John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to comment on some of the concerns raised by the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources during his speech in the House last Wednesday. The minister introduced his speech by claiming that a proposal to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 is some sort of Labor Party plot to create mass unemployment. He conveniently ignored the fact that his antecedent, Dr Kemp, the former member for Goldstein, had been pressing the cabinet to adopt a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. That was before he was evidently dropped from the cabinet by the Prime Minister and forced out of parliament for defying the government’s inflexible dogma on climate change. The minister claimed last week:

The Howard government has recognised for more than a decade the consequences of climate change and the risk it poses to Australia.

If that is the case then how is it that, as recently as 2003, the government dismantled the Cooperative Research Centre for Renewable Energy and the ABC Four Corners program reported in February last year that three of the CSIRO’s top climate scientists had been repeatedly gagged from talking about cutting greenhouse gas emissions? The minister also said last week:

I believe every single one of the reports—with the exception of the fourth assessment report ...

Does the minister actually mean that he understands the contents of the preceding three reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but finds that the content of the just-released fourth report, which contains significantly more rigorous evidence, is wrong? I invite the minister to come into this chamber and explain in detail his understanding of the science behind these reports. Let us see if the minister actually believes the arguments. If the minister rejects the findings of the fourth report, could he please explain just where the 600 scientists who wrote the summary of the fourth assessment report have gone wrong?

The minister has implied that people who oppose the government’s position on global warming are some kind of fundamentalist zealots unable to tolerate a difference of opinion. I suspect the minister is confusing someone who accepts a belief as a matter of faith with someone, like one of the IPCC scientists, who takes the trouble to understand the arguments and concludes on the balance of probabilities that the evidence is well supported. In the case of global warming induced by carbon dioxide emissions, the probability of human influence on these natural processes is generally agreed to be above 90 per cent.