Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Climate Change and Water (Senator Wong) to a question without notice asked by Senator Bob Brown today relating to carbon emission reductions.

I want to take note of the question I asked of the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, and her failure to respond to that very simple question. I asked her when the government was going to release its target for greenhouse gas reductions for the year 2020. Nearly every like country in the world has announced a target, and the International Panel on Climate Change annexure, as the minister would have it, has said that developed countries ought to be aiming at 25 to 40 per cent. The Greens’ target is 40 per cent for Australia—that is, a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 40 per cent over 1990 levels by the year 2020. That is what the scientists who are charting an increasingly worrying course to catastrophic climate change say is the minimum if Australia is to contribute to a global effort to prevent runaway catastrophic climate change.

The government has had the Garnaut report for some time now, and the next global conference on greenhouse gas reduction and climate change is in Poznan, Europe, in mid-December. The question I asked the minister was: will you be announcing the government’s target before, during or after that conference? There were three alternatives. Let me look a little at each of those three, remembering that the minister completely ducked the question.

The first was that, sensibly, she would make the announcement here in Australia before she went to Poznan. The basis of the discussions in Poznan will be where, in the range of a 25 to 40 per cent reduction for developed countries, the world will go. The Australian government ought to be aiming at a 40 per cent or, at minimum, a 25 per cent reduction, as the International Panel on Climate Change would have it.

The second alternative was for the minister to make the announcement in Poznan. That would seem strange, as other countries would have made their announcements before they went there, and the matter, right from the outset, has to be debated on the basis of what countries are putting on the table.

The third alternative would be stranger still. That would be for the government not to announce Australia’s target until after the conference where other countries were debating the targets they were going to set, that conference ending on about 12 or 13 December, in the run-up to Christmas. It would present the very worrying prospect of a government that knew it was totally out of step with the Australian people and that wanted to have the uproar amongst Australian people, who are very well versed in the dangers of climate change, about the failure of a target—for example, were the government to adopt the Garnaut recommendation of five to 10 per cent—stymied by the prospect of Christmas. It would be a political cheat of the first order by the Rudd government. I cannot contemplate that a government would be so devious and so lacking in faith in its relationship with the Australian people that it would do that. We are left with questions as to when, in the next week or two, the announcement will be made and why the minister is not making it, so that there can be some debate about it at home before she heads for Poznan.

The other matter related to this is the release yesterday of a report by the Australia Institute indicating that the glitch with any emissions trading scheme is that once it sets limits it effectively sets a floor. Once the government has set an emissions target, that target operates as a floor beneath which emissions cannot fall. What we need to know from the minister or the Prime Minister is: once emissions trading comes into effect in Australia, what about the efforts of Australian families and households to reduce emissions—for example, by putting solar hot water systems on their roofs? Under an emissions trading system, if you effectively save a coal-fired power station giving you hot water, the coal-fired power company has to do nothing about it. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.