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

I do not wish to delay the Senate unduly but I do wish to agree with my colleague Senator Bob Brown and remind the Senate that we wrote to the Prime Minister some time ago saying that there should be an additional week’s sitting in order to deal with this matter. It was obvious to us in September that we would need more time to deal with these issues. The Prime Minister did not even have the courtesy to answer our letter, which is the kind of contempt for the Senate that we are seeing from the government.

The most recent example of that contempt has come from the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Carr, who is in here at the moment. He has said that he will defy a Senate motion to table a paper which the Senate voted to have tabled in here. That is the kind of contempt we are now seeing from the government for the Senate. People might ask, ‘Why not just have a couple of hours of extra sitting time to deal with this?’ The fact is that it needs a lot longer than a couple of hours—another week of sitting time is needed to look at this—and I want to go through a couple of things. The Senate has had no opportunity to scrutinise the deal that the coalition and the government have come to. It has had no opportunity to scrutinise the deal at all. Making such a huge allocation of money without scrutiny is unprecedented in the history of the Senate when scrutiny is our job and our responsibility. For example, the Prime Minister said yesterday that the additional compensation to the coal industry would be around $7 billion. When you look at the small print, you find that $7 billion is expressed in 2008 terms and is not consistent with the way the forward estimates are usually dealt with. Usually, you would look at that in real terms for the future rather than looking at it in 2008 dollars, especially when the sum is projected out to 2020.

When we had a look at this last night, we discovered that the $7 billion extra to the big polluters was based on a five per cent reduction target. We should not have been surprised by that, because the government has conned the Australian people into thinking that it is going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between five and 25 per cent. But, no, the government’s only promise is a five per cent reduction. That will guarantee the death of the Great Barrier Reef, the loss of the Murray-Darling and the worst case scenario that we all know from the science of a half- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, which was talked about most recently overnight. A five per cent reduction does not cut it. A 25 per cent reduction does not cut it. That is the absolute bare minimum where you need to be starting, not finishing.

As I said, the figure of $7 billion was calculated on 2008 figures on the basis of a five per cent reduction. When you look at a 15 per cent reduction, you find the amount going to the coal industry, in addition to the $16 billion that was already there, would go out to $10 billion—and we have not yet calculated what a 25 per cent reduction would mean. The government dressed it up yesterday to try to minimise how much it is giving to the coal industry, but it is actually many billions of dollars more than that, and it has taken it out of the compensation to households. This is a massive wealth transfer, taking the money away from the community and giving it to the coal fired generators.

Another thing that the government is not looking at is the legal advice, which shows that once this deal is done and goes through the effort that the electricity sector—the coal fired generators and the energy-intensive trade-exposed industries—has to make to achieve a reductions target will not be changed until 2020. So not only has the government taken the compensation away from the community but also it is saying that if we increase the target in the future, which no doubt this country will have to do because the target is such a disgrace, all of the effort will be outside those sectors locked into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. In other words, the coal industry—the big emitters—is now insulated out to 2020 from any future effort and will have its compensation locked in and be able to sue if anyone tries to make it do any more. That means that the community, having already lost the compensation of $6 billion that it was to be given, will also have to shoulder the additional benefit into the future. We need to look at that really carefully.

Another thing is that there are serious ramifications for rural and regional Australia in the deal that has been done between the government and the coalition, and it is not clear yet what that means. For example, the government has said that agriculture will be out, but the fact of the matter is that that was no concession to the coalition. The coalition has been conned completely on that, because the government was not going to make a decision on that until 2013. Next year there will be a federal election. The federal election after that will be in 2013. So we are talking about a decision two federal elections away for an implementation phase post 2015, which is three federal elections away. Even people who take only a passing interest in federal politics know that it is the stuff of fantasy land to tell people, ‘We have changed our minds about something that was going to happen three federal elections away.’

The coalition thinks that now it not only has got agriculture out but also has this ability for rural Australia to claim credits. But go and look at the fine print and you will find that it is not there at all. All the government has said is that it will give these credits to rural Australia if its task force can come up with robust accounting that would make it possible, and we all know that that will not happen. So the farmers are deluding themselves right now into thinking that they got carbon credits for abatement when they did not. Instead, they got a task force which will determine whether there is robust accounting to enable it to happen. It will not happen. I can tell you that now. I can tell you who it will happen for, though, and that is the loggers. The deal here is not for the farmers but for the forest industry, because they are the ones in here getting the big concession. Yesterday’s deal gave them another $40 million as well as carbon sink forests, which this Senate has shown that it opposes time and time again. The deal between the government and the coalition provided for carbon sink forests to get guaranteed water rights and planning rights.

That is not something that the Senate has ever agreed to. In fact, we have made it clear time and time again that we do not like the carbon pollution forests thing because it is exactly like managed investment schemes. It is yet another lurk for the National Association of Forest Industries and for Collins Street investors; it is not good for rural Australia, for all of the reasons that managed investment schemes have been a disaster in rural and regional Australia. That is part of the coalition deal. I wonder how many coalition people understand that they have just agreed to give carbon sink forests guaranteed water entitlements and planning rights but that the farmers have got nothing except a task force that might come up with a robust accounting scheme which might incorporate their emissions in the future.

Yes, there is a $40 million Green Carbon Fund. That is there to equal the amount they wanted to give to the forest industry. The most sensible thing to do would have been to take out the plantation sector entirely, have the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as a fossil fuel scheme and have an alternative mechanism that looks at carbon in the landscape. This mechanism would incorporate food security, water sustainability, biodiversity outcomes and resilience in rural communities. If you had taken all of that out and created a separate program, as the Greens have advocated, you would actually start to address some of these issues. You would allow rural Australia to start bringing together consideration of where we are going to grow food, how we are going to have the water to grow that food, how we are going to improve biodiversity in rural and regional Australia and how are we going to do it in such a way as to improve job prospects in rural communities and build resilience in those communities.

That is what we needed to do, but if all we have is a couple of extra hours of sitting, this will not be discussed, because these are not amendments to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. They are off-legislation deals. They are not going to be amendments that come before the Senate. This is a deal separate from the Senate. It has no legislative status. It is part of a deal. In the future, you are going to see Liberal and National Party senators standing up and saying that they did not understand, at the time of the deal, that there was nothing guaranteed and that there were no specific agreements being made.

So I would urge the Senate not to go down this path of a just a few extra sitting hours. We need an extra week of sitting time. We need it so that we can get the government to outline in detail what this deal actually means. I think people out there assume it is going to be a legislated deal. It is not. It is a backroom deal. We do not know exactly how it is going to play out, but what I do know is that those people in rural Australia who thought they were going to get carbon credits are not going to get them in the time frame they thought, because the accounting framework does not exist.

That is why agriculture was left out. It is why agriculture was always going to be left out and, having been left out, did anyone ask the question: why did the government agree to leave it out? The answer is: no accounting system. The Liberal Party thinks it got some deal because the government says, ‘We will count the abatement from all these activities in rural Australia,’ but there is no mechanism. That is why they left it out. There is no accounting mechanism.

So, before you go ahead and agree with this deal and agree to ram it through in an extending sitting period without proper scrutiny, go back to Ian Macfarlane and the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, and ask whether there are accounting methods in place today which will allow farmers to measure the abatement opportunities that are supposedly there for them and, if they are, whether those methods would be sufficiently rigorous to support qualification for a permit? I can tell you now that the answer is no.

It is a disaster for the Australian parliament to ram through something it does not understand, because you always end up with perverse outcomes. One of these perverse outcomes will be that the community will suddenly discover that the $7 billion, in 2008 dollar terms, on a five per cent reduction will be $10 billion, at least, under a 15 per cent reduction and an unknown figure if we go higher—on up to 25 per cent.

How dishonest is it for the government to stand there and say, ‘This is what we have done,’ when they are not telling the Australian people what they really have done; to try and pitch this to people who are already suffering from the collapse of the Murray-Darling system; to pitch this to people in rural communities who have already suffered huge losses as a result of the managed investment scheme rip-off; to now pretend to those people that they are going to get some benefit when the government knows full well—I know full well and Minister Wong knows full well—that there will not be one permit issued to one farmer because there is no robust accounting? That is why agriculture was left out of the scheme. So I really want people to think about this carefully and to support proper scrutiny of this deal and what it means before they agree to just ram it through and live with the consequences, because fixing it up later, we have discovered, is not something that is easy to do. Once this goes through, those who benefit from it will sue at any prospect of any of their deal being unpicked.