Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is not my first speech. I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 [No.2] and related bills today. I have been in the Senate for three days, and I feel like Alice in Wonderland—in a different world where everything is just turned upside down. I have been listening to the coalition arguing that white is black—that climate change is not happening. I have been listening to the PUP senators arguing that getting rid of the price on carbon will be good for low-income people. And I have been listening to all of them arguing that repealing the price on carbon will solve all of the problems of the Australian economy and usher in a new era of prosperity and wellbeing.

I think it is very appropriate that, in my first week here in the Senate, climate has been the issue that we have been debating, because it was climate change that politicised me. I studied science at Melbourne university, and I learnt about climate change when I was 20, in 1980, and I distinctly remember coming out of a lecture thinking: 'This is really serious. The world needs to be doing something about this.' It motivated me not to go on to a career as a research scientist but, instead, to become a campaigner, working to protect our world against the impacts of climate change.

In 1980 the science of modelling the likely impacts of global warming was in its infancy. It has developed massively since then, but the overall message has stayed the same: that continuing to pump carbon dioxide into our atmosphere will have major, irreversible and extremely damaging impacts on our climate, our oceans and our whole way of life. The impressive thing about the science is how consistent it has been. If you look at the projections made in the 1990s, they are remarkably consistent with the projections prepared by the IPCC last year. They have become more detailed and more specific and there have been some minor changes, but the overall projected impacts are the same: overall increasing global temperatures, increasing climate variability, increasing rainfall variability, increasing extreme weather events, increasing sea surface temperatures, sea level rise, increasing acidification of our oceans, and the melting of glaciers and the ice caps.

The other sobering reflection I have from thinking back to learning about climate change in 1980 is that, at that stage, carbon dioxide was only at 340 parts per million. It is now 400. That means that, in the intervening years of my adult life, carbon levels have increased as much as they had in the previous thousand years. Carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are now the highest they have been for the last million years.

The full impact of the consequences of our carbon pollution does not seem to have hit home for many people in this place, and I do not understand how they cannot understand. For example, the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is in the news this week. And babies born today—your child or grandchild or a friend's child born today—will be alive when the impacts occur. Do we really want to bequeath this to them?

Melting ice sheets are just one of the impacts of climate change, as those of us who understand the science know. The reality of climate change is a story of big and evolving impacts on people today, and massive impacts on people in the future—and one only needs to start looking at and thinking about the potential impacts that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is projecting for Australia.

We can start with bushfires—their increased frequency and severity, and their increased spread across the country and across the year, beginning earlier and continuing later. Think of the likely loss of life that will occur, and the personal losses, the personal costs, and the public costs of dealing with increased bushfires. Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009 cost the community more than $4 billion, according to the subsequent royal commission, and this does not include the health and social costs and the flow-on costs to business.

The costs around the world of the extreme weather events that climate change is going to result in will be massive. The global reinsurer Munich Re recently predicted that the cost of all the extreme weather events in Australia is set to soar, from $6.3 billion a year today to about $23 billion a year in 2050. And the frequency and intensity of severe events like bushfires will rise together with our rising population. So I want to do everything in my power—and I feel it is our responsibility to do everything in our power—to stop this awful scenario happening.

There are other impacts. Think of the increased frequency of heatwaves. Those in this chamber who share my concern, and the Greens' concern, for people on limited incomes and people living in poorly insulated public housing that are heat-boxes in summer, will care about what happens to them in heatwaves. Three hundred and seventy-four people died from the heatwave in Victoria in 2009, in the two weeks prior to Black Saturday—almost twice as many as the 174 people who died in those horrific fires. There are things that we can do to reduce this loss of life: make better insulated housing, more energy-efficient housing and better quality housing. These are exactly the sorts of measures that can be funded through revenue from a price on carbon.

I think of the impact on agriculture. I spoke this week to a young woman whose family has a vineyard in South Australia. Her father is despairing. He does not have any superannuation. His whole wealth is based on his vineyard. He can see the value of his vineyard evaporating before his eyes, every year, when the quality of his grape crop crashes because of extreme summer heat or when it is affected by smoke taint from bushfires occurring where bushfires just have not occurred before. She is advising him to sell up now, before it is worth absolutely nothing. He is reluctant, but he is depressed and despairing. This is the cost of climate change.

Think of what a one-metre sea level rise is going to mean to Australian cities. Think of your favourite beach—think of it no longer there; think of a two-metre high seawall instead. Think of suburbs like Altona in Melbourne, where I grew up; it already has a one-metre high seawall. My mother's house, where she has lived all her life, is a kilometre inland; it is less than half a metre above sea level. Yes, we can build that seawall another two metres higher—but at what cost? At financial cost, at cultural cost, and at cost to our connection with the coast, with the sea, with nature—with our treasured Australian way of life.

It is these impacts and more—many more—that are why the young people of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition were out there on the Parliament House lawns on Monday. These issues are why there are so many people around the world who are passionate about the need for real, urgent action to be reducing our carbon pollution—not just reducing it by five per cent, but getting rid of our carbon pollution so that we will have a future.

What I want to achieve in my time in the Senate is to help us shift towards a 21st-century economy that is based on renewable energy, which all of the mainstream economic institutions in the world are now saying is not only possible but makes economic sense. We have the solutions. All we need is the political will to implement those solutions, to challenge the vested interests of the fossil fuel industries and to shift our economy to the bright future that is there with the renewable energy industries—a really caring, sustainable future for us all.