Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Berowra. Often you have to pay to see acts of contortion and tonight we got one for free. That twisted logic that said to us that we needed to accept their idea or their proposition of an amendment to save ourselves is something else. We are being asked to delay action and it is said that that would provide some benefit when the reality is that, for every year we have delayed acting in trying to meet a bipartisan target of cutting emissions by five per cent by 2020, from 2015 there is $5 billion in cost that we would have to engage in to catch up to make that target. We are being asked to delay action and in effect assume huge costs in the process.

Tonight we were chastised, I would put it, about engaging in a scare campaign by relating fact—fact that the Climate Commission in its report The critical decade outlined clearly in the types of impacts that will come about as a result of worsening climate change as it relates to Australia should temperatures change by one per cent. A mere one per cent has impacts on Australia. The frequency, the duration, the intensity and the spread of climactic events in this country and the impacts that they have are real and they have been outlined in the Climate Commission's report, which members opposite can access. After Cyclone Yasi we saw in one year a decrease in economic growth of one per cent—$13 billion—and inflationary impacts of up to 0.8 per cent. That was from one climactic event. So asking us to delay—

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