Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts. What action is the government taking to transition Australia to a low-pollution economy and are there any threats to Australia’s climate change response?

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, 2008 has been a big year for Australia when it comes to climate change with a number of important actions from the government to enable the transition to a low-pollution economy. After 11 years of inaction, we still have a lot of ground to make up, but we have made significant and important progress on the way. As the Prime Minister has just remarked, we ratified immediately the Kyoto protocol. We received the reports of Professor Ross Garnaut. We released an extensive green paper on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and consulted widely on the propositions set out in that paper. We have completed the most comprehensive economic modelling exercise undertaken by the Australian Treasury on the costs of climate change action. Last week the government announced that it would round out the year by releasing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme white paper and medium-term target range on Monday, 15 December.

The government understands that the current global economic circumstances make the task of governments around the world that much more difficult. But transitioning to a low-pollution economy is vital for Australia’s long-term prosperity and the global financial crisis makes it more, not less, important that we tackle the big economic challenges. This is an economic reform that the gov-ernment knows we must undertake. We know the economic costs and the environmental consequences of failing to act on dan-gerous climate change are great. We will have rising sea levels, more coastal inundation, more frequent and intense droughts, impacts on tourism and, of course, impacts on jobs as well. We understand that growing the green-collar economy and having a forward energy efficiency strategy mean there are significant opportunities for skilled employ-ment and that jobs will be a focus for the government in that respect. So we cannot simply delay the challenges of the future because the economic circumstances are difficult today.

The Leader of the Opposition says that he supports action on climate change, but we are yet to see any evidence of that from the coalition. We have seen evidence that the Leader of the Opposition could not convince his former cabinet colleagues to take serious action on climate change. We read about that in the newspapers when he could not convince them to ratify Kyoto. We have seen evidence that the member for Goldstein, who is assisting with the coalition’s emissions trading policy, thinks that climate change is a leftist fad, that it is the new communism. And, of course, we know and we have seen evidence that the member for Groom cannot wait to roll out nuclear reactors around our coastline.

The question here is: where is the evidence of the Leader of the Opposition’s ability to unite the coalition on climate change action? We will not find any evidence of that today because we now have the National Party refusing to support carbon sinks legislation—legislation that was introduced by the previous government when the Leader of the Opposition was environment minister. That is right: the coalition are divided on legis-lation their own leader described as ‘a key element in addressing climate change’. This is the second example in two weeks of the opposition failing to support legislation that the Leader of the Opposition championed when he was environment minister. We hope that the opposition leader will be more responsible when it comes to passing the water bill this week.

Next year, the government will introduce landmark legislation on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and we expect a critical and robust debate in this House because this is a substantial economic reform. But the Leader of the Opposition’s handling of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme debate depends on there being some unity on the other side of the House on this issue. Given that they are divided on carbon sinks legislation, given that there is a cabal of climate change sceptics, given that the member for Goldstein is out there talking about communist plots, given that the opposition leader will not stand up to the member for Groom who talks about nuclear issues, when will the opposition leader show us exactly what the coalition stands for on climate change?