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

I just want to speak to these amendments briefly. This issue of how to take voluntary action into account has been a rather vexed one. It came up in previous discussions during the government's former Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and at that time a mechanism for incorporating voluntary action was talked about. We considered this at length in the multi-party climate committee—how you could incorporate voluntary action and therefore be able to reach more ambitious targets by adding voluntary action to whatever else was being done. But the issue is: how do you actually develop the methodology to account for voluntary action, especially if that voluntary action is taken by state governments, by particular businesses or individuals or indeed by community groups? There are a lot of community groups in suburbs and so on where people are saying, 'We want the action we take to be added on to the target; we do not want all this work we are doing to allow the polluters to pollute more, because every time we reduce emissions it creates the space within a target framework for the polluters to pollute more.' It is a vexed question. The way that we have resolved this with the legislation is that the Climate Change Authority—the independent authority that has been set up to set the targets, the trajectories, for the first five years and then every year after that for the scheme—is enabled to take into account voluntary action.

Specifically, what is being asked for is that the methodologies for voluntary action be developed by state or territory governments—like the ACT, for example; it has a very ambitious target and its additional effort ought to be able to be taken into account. This would enable state and territory governments, community groups or individuals to work on developing a methodology which they would then submit to the Climate Change Authority. If the Climate Change Authority deemed that that methodology was rigorous then that voluntary action would be incorporated into the target setting of the Climate Change Authority.

So, Senator Xenophon, you have quite correctly identified an issue that the community has been concerned about, because the community wants to make sure that every effort it makes actually leads to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions overall and leads to an ability for us to increase the ambition of our target in the shortest possible time frame. So that is how we have gone about it because, in the absence of a methodology, it is very hard to make sure you get rigour, taking into account all the other facets of the package that we are legislating.

Senator Xenophon, the Greens will not be supporting your amendments, but we believe that, through the multi-party committee and the package of bills, we have actually taken into account the need to identify voluntary action, develop the methodology for it and take it into account. Really, the challenge now is for all of those people engaged in additional voluntary action to work on getting a methodology so that we can get it incorporated as quickly as possible.