indicative feature of a healthy economy is change. If you are not driving it, if you are not continually transforming it, you are as good as standing still. It is this fact that the opponents of change—the opponents of transformational public policy—have sought to destroy since time immemorial. And of course we have seen scare campaigns on environmental and economic challenges before in Australia. We have seen how they have been exposed as baseless.

Twenty years ago a Labor government introduced a superannuation guarantee. At that time, those who were sitting opposite made a number of predictions about the supposed damage, with no corresponding benefits, that universal superannuation would wreak on Australian workers in the economy. By revisiting some of the uninformed claims made on superannuation, we can draw some revealing comparisons with the current carbon pricing debate.

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