Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Urban Development) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Temporary Chairman. What I have here is an amendment which, as I have said, has been before this chamber for four hours. We have a minister at the table who has had the opportunity to actually canvass the question that has been presented and to explain why the government is opposing this amendment. All we have heard from him is abuse of other senators, gross misrepresentations, defamations of other senators and slurs on other political parties in a manner which is clearly indicative of the fact that he does not want to face up to the fact that this government has failed to address the issue of climate change with this particular legislation. There are 409 pages of legislation and you have failed to deal with this question. You have yet to explain why the government is not supporting these amendments.

What we have heard in its place is a bizarre journey about the minister’s recollections of his world travels as an observer to world events, as a spectator on the question of Kyoto. We have seen the minister try to explain his abysmal performance in regard to changing tack three or four times on the question of greenhouse, where he has come from being a greenhouse gas sceptic and a climate change sceptic to a man who now claims to have been a born-again convert, to a position where he says: ‘Nonetheless, despite that we won’t sign up to Kyoto. We won’t sign up to any commitments on an international basis. We’ll wait for the next phase of international treaty development. We will say, “Yes, there are some very interesting films on this issue.”’

This is the contribution we are hearing from this minister. His own colleague Mr Ian Macfarlane made the point that Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was just entertainment. That was the position the government took shortly before the United States elections and shortly before the government’s receipt of their latest polling information with the change in the direction it has taken. Their focus group’s research came back and explained that the government’s attitudes on these questions were all wrong, that the Australian community was not going to tolerate the contempt that this government were going to show.

What the Prime Minister sought to do in dealing with this position was to suggest, ‘The government have new directions to follow and new ideas to explore. We haven’t really exhausted our agenda; we have this new notion of nuclear power.’ So the government commissioned their old friend Dr Switkowski to report on the matter of nuclear reactors. Dr Switkowski brought back a report that says there will be 25 nuclear reactors across eastern Australia. If I recall rightly, the report pointed out that these new reactors will not actually reduce the level of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions but will in fact increase them by 29 per cent by 2050. So, Minister, my question to you, given that you have this sudden conversion to nuclear power and despite the fact that—