Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sometimes I wonder what it will take for the climate fundamentalists on the hard right of the coalition to realise that they've got this wrong. When exactly will it be that the penny drops that they have messed this up, and not just a little bit but in a really big way? I wonder this because I am genuinely curious about what more they need in terms of proof of human-induced climate change. Is it scientific proof that they need? For decades now, we've had scientific consensus about the nature and causes of climate change.

James L Powell, Executive Director of the National Physical Science Consortium, reviewed more than 24,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming that were published in 2013-14 and, of those, only five reject the reality of rising temperatures or the fact that human emissions are the cause. Maybe scientific evidence isn't enough. Maybe the hard right don't really trust the boffins. Maybe what the hard right need to hear is consensus amongst the hard-nosed element of the business community. Well, the Australian business community is pretty much united in its view that climate change is real and we need to act. Let's have a look at what BHP says—the favourite of the coalition. They state:

Our position on climate change

We accept the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change … assessment of climate change science, which has found that warming of the climate is unequivocal, the human influence is clear and physical impacts are unavoidable.

That's very promising. What else do they say? They talk about their approach and say: 'We believe an effective policy framework should include a complementary set of measures, including a price on carbon, support for low-emissions technology and measures to build resilience.

BHP was one of a whole range of companies, NGOs and community groups that came out this year in support of an EIS, which is Labor's preferred policy. But, as you can see from the debate this year, calls to action from the business community aren't actually enough. They are not enough to move the hard right of the coalition. Maybe they are men who like to see things with their own two eyes. Maybe they don't want to trust models and projections. Maybe they will believe we need to act when we see the effects of climate change happening in the real world. Well, we are there already. We are starting to see the physical phenomena that were predicted by the scientific models. We are seeing melting sea ice. We are seeing an increased incidence of natural disasters, perhaps like having two of the most powerful storms on record hit the US in just two weeks. We are seeing higher than average temperatures consistently and many more severe heat events. All of that leaves you wondering what exactly would be the standard of proof required. Where is there left to go? Will these people only accept the need for action on climate if the sea is lapping at their door? By that stage, it will be too late. All of it would be comic if it weren't sad. The Liberal and National parties have hijacked this country's climate policy and they've stopped us taking real and necessary action. That inaction has costs.

We've talked a lot about energy in this chamber recently. In part, that is because four years of inaction is starting to bite. You can only get away with not acting on things for so long. Eventually the cracks start to show. The government's refusal to have a real policy on energy didn't bring things to a crashing halt right away—not straightaway—but it did cause a slowdown in investment. Four years later, in the government's fifth year in office, we can see the costs that come with that: ageing infrastructure, higher power bills, higher emissions. We are fast approaching a similar point with the physical risks of climate change. This won't happen all at once, because it never does. But, slowly and gradually, we will be seeing events like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma occurring more and more frequently. The government are doing nothing about it. They have no plan, no credible policy and, seemingly, no-one cares.

The government might not recognise the risk, but business does. It is becoming standard for big Australian companies to have policies that manage climate risk, and that's because they recognise that the physical effects of climate change pose real risks to their businesses. What does one of Australia's very, very big banks, Westpac, say about it? They say:

Despite the commitment to limit global warming to two degrees, climate change will still cause shifts in weather patterns and increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters. Communities may experience weather events that they are unfamiliar with or for which they are not prepared.

They've got a whole policy about adjusting their business model to deal with the reality of a warming world and what it will do to their market. Telstra, the biggest telecommunications company in Australia, says:

Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather can damage and disrupt our infrastructure and operations.

This, in turn, can affect customer service and have wider financial, health and safety implications. We are committed to better understanding the risks posed by climate change to our infrastructure and people, and identifying action to strengthen the climate change resilience within our business.

In the last little while, there's been a sort of allegation that AGL is only taking the decisions it's taking because it has been infiltrated by a single person who once had a relationship with the Labor Party. But, when you look at the range of actions being taken by the largest businesses in Australia, you see a consistency in their approach, which is to recognise that climate change is real and to recognise that it has very real and worrying impacts on business models and to start to work out how to respond to that.

Transurban, a big manager of transport infrastructure across the country, conducted a series of climate change risk assessments for many of their major projects to assess the potential impacts of a range of climate change scenarios, looking at 2040, 2070 and 2090. The risks they were interested in included: the effect of potential extreme weather events; indirect risks such as the increased risk of power supply interruptions due to heatwaves; and the effect on the expected lifetime of infrastructure due to increased temperatures, heatwaves, rainfall and storm surges. If you manage a whole lot of kit and you manage stuff that is made of concrete, you need to start thinking about what it will mean to have very, very hot days. You need to start thinking about whether that infrastructure is designed to cope with very, very heavy rainfall events which produce much larger levels of run-off than anyone ever predicted when they were building transport infrastructure just a decade ago.

One of the most exposed sectors, however, is the insurance sector. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, warns that over time the adverse effects of climate change could threaten economic resilience and financial stability, and insurers are currently at the forefront. ClimateWise is a coalition of 29 insurers. It includes the industry's biggest names: Allianz, Swiss Re, Zurich and Lloyds. Last year, they issued a report looking at the impact of climate change on their industry, and the outlook isn't good. The report said—and these are big numbers:

Since the 1950s, the frequency of weather-related catastrophes, such as windstorms and floods, has increased six-fold. As climate-related risks occur more often and predictably, previously insurable assets are becoming uninsurable, or those already underinsured further compromised.

These are serious warnings from people who are in the business of assessing risk, and they are telling us that we have a problem. But no-one on the other side of the chamber is listening. The chairman of the Global General Insurance at Aviva said the insurance industry's role as society's risk manager is under threat. He said:

Our sector will struggle to reduce this protection gap if our response is limited to avoiding, rather than managing, society's exposure to climate risk.

People, we have a problem. The complacency with which the coalition approach this issue is extraordinary. It's not just the environment groups, it's not just the opposition, it's not just the scientists warning them; it is business. Business is telling them that it is time to act, but, constrained by the coalition's hard-right partners, they are failing to do so.