Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking to the Climate Change Action Bill 2006, I congratulate Senator Milne for bringing the first climate change action bill to this parliament. It is something that should have been introduced here when the Howard government came to office in 1996, but they failed to act. This country is in a ‘back of the pack’ situation because of that failure to act, when we should be leading the world in terms of rescuing this marvellous little planet of ours from what Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, described just a fortnight ago as a calamity facing humankind.

If only our Prime Minister had woken up; if only this government would wake up. What an insult it is to the enormous concern about climate change in this nation of Australia, where any primary schoolchild could tell you of the need for action such as that in Senator Milne’s bill. There is greater concern and intelligence about the matter in an average school class than there is around the cabinet table of this country of Australia. Here today that is exemplified by the failure of the government to produce one minister to speak on this bill. Not a minister; not a secretary—just a gaggle of backbenchers. They are lined up to talk this bill out—to filibuster it—so that there will not be a vote. But we had the government voting no to climate change action brought forward in this manner by the Greens through Senator Milne.

We had Senator Eggleston as the first cab off the rank for the government, saying that it does not matter what the cause of climate change is. He put forward the theory that it may be due to the earth wobbling on its axis. Government members, it does matter, and we know what the cause is. The world’s scientists have been warning about that since the 1960s. The matter was first postulated by Arrhenius back in 1895. Before this government came to office, thousands of scientists, including more than 100 Nobel Prize winners, in their first warning to the planet had said to all the leaders of the world, ‘We must act to stop the destructive impact of human behaviour on this planet or within 40 years we will be seeing not only mass extinctions of species but the planet becoming less tenable for the life of human beings, the big species which we know is the cause.’

What was the reaction to that? In the Australian press, it made no front pages. It was buried on page 9 in the Hobart Mercury but it did not make many newspapers. Had it been a warning of a stock exchange collapse, it would have been on the front page. Had it been about money and profits, it would have been on the front page. But it was not. It was just about the planet, so it did not matter. It is as if there is a disconnect between our leaders—Prime Minister Howard and President Bush—and the planet. There is a failure to understand that we are here because of this planet and that we depend upon it. It does not need us, but we need it. It gives us not only sustenance and life from its living fabric but also inspiration, adventure, joy and fulfilment. And its living fabric is being wrecked at the greatest rate in human history, and we know that that is because of our depredations. A sequela of that is climate change.

There is no escape: whether you are in the most remote wilderness on the planet or in the most densely populated city, climate change is not only stalking the future but impacting upon you now. Yet we have in the prime ministerial office in this country, after 10 years of scepticism of climate change, a no vote to a climate action bill—they say, ‘No, we won’t take action.’ Senator Eggleston resorted to the unethical defence that Prime Minister Howard and several of his ministers have brought out over the years—‘We don’t want to do it because other countries in the world won’t match action at this time.’

Just a fortnight ago Angela Merkel, Mr Blair and the leaders of the 29 European Union nations said: ‘We will take action. We’re going back to our countries to introduce a Senator Christine Milne bill. It will have a target of a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020’—as in the bill Senator Milne brought into this place last year and we are debating this afternoon. The leaders of Europe said: ‘We will aim to have a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020.’ And that is what the European leaders are doing. Do you know what they were asked? ‘Oh, but aren’t you going to suffer a business disadvantage?’—the thing that terrifies Mr Howard, Mr Costello and their coteries. They had this simple response: ‘The world is threatened and we must take a lead.’ They did not say, ‘No, the coal companies want to keep making their profits; they have us under their thumbs.’ They said, ‘We’re concerned about catastrophe stalking humankind and all life on this planet, and we must act.’ But here on the other side of the planet we have a government that will not act, that has not acted, that has been delinquent and that has sold out this country, this nation and its future.

Let this be said: the last decade of studied ignorance of climate change will cost this country billions of dollars to catch up on. Sir Nicholas Stern, the chief economic advisor to the Blair government and former chief economist to the World Bank, will be in this city next Wednesday. He has done something that the Prime Minister and our chief economic decision maker, Mr Costello, have not done—that is, he has studied the impact of climate change on the world were we not to act as Senator Milne’s bill would have us act. The outcome makes for very daunting reading. Besides the catastrophic environmental effects on the planet by carrying on as this government has done and projects to do, the impact on the gross domestic product by the time the next generation is our age will be some 20 per cent, or $US9 trillion.

What the Howard government is doing is simply saying, ‘No, we won’t act, because the coal industry doesn’t want us to and Australia’s children and grandchildren can pay the penalty in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars per annum for our inactivity now.’ If you do a back-of-an-envelope calculation you will find that just the exudates from the coal exported from Australia will go very close to damaging the economy of our children or grandchildren by an amount equivalent to the current Australian budget per annum. Yet the government could not get a minister in here to debate the issue. The government could not find a secretary, because it does not give a damn about climate change action. It does not want to defend it. It does not want to support it. It does not have an opinion. It simply wants to say no, as it has said for the last 10 years.

If you look at the Costello budget of May last year, you will look in vain for climate change. The two words are not there. We can expect that, in the May budget, there will be some billions spent. I will tell you why, Mr Acting Deputy President: because this greedy, small-minded, venal government is more concerned about itself than it is about the planet and the nation’s wellbeing. So we have the situation where there will be money spent this year on climate change, though last year it was not even mentioned. That is because the government is getting back the polling that shows the Australian people are very worried indeed about climate change and the impact it will have on their children.

Just yesterday I was reading the report of the APIA, the Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency, and they were asking older folk, aged over 50, around the country, ‘What is worrying you?’—and climate change is right at the top. They recognise that most of us in that age category will not be around when the major impacts of climate change come along. But do you know what? They are worried about their kids. Do you know what this government is worried about? The coal multinationals. Do you know who the policy favours? The coal multinationals. Do you know who the policy of this government has let down and will hurt, regardless of whether this bill gets up? Australia’s children, their children and this nation’s environment.

Here we have a negative government confronted by positive Greens, and it does not know what to do about it except to say no. Elsewhere in the world you might have thought Colorado was a conservative bastion in the United States. This is what the governor of that state had to say less than a month ago: Governor Bill Ritter told the media that he envisaged the state getting an increase of $US1.9 billion in GDP by doubling its use of renewables by 2020, and that this would see renewables meeting 20 per cent of the state’s total energy demands. Guess what? That is the exact selfsame figure that Senator Milne has in her bill for Australia to reach.

We just heard Senator Eggleston say, ‘We don’t want to take on strategies that will fix this problem, because they might harm our economy.’  Read for that: ‘They might harm the interests of the coal barons’—who, by the way, do not live in this country. They are not here. They export their profits overseas. Governor Ritter had a different idea. He said:

More clean, homegrown energy means more jobs and higher wages paid for Coloradans. Increasing our use of renewable energy would bring over 4,000 high-paying, high-skilled jobs and over $US570 million in wages paid to our state.

In releasing his report, the governor also said:

… a 20% renewable energy goal would also result in significant reductions of soot, smog, and mercury pollution. Also, since wind and most solar resources use a negligible amount of water compared to fossil fuel sources, Colorado could save over 18 billion gallons of water by 2020.

What a remarkable complementarity there is between Colorado and so much of Australia, except one thing—that is, political sagacity and a long-term view. If there is one thing that must be of equal concern to most Australians, along with the government’s delinquency in failing to support this bill—there are no amendments, no positive contribution, not a senior government member fronting up to put the government’s point of view—is Labor’s approach to the bill. Labor will not support it. They are going to have a summit. What do you do when you do not know what you are going to do? You call a summit. This is after the previous 10 wasted years and, before that, 10 years of Labor failing to act on climate change and 10 years after the warning bells were well and truly sounding around the world. So that leaves the Greens and the Democrats, and let me congratulate Senator Allison on her contribution. She came in as Leader of the Democrats and took the lead on this bill. I say again: there is not even a frontbencher from either side of the two big parties here to contribute to the bill. What disdain for the Australian public!