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

I would like to comment on the report of the Select Committee on Climate Policy and begin where Senator Colbeck left off and add my thanks to the secretariat who worked assiduously throughout the whole process and put in some incredibly long hours to get us to where we are now. I really want to thank them for that. It was an interesting process, and I would like to thank my Senate colleagues who were part of this committee. I have served on many Senate committees since I came here in 2005, and this committee worked in a very collaborative and respectful way. There were 10 members of the committee, and for the majority of the hearings the 10 members came and actively participated. There was a collaborative atmosphere for the most part in the way that the committee was conducted. I want to thank the chair and members of the committee from all political persuasions. It was a good way of working, because the commitment we made from the start for this inquiry was to try to elicit information. That is what we set out to do.

I would also like to thank the community for their overwhelming response. I do not have the final number in front of me but around 14,000 submissions came to this inquiry from around Australia. People say that the community is now disengaged from the political process, that democracy is not alive and well in Australia and so on. I think that that number of submissions to a policy committee on climate policy shows there is active interest throughout Australia from all perspectives on this particular issue. I would like to thank people who took the trouble to send in submissions.

That having been said, the history of this committee was that the Greens had a proposal for a Senate inquiry into the science of climate change already on the books of the Senate. The coalition had determined that they would like to move for an inquiry along exactly the same lines as the Treasurer had moved in the lower house. So the coalition and the Greens worked together to come up with agreed terms of reference that would look at some of the issues around the CPRS but also at the wider policy debate, because there had not been a look at the complementary measures that could lead to emissions reductions in addition to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We looked at issues pertaining to renewable energy and to energy efficiency on the demand and supply sides but we also looked at the land use side as well as the actual climate science issues.

I would like to start by referring to the climate science issues. There was a degree of inevitability that there would be a degree of disagreement over the extent to which Australia should cut its emissions, and that is no surprise. That is why the Greens have cited in a minority report what we think the science was telling us to do, which was not a conclusion of the committee—that is, that Australia must enter the climate treaty negotiations at the end of 2009 with an unconditional commitment to reduce emissions by at least 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and a willingness to reduce emissions by 40 per cent in the context of a global agreement.

If you look at the evidence from the scientific roundtable and from scientists such as Dr Graeme Pearman, Professor David Karoly and Mr Andrew Macintosh who were gathered there, it was certainly the view of those climate scientists that we need to go to deep cuts and we need to go quickly in any attempt to stabilise the climate at safe levels. In fact, Dr James Risbey from the CSIRO—although he was appearing in a private capacity—told us that what we should be aiming for is closer to 350 parts per million because that would reduce the risk of exceeding two degrees Celsius to more moderate levels. So that was the fundamental disagreement of the Greens with the report.

Having said that, I would like to concentrate for a few moments on the positive information we were able to elicit in relation to land use, land use change and forestry, and I include in that the agricultural sector. Our committee elicited some very important information about the impacts on the primary industry sector, and in particular on the processing sector, and the perverse incentives to do things such as downsize existing operations, which does not make sense but would be one of the perverse outcomes of the CPRS as it currently stands. What came out very strongly in the land use sector—and we have debated this previously in the House with the carbon sink forests legislation—was the way the current situation is structured. Because of the accounting systems under the Kyoto protocol there is an incentive to take food production land out of food production, there is competition for water, and we are not going to be driving the biodiverse plantings that the government claims will be the case. The fact is we cannot afford to lose one hectare of food production land.

While we need to make sure that we have restoration of ecosystems and biodiverse plantings, we need to make sure that we are not driving wood production into old growth forests and using plantations to displace food-growing land. That would be the worst case outcome. We have to make sure that that is not the case. We had a lot of evidence to that effect, saying: we need a complementary measure to the CPRS to look at incentivising those things which maximise carbon storage in the land, in the landscape; we need to incentivise protection of old growth forests and native vegetation; we need to make sure existing plantations are used for what they are planted for, which is wood production; but we need to make sure we do not incentivise the conversion of food production land and water into plantations as opposed to food production. We received a lot of really good evidence, and I would encourage people to go and read the evidence that we got, particularly what was given to us in relation to that.

The other area in which we had very strong evidence was energy efficiency. So much of the debate has been devoted to coal-fired power stations and coalmines and not nearly enough to the potential to reduce demand on electricity through energy efficiency. The committee heard from many people talking about the gains that we would make by implementing energy efficiency measures at the residential, the commercial and the industrial scale. That is clearly an area where we have ad hoc policies and small numbers. We need systemic change, and that came out strongly through all the evidence.

In terms of renewables, what also came out strongly from the roundtable that was held, in particular from the business sector involved in rolling out renewables, is that they not only want a renewable energy target but they want a gross feed-in tariff because there is strong recognition that a renewable energy target will bring on those technologies which are already relatively cost-competitive with coal but you need a gross feed-in tariff to bring on those other technologies which are going to be more expensive than coal in the short term but which we will need if we are going to meet the kind of energy demand for the future we are talking about. To that end I was in Newcastle last week looking at the solar thermal towers and the huge potential there is there to be generating large amounts of energy. Also it is a fantastic opportunity for adaptation in rural and regional Australia, where people with large properties where they can no longer maintain their stocking or their crop regime as they have done in the past because of the changes to the climate now have the opportunity to enter into leasehold or partnership agreements in order to get their income from farming renewable energy as well as the other pursuits that they have. Overwhelmingly it was a very positive experience to be part of the committee and to hear from such a large number of people across Australia from all different backgrounds.

The other area where the Greens disagreed with the committee was in relation to carbon capture and storage. We do not agree that this is a technology that the community should pay for or that will be brought on in a timely manner. We believe the coal industry should actually focus on that.

Australia really has to pull out all stops, as does the whole of the planet, if we are going to have any hope of achieving a safe climate. The evidence has clearly been put before the Senate through this committee from Australia’s leading scientists, and nobody in the future will be able to say that they were not told or the evidence was not made available to the parliament of Australia. It has been. It is now up to people to determine what they do with that scientific information.

In conclusion, I again thank other members of the committee for the collaborative manner in which this committee inquiry has been carried out.