Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm proud to rise and speak in support of this excellent motion about supporting the Great Barrier Reef with concrete actions. The Great Barrier Reef, besides being inherently naturally beautiful and a great piece of this country's heritage, employs 64,000 Australians—64,000 Australians whose livelihoods depend on a healthy Great Barrier Reef, a legacy that we hold in trust for future generations. If we're serious about preserving the Great Barrier Reef, we have to be serious about keeping global warming under 1½ degrees Celsius. The last speaker talked about the government's 26 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030—a target that is woefully inadequate and a target that is consistent with a three-degree warming scenario, not a two-degree let alone a 1½ degree warming scenario. It is a target that has been universally derided as inadequate by climate change scientists and experts. That is why I'm proud that Labor's target is 45 per cent—a target that is endorsed by the Climate Change Authority.

What is worse is this government has zero chance of hitting its 26 per cent reduction target. They have zero chance, because they don't have any mechanisms to deliver it. They achieved Kyoto through accounting tricks around carryover units from the first Kyoto period, where we achieved our targets through a combination of the carbon price being in action for a couple of years and Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh's visionary restrictions on land clearing. They talk about being opposed to banning land clearing, but that's the only reason this government hit the Kyoto targets. Today, a submission is being taken through cabinet that will presumably kill the clean energy target—the last best hope to get a bipartisan climate change and energy policy that will set us on a path of decarbonising our economy. Why will it be killed? It is because we have a jelly-backed Prime Minister in search of a spine—a Prime Minister who is now at the beck and call of the conservative elements of the coalition party room, rather than the old Prime Minister, the old Malcolm, who in 2009 said, 'I will not lead a party that's not committed to taking action on climate change.' That member from Wentworth is a mere memory. What is he walking away from? He's walking away from a review commissioned by this government in which the Chief Scientist recommended a clean energy target and said that it will lower power prices, drive new investment and put us on a path to reducing emissions—a clean energy target endorsed both by the Prime Minister as recently as two months ago when he said it would work and by the Minister for the Environment and Energy, who said it will lower power prices.

This is a sad day for the nation in that the government is walking away from its last best chance of actually setting us on the path to meeting its inadequate 26 per cent emissions reduction target. This will imperil the reef. The last speaker talked about the need for concerted international action, and he's absolutely right. To help save the reef, we need international action to decarbonise the global economy. No other country is going to take us seriously if we don't meet our commitments, let alone meet meaningful commitments, and that is what this government is doing.

On Adani, the global seaborne trade for thermal coal has declined every year since 2013. It's declining each year as other countries shift to more investment in other power sources. So we've got a declining market, and this government is proposing a $1 billion subsidy to set up a competitor in a declining market to my coal mines. They're imperilling the 18,000 coalmining jobs in the Hunter region and the thousands of jobs in the Bowen Basin if they go ahead with this subsidy. I'm not anti-coalmining, but I'm anti subsidies into a declining market that don't make economic sense. This is a direct threat to the 18,000 coalminers in my electorate, to our environment and to the Great Barrier Reef—and for what? According to the government's own figures, it is for 1,400 jobs—at best—while imperilling 64,000 jobs on the Great Barrier Reef.

If this government was serious about saving the reef, it would take concerted action on climate change, commit to a 45 per cent emissions reduction target and, more importantly, put in place a mechanism that would actually put us on that path, rather than being a jelly-back Prime Minister who is junking the clean energy target as we speak.

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