Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

Before the minister responds I will throw a few more things in. This is one of those debates and issues where we probably have four distinct perspectives, which makes it perhaps a little more complex to differentiate. That no doubt explains the enormous interest from the press gallery at the moment, all clustered around listening to this detail about the most crucial environmental issue of our future! They are probably in their offices listening on the radio. This is an important issue, of course, and many people quite rightly call it the most important environmental issue facing not just our country but our globe. We have two amendments before the chair. The debate has ranged rather more widely than the specifics of the amendments; I think the amendments are serving as a proxy for the entire issue of climate change. All the amendments seek to do is put a specific trigger in the current legislation to require that the greenhouse impacts or climate change impacts of a project be assessed if a certain threshold is reached. The Democrats and the Greens both have an amendment that has a lower threshold than the ALP amendment. The Democrat amendment has a life cycle component as well as an annual threshold.

I think there are two issues. There is the issue of whether or not there should be a trigger in the federal environment law. The Democrats’ position is similar to the Greens on that, and it is a position we have had since the act was first put into place. Senator Milne has outlined a lot of valid points in that regard, although Senator Milne also has a view that the whole EPBC Act is a waste of space, is useless and should be scrapped. Why we would want to add a trigger into a useless act is another matter, but the Democrats’ view is that the act is not useless. It is quite strong and having an extra trigger would make it even stronger.

The other point—and I think Senator Milne asked this question but the minister has not answered it—which I think is valid is: what has changed from the government’s point of view? It is a question to which the Democrats deserve a response from the minister—if I might say, even more so than the rest of the chamber—because it was the Democrats that supported this act coming into being. That was for a lot of reasons, but in part we did it with a public commitment from the then minister, which he started to follow through, of seeking to include a greenhouse trigger down the track. Indeed, if we want to look at anniversaries, it is almost the seventh anniversary.

It was 10 December 1999 when Minister Hill released a consultation paper about the possibility of putting a greenhouse trigger into the act. He stated on record, including in this place in August 2000, that the government had a preferred model and that it was consulting with the states and others about putting it into the act. Obviously that did not happen, otherwise we would not be having this debate now, but all of us at the time thought it was a good idea. It seemed from Minister Hill’s statement that he thought it was a good idea but he wanted to consult with the states first, not surprisingly, for reasons such as Senator Milne has said. States like my state of Queensland were not keen on it at all, but the fact is that the government did have a preferred position, a preferred model, for putting a trigger in the act, and now clearly it has the view that a trigger is a bad idea, to paraphrase the minister’s statements both today and in the media during the week. I think it is at least appropriate, given the history of this legislation, to get an indication of why it is now not seen as a good idea.

The other point I would make from the Democrats’ perspective is that I am certainly not suggesting, and I do not suspect anybody is suggesting, that putting a greenhouse trigger in the EPBC Act will on its own somehow make a major shift in Australia’s performance in dealing with the climate change threat. It would be one measure as part of a whole package, and I do not see the amendments that Labor has put forward and the Greens and Democrats have foreshadowed as intrinsically, necessarily, anticoal.

If some of the suggestions that have been put around concerning the possibilities of geosequestration et cetera do actually have some validity—and that is still far from proven—and there could be a dramatic reduction in emissions from coal, it does not necessarily follow that amendments like this or even proposals of capping total emissions for Australia would therefore lead to the end of coal. It is a neutral amendment. It does not single out any industry; it simply singles out emissions, which is what we should be looking at. I do not see it as an anticoal amendment beyond the simple fact that coal emits a lot of carbon. If it can be made to emit a lot less then that would be a good thing. Of course, we do need to be careful that, whatever the activity or resource, if we can make it emit half as much that we then do not go, ‘That’s good, we’ll consume twice as much.’ When we increase efficiencies, we tend to be in the habit of counterbalancing that by increasing consumption.

To move away from the coal debate, another very relevant example is from my own state of Queensland. It is completely inadvertent but nonetheless ironic that this Labor Party amendment will insert a definition of ‘adverse effects of climate change’ in the act straight before the definition of ‘Australian aircraft’. If there is one area of activity that is not being given much attention at all it is the climate change impacts of air travel. Perhaps we can all ponder that as we jump on our planes tonight and all jet back to wherever we live for the weekend and then all jet back here again. Perhaps Senator Campbell might be staying here over the weekend?