Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In taking note of the Bureau of Meteorology report for 2008-09, I would like to continue the theme that I have been running this evening in bringing to the attention of the Senate Labor’s falsehoods in setting the most extreme cases to argue their climate change debate—that is, that everything is linked to human induced climate change. This is what they say. They say the Great Barrier is doomed, that bushfires are a cause of human induced climate change—Senator McEwen said that—that all the stress and strain on the Murray River is due to human induced climate change and, of course, that the Antarctic is shrinking due to human induced climate change. This evening I have highlighted the falsehoods of each one of those extremes.

But I notice that the latest one they have latched on to is the rise in sea levels. It has been run through the media and run through this parliament by the high priestess, Senator Wong, and, I should add, the Prime Minister. In the last week, in the run-up to this vote we are having on the ETS next week, we have seen a House of Representatives report being tabled indicating that the sea levels will rise to a disastrous level that will swamp the east coast, west coast, the north and the south. Then of course the Prime Minister himself at the Lowy Institute, in that hysterical address he gave, claimed that 700,000 homes are going to be swamped due to the surging tide. And, of course, the New South Wales government—I called them the ‘knaves’, in the New South Wales government—have got an opinion on this. How dare they have an opinion on this! They, too, talk about the disastrous effects of the rising levels by 2050. A good excuse, if ever I have heard one, for the New South Wales government to slap an extra coastal tax on people.

But the truth of the matter is that there are greater experts than those political heads. That is all they are: political heads—and one is about to leave the chamber right now. There is no science in their argument at all; they are just political heads. The real scientists have come forward and said that these claims are nothing but rubbish. No less than the Bureau of Meteorology have had something to say about the New South Wales government’s claim about the rising sea levels by 2050—that it is just going to swamp the whole east coast, the Sydney airport and all those other laughable claims. The report of the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Tidal Centre, issued in June, said:

... there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla—

which they use as the proper example—

south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991.

This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average.

The bottom line there is that, under any analysis, if that is the rate the sea is increasing, the New South Wales government are wrong and telling an untruth—and probably knowingly.

But a greater expert than that—the world’s greatest expert, I should add—has weighed into this debate about rising sea levels. Professor Morner, from the Stockholm University and past president of the International Union for Quaternary Research commission on sea level changes and coastal evolution—a man of greater gravitas than Premier Rees, I assure you—says in a letter that he wrote there is ‘No rational basis for the hysterical claims that the people of Maldives—or the rest of the world—are threatened by rising sea levels’. And he went on to give the facts. He does not just make the assertion, like the other side does; he actually gives the facts—but time does not allow me to do so.

So it has actually been a good week to watch the other side squirm as the world shifts its position, as world leaders shift their position and as the Australian people are starting to wake up and shift their position. It is not 2007 politics any more; this is 2009 politics. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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