Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

Mr President, I apologise to you and the Senate because I know that whenever I mention the Greens’ ‘soft on drugs’ policy and their policy to tax family homes, Senator Brown gets to his feet. It upsets him enormously. He is deeply embarrassed, and so he should be. Senator Milne at least cares about the environment and does a bit of work. We probably disagree on some of the responses. We probably disagree on some of the policies to address climate change but what we do not disagree on is that it is an incredibly important issue for Australia and for mankind and for the ecosystems of the world. We do not disagree on that; we agree on that.

We agree that about a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide have been pumped into the atmosphere over the past 150 years and that if mankind do not change what we are doing, about another trillion tonnes will be pumped there in the next 50 years. We know that the world is going to demand about a 100 per cent increase in the energy that it consumes over the next 40-odd years. I suspect Senator Milne and I would believe that it is not a bad thing that you expand the amount of energy that is provided to the world so that the people who are starving and dying of malnutrition in Africa and the 300 million people in China who live below the poverty line can get distributed energy. I think that we agree that if we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are doing at the moment, and at the rate, I might say, that it is occurring during the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol—a 40 per cent increase under the Kyoto protocol—there can be dangerous climate change.

Within a few months, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be producing a report on the science as it stands at the moment. That report is likely to show that temperatures across the world have increased by just over 0.6 of one degree in the past 100 years. It will show that the warming is roughly double that rate at the poles, which has implications for the melting of ice that is on top of, for example, the Antarctic continent and therefore has ramifications for sea level rises.

The report will show that sea level rises have occurred and that the oceans are warming. It will be no surprise to Australia, because the government invests over $30 million in climate change science to ensure that Australians are well aware of this. As environment minister, I have ensured that all of the scientific reports and all of the investment that we make in science is made available to the Australian public. So when Professor Will Steffan from the Australian National University was given a grant by the Australian Greenhouse Office, the first dedicated climate change office established in the world, I released that report and Professor Steffan put into the public domain his assessment of where the science is.

We do not disagree with Senator Milne that climate change is very serious and needs to be addressed. That is why we are investing $2 billion in a range of measures across a portfolio of solutions to address climate change, one of the largest public sector per capita investments anywhere in the world. That is why we are one of the few countries in the world that is on track to meet our Kyoto target. (Time expired)