Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to speak tonight about an issue that everyone in this chamber is familiar with, and that is the issue of air travel, and I want to do so in the context of the climate change debate. We are, thankfully, finally getting to a stage in Australia where climate change is being recognised pretty much universally across the political spectrum as a serious and genuine issue. Some of that recognition might be less than sincere but most are acknowledging it and recognising that we need to act. That is the very first step.

The next step is building the political will and developing mechanisms to enable sufficient action to occur to address the problem that we are finally now acknowledging exists. This tends to mean that you will get focus on a few key areas. That is the nature of the way political and public debate works—people focus on a couple of areas and say they are the big problems and we must do a lot about those areas. In terms of climate change and carbon emissions, power consumption and coal fired power stations in particular are seen as one of those big areas. Another is the area of transport. They are both significant areas. When people think of transport they tend to think of trucks, cars, trains and the like. But the area of air travel has not had a lot of attention and I believe it merits more attention than it gets. That is important because any response to climate change that is going to work has to be a holistic one.

Whatever we might like to think about what is feasible and what is not regarding the necessary changes to address and minimise climate change, it is going to mean significant changes to the way we live in future compared with the way we live now. My view is that the reality of how we address climate change is somewhere between the extremes that are often presented. We have the extreme that is put regularly by people like the Treasurer, Mr Costello, that if we make significant shifts to our resource sector, or pretty much anything away from business as usual, then the economy is going to collapse, there will be mass unemployment and ‘We’ll all be rooned.’ That clearly is quite farcical, particularly when you look at the consequences of doing nothing, which will really allow dangerous climate change to become rampant and then we will ‘all be rooned’. There will be enormous economic damage. Just putting the environmental issues to one side, the whole way our economy functions is underpinned by many factors—the natural ecosystem would be severely harmed and the cost would be enormous. We are starting to see that already, of course, in terms of issues like drought, severe weather events and the like.

The alternative view that is often put is that we need to just wipe out the coal industry straight away—close down that whole area—and it will all be fine because all these new jobs will just pop up overnight in renewable energy, people can just shift across, it will be easy and we should just go with it. Certainly there are enormous opportunities in the renewable energy industries, carbon markets and all sorts of other areas. But we should not kid ourselves that it is going to be easy to make those transitions or that people who are affected by declining employment in a particular sector can easily flip across to another one. We know from the significant shifts that have happened, for example, in the manufacturing sector and in some of the resource sector industries that it does not always work as neatly as that.

The other point that I want to make is that it will require significant individual personal change. This is something we are all in together. We need more action, leadership and political will from government and we need more genuine commitment and leadership from business, but we need more individual commitment as well. We will not be able to get to where we need to in reducing greenhouse emissions purely through technological fixes and pricing mechanisms. Behavioural shifts will be required on top of those.

I believe one of the areas we need to start thinking about and acclimatising our attitudes to is air travel. Air travel at the moment accounts for around two per cent of our total CO₂ emissions in Australia. Certain people might say, ‘It’s not very significant then.’ It is scheduled, if it keeps growing at its current rate, to double by 2020. On top of that, a lot of scientific opinion suggests that you cannot just measure carbon emissions—there is what is usually called an ‘uplift factor’ in calculating the climate impacts of aircraft travel emissions because of other greenhouse gases apart from carbon, like nitrogen oxides and water vapour, and also the areas in the atmosphere where they are released. The science in this area is less precise and therefore you get a lot of debate about whether the impact of emissions from aeroplanes should just be counted as straight carbon emissions or whether you should have an uplift factor of 1.7 to 2.7—that is the sort of range that is put there. The fact there is no agreement on precisely what that uplift factor should be should not be used as an excuse to just not measure it at all, but that is basically the approach we have taken to date.

I draw the Senate’s attention to a paper that was recently put out by the Australia Institute looking into the topic of air travel and emissions. It is one that I would recommend to policy makers across the board because it focuses on an area that is not often focused on. Even the debate at the moment about developing a carbon-trading program of some sort or a carbon-pricing mechanism in some way through a straight carbon tax will not necessarily take into account all of the climate change or greenhouse emission impacts—the full impacts of air travel.

This is particularly crucial to Australia’s economy. Of course, we rely very heavily on tourism. We are a long way away from other parts of the world, so there are a lot more emissions created through people catching planes to get here. Even travelling within Australia, as we all know—in this place more than most—if it is not by air travel, is quite difficult. We need to acknowledge this and accept the reality that if we address some of the other areas and reduce emissions in electricity consumption, car transport and other sorts of things whilst not doing anything about air travel because it is too hard or too inconvenient then we will wipe out a lot of the gains that we have made. And let us not forget that, whatever target or aspirational goal we set for 2050 or 2020, it is going to require significant cuts, and you cannot have a continuing increase in air travel and expect to get cuts in emissions.

In the latest edition of the Economist this week, an article called ‘Time to land’ details a few different ways in which we might be able to make air travel more efficient and chew up less fuel along the way. There is no doubt that there are savings there, fuel efficiencies and all sorts of things, but I do not think anyone should kid themselves—certainly the Economist’s article did not convince me by any means—that there are enough savings to be made by changing air travel patterns and routes and those sorts of things to make up for the continuing increase in air traffic around the globe, and that includes Australia.

We have to start thinking ahead about this. As an example, in my own town of Brisbane we are now going through the process of planning for a second runway to take the extra traffic that is likely to be coming into Brisbane. I accept that that is needed under current projections, but by putting in place that infrastructure we are facilitating further air travel. We need to be looking at ways to change that. Pricing mechanisms might play a part, perhaps with a direct charge or fee per flight, with the money going towards mitigation or other measures, or a charge at a much earlier stage for the weight of the luggage and things people take on board, because that certainly has its impact. But on top of that we simply need to recognise that we need to reduce air travel in certain circumstances.

I think we in the parliament could make a start on some of those things. Something as fundamental and basic as having really top-quality videoconferencing facilities in Parliament House and in all of the Commonwealth parliamentary offices around the country so that we do not need to travel so often to have run-of-the-mill committee meetings that could be done through high-quality videoconferencing would save a lot in terms of emissions. It would also save the taxpayer a lot of money pretty quickly and it might mean all of us being able to stay home in our electorates a little bit more often, which would probably not hurt either. There are simple things we can do, but we need to think about them now. (Time expired)