Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the carbon repeal bills. Before I commence my speech, I just want to respond to two points that the previous speaker made. The first point is that, halfway through her 20 minute allocation, she said she would sit down because others wanted to speak and because it was important that we have a debate. I invite her to vote against the guillotine motion that her government will no doubt bring forward again. My second point is that she said: 'We would like to get on to debating Direct Action.' Let us understand that this government has hidden as much detail of Direct Action as possible because it is a joke and it is embarrassing and because you know that it will not stand up to scrutiny.

But let me make my contribution. I think I will be the last speaker on the second reading debate for the Labor Party on these bills. We are keen to get in to committee to have a proper committee stage in spite of the government's intentions to try and guillotine this legislation. I think both the way in which this debate has been undertaken and the content of these bills confirm that this government is arrogant, this government is untruthful and this government is cruel. It is a government which is hurting Australians right now with cruel cuts and tax hikes, and it is a government which will hurt future generations of Australians by its refusal to tackle climate change. It is a government that wants to dismantle carbon pricing and emissions trading. I remind the chamber that putting a price on carbon through an ETS is the most environmentally effective and economically efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This has been supported, not by radical left-wing organisations but by respected economic organisations such as the Australian Treasury, the Productivity Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD. Let us get some rationality into this debate

I would hope that people in this Senate would stand up for rational and responsible policy rather than irrational, deceptive and destructive politics on this important issue for the future.

This government talks a lot about the future. But with these bills it is a government that is abdicating its responsibility to take action on climate change. This will hurt future generations of Australians, just as the government's cruel budget cuts are hurting Australians today. We have a Prime Minister who is out of touch; he does not understand how his cuts will hurt ordinary people. We have a Prime Minister who does not tell the truth; he came to office on lies and deception. And we have a Prime Minister who does not care about the future; doing nothing about climate change is both irresponsible and irrational. The scientific evidence is clear. We know that we are on a path that will see substantial increases in temperatures by the middle of this century, which will have significant environmental, economic, social and human impacts.

Those opposite like to talk about future generations. They like to talk about intergenerational equity. That is part of their core argument when it comes to the cuts that they are seeking to impose on Australians, the cuts that they did not tell Australians they would put in place—they, in fact, lied to Australians and told them that they would not put them in place. Yet they seem to forget about intergenerational equity and about future generations when it comes to climate change because our failure to act now will only increase the risks and costs for future generations. If we do not act, we will bequeath to our children a world of rising temperatures, high sea levels, acidified ocean salinity, land degradation, and more frequent and extreme weather events.

Labor introduced a comprehensive package of reforms to clean up our economy. Contrary to some of the mistruths which have been put to this chamber, including by the previous speaker, these reforms are already working to reduce emissions and transform Australia's economy to the clean energy sources of the future, and carbon pricing is an essential element of these reforms. I remind the chamber that carbon pricing through an ETS is mainstream economic environmental policy. It is a policy that every living former Liberal leader has supported—Malcolm Fraser, John Hewson, John Howard, Malcolm Turnbull. Even Mr Abbott supported this policy until he decided that throwing in his lot with those who are climate sceptics was his path to the Liberal leadership. He supported this policy until he decided that running an untruthful scare campaign was also his path to the prime ministership.

Our Clean Energy Act, which is sought to be repealed, established an emissions trading scheme starting with a fixed price and then moving to a price determined by the market. The scheme imposes a cap on our pollution. That is so Australia can ensure it meets its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the carbon price creates an economic incentive for large polluters to clean up their act. There is a range of additional policies over and above the carbon price which include investments in renewable energy, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and the independent Climate Change Authority.

Those who say these policies are not working are wrong. In the first year of carbon pricing, emissions from our electricity market fell by almost 12 million tonnes. We are using electricity more efficiently and we have a larger share of generation coming from natural gas, hydroelectricity and wind power. Wind power capacity trebled under Labor's policies and more than a million households have installed solar panels.

The carbon price has been in place for two years, during that time we have not seen a single one of Mr Abbott's prophecies of doom come true. Yet the government remains addicted to this doomsaying. Just this week—yesterday or the day before—the Leader of the Government in the Senate actually claimed that the carbon price had destroyed jobs and was destroying the Australian economy. It is completely absurd. Since the carbon price started, GDP has grown, more jobs have been recreated, the share market has risen and market capitalisation of our share market has risen. That is not an economy that has been destroyed.

Labor, when it comes to climate change, has a long history of working to address it. We first included climate change in our platform in 1988. The Keating government ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. The Rudd government ratified the Kyoto protocol in 2007. We adopted an enhanced renewable energy target to ensure that 20 per cent of Australia's electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020. We introduced legislation for a carbon price very similar to what the Greens eventually voted for, with less assistance to electricity polluters than the current scheme. We introduced that legislation in 2009 but, regrettably, it was blocked by the coalition and the Greens. But we did not give up and we successfully introduced a carbon price into our economy from July 2012 along with the other measures I have referenced.

We do stand by our principles and those principles are sound. These policies are in the national interest. I will pause to address one point that is made always. Those opposite say we cannot fix climate change ourselves; everybody has to act. That is true; it is a global problem. It is a global challenge that all nations have to meet. But you do not enable that to happen by not doing anything yourself. You do not enable international action by simply sitting back and saying we are not going to do anything. If every nation did that, if every nation sat back and said they would not do anything until others act, we can be sure that action would not occur. We can be sure that we will be bequeathing risks that we ought not bequeath to our children. It is not a responsible way to act. It is false to assert that no other nation is acting. I invite those who are interested to read what the Climate Change Authority has said—not what I have said but what independent scientists and analysts have said—about the extent of international action. Walking away is an abdication of responsibility, not only to the international community but to our children as well.

On the issue of climate change, Mr Abbott has been a self-confessed weather vane. He changed his position when he found it electorally expedient. He has treated climate change as an opportunity to maximise his own self-interest instead of pursuing policies in the interests of future generations. In fact, if you track through Mr Abbott's comments on climate change, he has really held pretty much every view at every point in the spectrum, from saying climate change is 'absolute crap' to saying that imposing a carbon tax is the best way to go.

Mr Abbott has nominated Margaret Thatcher as one of his political heroes. The late Baroness Thatcher was not only a political leader, she was in fact a scientist by training and background and she was one of the first world leaders to identify the risk and the threat posed by climate change. In 1989 in a speech to the UN, she talked about climate change. She said:

… the evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the International Community, do about it?

Fast forward to this week and we heard an assessment of Mr Abbott's performance on climate change from one of Mrs Thatcher's former ministers, Lord Deben. He said on Lateline on Tuesday night:

Well, the fact is almost all the rest of the world is now fighting climate change. … Only Australia and to some extent Canada, but particularly Australia, is actually going backwards.

He went on to say:

… nobody outside [Mr Abbott's] party thinks that his policy is going to deliver and he will not listen to the rest of the world. That seems to me to be very sad, 'cause Australia is a great nation, an English-speaking nation that ought to be leading the world instead of going backwards.

This is the Right Honourable John Gummer, Lord Deben, who served 16 years as a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government and John Major's government and as a former chairman of the British Conservative Party.

The fact is: mainstream conservatives internationally and mainstream liberals in Australia know that carbon pricing is the lowest-cost way of reducing emissions. In fact, our environment minister, Mr Hunt, has known that since 1990. When he was at university, he wrote a research report, called 'A tax to make the polluter pay: the application of pollution taxes within the Australian legal system'. In that paper he argued that the best way of tackling the problem of industrial pollution was through a market mechanism. The intellectual journey—or, frankly, the craven political path—that Mr Hunt has walked is quite extraordinary. He started out advocating sensible, mature policies, but he grew up and became a crazy. A lot of people might say, 'We are a bit different at university, but we grow up and become more mainstream.' This environment minister has gone the other way.

Australia's political spectrum on climate change is now not dominated by mainstream liberals; the Liberal Party have gone to the extreme hard right on climate change. The political spectrum in this nation now comprises the Liberal Party which has moved to the hard right and does not care about the environment or the future of the planet.