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

The discussion before us is:

The Government’s refusal to acknowledge that direct action on climate change can be achieved without imposing a massive new tax on Australian industry and families.

At the core of that is the assumption that a massive new tax is in fact inherent in the government’s legislation. The government and the opposition have debated this. I take that terminological attack on action on climate change, which has come from the National Party and been adopted by Mr Abbott in opposition, to be a defrauding of the information base and the intelligence that we have in this parliament to act on climate change. It undercuts the intelligence of the Australian people, who understand that climate change is a big threat to the future and who want action taken.

Now both the government and the opposition are claiming that each other’s policy is going to create a tax imposition on the Australian people which should not be there. Yet two days ago, in talking about the impact of an ageing population on the economy, the government’s own assessors—and this is coming from Treasury and the best economic advice in the nation—advised that, unchecked, climate change will cause an eight per cent reduction in gross national product by mid-century. Let me state that again: climate change, unchecked, will reduce the gross national product of this nation by eight per cent by mid-century. That is billions and billions of dollars. With that eight per cent will come hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lost jobs and a tangible and great decrease in the wealth of people, their lifestyle and their safety. Yet both the parties in this parliament are hectoring each other into greater inaction, based on the claim that there will be an impost on us in 2010 as mature and rational citizens. Their view is that we should back off and leave the next generation to be assaulted in their time by an eight per cent reduction in gross national product.

The question again is: does this parliament have the long-sightedness to act on behalf of the national good in the long term as well as in the short term? That is a question that I think only the Greens are tackling with the maturity and the responsibility which it requires of the national legislators. We have seen from both the big parties a targeting of five per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 over 1990 levels, when the world’s scientists tell us it must be a minimum of 25 per cent and should be 40 per cent. These are the targets which the Greens have adopted, because that is what the global scientific opinion and, increasingly, economic opinion—from experts like Professor Ross Garnaut in Australia, who advised the Labor government, and Sir Nicholas Stern in Britain, who advised the Blair government but has become a globally respected figure on the economics—say that we should be aiming at.

If we do not act now, the impact on coming generations is going to be far greater. As Maggie Thatcher herself said two decades ago, every day we delay on climate change action, the cost of remediating that, of taking later action, increases. And yet we have both parties aiming at a five per cent reduction, when a 25 per cent reduction is required. Why is that? It is because of the power of the big end of town and, in particular, the coal conglomerates. I remind the Senate that the coal corporations acting in this country are 75 per cent owned outside Australia, and yet the government’s action plan for a five per cent reduction would hand across $24 billion to the big polluters, including billions to those very same coal corporations, and a lot of that money would drain straight out of the country. The opposition, on the other hand, is saying—and I heard my colleague Senator Joyce, who is to speak next, saying this on radio this morning—’We will appeal to the greed factor in getting the corporations to take money from the state, in order to, if they do not reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, keep emissions where they are.’ I cannot and will not, and nor will the Greens, ever accede to any policy which is based on an appeal to the greediness of megacorporations like these coal corporations, who are 75 per cent centred outside this country anyway.

I heard from the coalition speaker Senator Abetz that there are thousands of jobs in the coal industry that are dependent upon proper protection. Then from the Labor government speaker we just heard an appeal for the protection of the Great Barrier Reef. There are competing interests here. On the one hand, the coal industry has 30,000 jobs, which we Greens say need to be thought about. Those communities need to be assisted in transforming to the highly skilled new environmentally based industries of the future, including renewable energy. But there are more than double that number of jobs—63,000 jobs—in the $5 billion per annum industries of the Great Barrier Reef. You cannot fail on climate change and say you are looking after the interests of those jobs on the Great Barrier Reef and the thousands of small businesses which are dependent upon it.

We will have the scepticism of members of the big parties about climate change and the Great Barrier Reef, but I am indebted again to the former great Democrat senator in this place Norm Sanders, whom I saw Sunday week ago, for reminding us—as the last speaker has just done—that acidification threatens the Great Barrier Reef more than climate change even. What is acidification? It is carbon dioxide being absorbed in the ocean as we increase greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon in the atmosphere, making the ocean more acidic. This is threatening the whole food chain of the world’s oceans. This is besides climate change. You can be sceptical about climate change, but you cannot be sceptical about the increasing acidification of the oceans, beginning with the zooplankton and the phytoplankton, the starting blocks of the whole food chain, which are materially being diminished and threatened by acidification because coal-fired power stations are belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The opposition says, ‘We’ll appeal to their greed to see if they won’t at least limit it to what they’re doing at the moment.’ Business as usual will lead to the collapse of the ocean food chain, as acidification gets worse. Even if you do not regard as a possibility the heating of the oceans and climate change impacts on the ocean, we are headed for catastrophic impact on the whole of the ecosystem of this planet, the mass extinction of species. Scientists tell us that a third of bird species will be extinct by the end of the century, and there is a real threat to mammal species, including this one, Homo sapiens. There is an attendant megathreat to the whole of the oceans upon which we human beings depend, through acidification, and we have got the government and opposition arguing over who is best at delivering a five per cent reduction in carbon emissions into the atmosphere, when we need a minimum 25 per cent reduction if we are going to offset those threats.

So as both the big parties fail their duty to this nation to tackle climate change—through their so-called action plans, which are in fact fail plans—it is left to the Greens to be the champions for this nation of responsible, mature and appropriate action on climate change. We have put an interim proposal to the government for, effectively, a carbon tax of $20 per tonne of carbon. We are negotiating that with the government. This is a very serious matter and requires serious action. It requires this parliament to raise its sights. It requires the big parties to raise their sights from the five per cent target to the 25 per cent minimum target they should be aiming at.

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