Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is not absolute rubbish. One of our very nearest neighbours, Kiribati, sent a parliamentary delegation here last year and said that of 100 inhabited islands they have identified at least 40 that would have to be evacuated in the next 15 years—30,000 people—and that they will have to absorb them on the remaining 60 islands. They were hoping to get refugee status through Guam to the United States because they knew that Australia would not help them. That was a parliamentary delegation in this place last year, and the Australian government is not prepared to take on any kind of global moral or ethical responsibility for the fact that sea level rise is impacting on poorer people around the world who do not have the capacity to build seawalls and develop engineering solutions. The UK can say, ‘Let’s build a Thames barrier,’ which they have done. They are building massive seawalls. They are identifying some communities for managed retreat. But the poor in the developing world do not have those options.

Let me go to the next point in relation to the Kyoto protocol. We hear a lot from the government about the fact that they think the Kyoto protocol is useless. Nobody has argued that the Kyoto protocol alone is the answer; they have argued that it is the first step of global cooperation in getting outcomes, and that is already occurring. Under the Kyoto protocol there are three flexible financial mechanisms: one is emissions trading, the second is the clean development mechanism and the third is joint implementation.

Australia is sitting here with the Prime Minister saying, ‘Let me have a task force that might come up with an Australian designed global system.’ As if anybody in the rest of the world is in the least bit interested in Australia designing anything! They regard us as a pariah. We are not involved in the talks. Emissions trading is already occurring under the protocol in the pan-European trading system. For the benefit of the Senate, the World Bank and the International Emissions Trading Association estimated that the trading market last year was worth $US21 billion. Australia is missing out on being involved in the emissions trading that is already going on around the world.

In fact, in Australia there is already an active market around trading in offshore markets; investment banks are involved. The frustration is that the people who are putting uncertainty in the Australian business community are the government, because they are not telling companies when and how a price on carbon is going to be introduced. The business community know that it is coming and that the government will do what they have done in the last three months. Having been nowhere on climate change—being sceptics—they are suddenly saying, ‘We’ll have to acknowledge it because it’s an election year.’ Ultimately they will get kicked dragging and screaming to a price on carbon and, in the meantime, companies are saying, ‘For goodness sake, tell us what the price is going to be and how you are going to do this so we can make investment decisions.’

BlueScope Steel is a classic example in New South Wales. It is disgusting that Premier Iemma has exempted them from a carbon price in New South Wales. He has done it because they want to make a substantial investment and are saying they are not prepared to make that investment until they know what the price of carbon is going to be. So, to try and secure the investment, Premier Iemma has exempted them from a price on carbon, effectively exempting them from the lack of certainty. That is what has gone on in New South Wales. How many other companies around Australia are saying, ‘We’re not sure how to invest or which way to go because we’re not sure when the price on carbon is going to come in, whether it’s going to come in by way of an emissions trading system or whether it’s going to come in by way of a carbon levy.’ Let us not take the nonsense from the government about jobs. The people costing jobs and investment are the people who are fiddling around and refusing to acknowledge the global reality and who are in fact driving companies out of the country.

Last year, we had the government rushing along to stand beside Solar Heat and Power saying: ‘Aren’t we great? We’re giving this company a small amount of money.’ Then the company stood up and said: ‘We’re going to the US. We can’t stand it here anymore.’ The US understands that solar thermal can provide baseload power. They understand that, and that is why they have gone there. Prime Minister Howard, because he cannot get past the coal industry, says over and over again that renewables cannot provide baseload. He knows as well as I do that renewables can provide baseload. Solar thermal can provide baseload. Solar Heat and Power left the country with their workers. So too have Vestas, the wind farm operators and manufacturers of wind farm turbines. They left the country and the jobs went with them. Roaring Forties have gone to China, where it can make huge investments because the Chinese have set a 15 per cent renewable energy target.

There is a lot of finger pointing at China, but China has a 15 per cent renewable energy target. China has mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standards. China has set a 20 per cent target for a reduction in energy intensity in their economy over the next five or 10 years. China is working very hard to gain competitive advantage in low-carbon technology because it knows that whoever comes up with the solutions and mass produces those solutions is going to keep ahead of the technology game. Meanwhile, we cannot sell cars made in Australia because they are great big gas guzzlers because the government has never forced them to be fuel efficient. The only people buying the big Fords and Holdens are governments for their car fleets to keep the companies propped up and to give them huge amounts of subsidies instead of forcing them to become fuel efficient. If they did, they would be competitive on the world stage.

It is because the government is so completely useless and irresponsible on the whole issue of climate change that it gives the Labor Party some opportunity to say that it has the policies in place. But let me say this: with the Labor Party, you had Senator Chris Evans out there in the paper today making ridiculous statements and saying that cutting coal exports would deliver no net greenhouse reductions. Coal exports are burnt in China and cause greenhouse gases, and the Labor Party cannot get away from coal. It has to make a decision about coal. You cannot have your shadow minister for the environment ducking questions on coal and saying they are hypothetical at the same time as the shadow minister for energy, Senator Chris Evans, is talking up coal and saying that the government should do more on coal. At the same time Senator Kerry O’Brien, the shadow minister for resources, is supporting an expansion in all kinds of resource based industries. If the government got a bit smarter about climate change it would expose the lack of policy rigour in the Labor Party. But at least the Labor Party is prepared to ratify Kyoto and at least the Labor Party has been prepared to say that it would accept reductions of 60 per cent by 2050. But when you get to the detail, there is none on how it is going to achieve that. We will be pursuing that in the debate, because the Greens say that we need to have at least an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 to get anywhere near keeping global warming to less than two degrees.

In terms of the economic costs, Clinton, who I heard in Montreal at the first meeting of the parties, got up and said, ‘Whatever it costs to mitigate against greenhouse now, whatever it costs to adapt to climate change now, is a fraction of what it is going to cost if we don’t do it, because the costs are going to be enormous.’ The report of the Australian business roundtable, the Stern report and every single other report agrees with that. We have already seen the cost this summer of the drought and the cost of the fires. Look at the cost to the Murray-Darling. Look at the cost to the ecosystems. We have seen floods just recently and we are going to see more extreme weather events. They all cost vast amounts of money, and that money can be directly attributable to a failure to act on and mitigate climate change.

Let us not have the government saying that it is going to cost industry too much. What about the costs to the Australian community? We are already suffering these costs daily. In Europe in 2003, thousands died in the high temperatures. The climate change analysis tells us that we are going to have more very high temperature days in Australia. That is going to take its toll on the health system. We are going to have to make sure that our nursing homes, aged-care facilities and so on are air conditioned, and we need to provide the energy to do that through renewables.

There is a huge amount of planning to do to get us off our dependence on oil. The good news is that if we think about it strategically and plan it then we can build ourselves competitive advantage and a better quality of life. Investment in public transport in the cities would mean that it would be easier to get around, that it would be healthier and that there would be better air quality—good news all round. We should move to fuel efficient vehicles and to energy efficiency in our homes, offices, parliaments and in our way of life. It is not as if the solutions are not there.

My final point, which is on nuclear power, is that the Prime Minister’s only response to greenhouse gas emissions is that we will go nuclear—that will do it. What he fails to say is that Nicholas Stern says that we have 10 years to turn it around, and in that 10 years not one gram of greenhouse gas or carbon will be taken out of the atmosphere under the nuclear scenario that the Prime Minister outlines. So how is he going to get the cuts in that 10 years before any of his reactors come on stream? How is he going to react when the rest of the world says that they are not going to allow Australia to have any more free rides on the back of the efforts that are being made by the European Union in particular? It is only a matter of time before the European Union starts to take action against Australia on the basis that products going into Europe from Australia are subsidised by the fact that we do not put a price on carbon. That is already being discussed in the international community.

Australia needs to wake up to itself as a global citizen because, the way that things are going now, future generations are going to look back and regard the behaviour of this government—the lost 10 years—as a crime against the planet and a crime against humanity. That is what you are going to be charged with in the future, because future generations are going to look back in 2050 and be horrified that at a time when you had the opportunity to do something, when the science was there and told you what was going to happen, you deliberately did not act. That is criminally reprehensible. Future generations—your grandchildren and great-grandchildren—are going to look back and ask: ‘Why didn’t you act when you had the opportunity?’ It will be no use saying, ‘We didn’t know,’ because the science has been there for 20 years and the science is there now.

There is a 90 per cent probability that human activity is causing climate change. Business accepts it. The community accepts it. The Howard government does not accept it because of its relationship with the coal industry. Australia has to get off its dependence on coal as an export industry. We have to build competitive advantage in manufacturing. We have to recognise that the sun is our greatest resource, not the coal that is under the ground.