Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That was what I was about to do, Mr Acting Deputy President. Earlier today when the motion to give precedence and have the bills taken together was put to the chamber it was defeated—it was defeated on both counts. In fact, the decision of the Senate was that they not be dealt with together and that they not be given precedence. At that point the Palmer United Party agreed that they ought not to be given precedence and they ought not to be dealt with together. Now we have had a change of heart and no explanation at all as to why, within a matter of hours, that change occurred. According to the media reports, it is because the government has now agreed to bring the Climate Change Authority (Abolition) Bill into the Senate. As a result of a deal that has been done on that there has been a change of heart.

We deserve to know exactly what this deal, or this arrangement, has been. The reason I say that is that this is a hugely significant moment in Australian political history. What we are dealing with here, with this substantive package of bills, will determine the life chances of every generation that comes after us. Why would you, at one point during the day, say you wanted more time to consider these bills and then, at a later point in the day, say that you are prepared to abandon the 17 July reporting date and bring on the debate tonight? What has occurred or been negotiated in the last few hours that would lead to that change of heart? The Senate and the Australian people deserve some kind of explanation.

Senators need an explanation because what we are being asked to do with this package of bills is repeal an emissions trading scheme which is working. It is currently operating with a fixed price and due to go to a flexible price on 1 July next year. This Senate will be asked to repeal those bills, and we are told there is going to be an amendment to the Climate Change Authority bill from the Palmer United Party which inserts some kind of emissions trading scheme—but those amendments have not been circulated, so nobody knows what it is that is being proposed for the future.

The thing is: we have a scheme now. That is the important thing. It is working. It is bringing down emissions, particularly in the electricity sector; it is bringing down emissions as we speak. We need to know if we are being asked to exchange the scheme we have now which is working, which is bringing down emissions and which has an 18 per cent emission reduction target attached to it, because that is the default setting. That is what is currently in place as of 31 May. Are we being asked to exchange that for something which may or may not come into effect at some point in the future? That is all we have to go on at this point because we have not seen the specifics of the legislation. If that amendment is contingent upon all of our trading partners being involved in a global emissions trading scheme, then we are talking about the never-never. We are talking about a period so far away there would be a megagap between what we now have, which is bringing down emissions, and what may or may not happen at some point in the future.

If you are determined to bring on a debate on the abolition of a scheme which is working and legislated now, then it is incumbent on you to know exactly what is being proposed as an alternative. If you say you are supportive of emissions trading, then why would you not maintain the emissions trading scheme you have? I make these points because we have heard a lot of debate about what is, or may be, going to be proposed, but none of it has been circulated. No-one in the Senate has been able to make a judgement or have a look at it.

I, for one, will not be supporting in any shape or form the abolition of the clean energy package, because climate change is not only real; it is an emergency. We are living in the emergency now. That is the fact. You only have to look at the science.

We have heard some discussion of the science. Senator Macdonald cites Bob Carter. I cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One is a scientist whose field is not climate science; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the overwhelming consensus of the world's leading scientists—and there are thousands of them, from one end of the planet to the other. I can tell you: most of them live in a state of despair about how rapidly global warming is occurring. The question for them is not whether climate change is real or not; the question for them is whether we have already gone beyond the tipping point from which there is no return.

One of the big questions they are thinking about and asking themselves at the moment relates to a potential huge release of methane long-frozen in the Arctic permafrost. There is a 50-gigaton reservoir of methane stored in the form of hydrates in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. That could be emitted gradually or it could be emitted suddenly. If there were such a melt of the permafrost that it was emitted suddenly, it would be a megacatastrophe on the climate front. It would tip us over. That is the problem here.

The same goes for ocean acidification. Research at my own university, the University of Tasmania, has demonstrated that ocean acidification is such that it is already thinning the shells of creatures in the marine food chain. Once they lose their shells, they lose their reproductive ability and that is going to lead to a simplification of the marine environment. Newsweek have a fantastic series of articles this week about the oceans. They make it clear that, when scientists look at the fish in the Barcelona fish market, they do not just see a fish market like most people see and think, 'How fantastic!' They look at it and see it as a museum—something that will not be there for very much longer—because what we are seeing is a loss of the complexity of marine life and a growing number of dead zones in the ocean, with jellyfish in much more prolific numbers and a loss of complexity. We saw, only a few weeks ago, 10 million scallops die off Vancouver Island because of ocean acidification—because in low pH waters they cannot form shells. You get to the point where you have wipe-out. Consider microscopic creatures, down to krill. Imagine what would happen if krill could not reproduce. You would see a collapse in the marine food chain and starvation—not only in the food chain but for millions, if not billions, of people around the world who depend on protein from the oceans. That is one thing in itself.

Who is to benefit from abandoning carbon pricing? I can tell you: it is the big polluters; it is the people who run coalmines and who want to develop coalmines; it is the coal seam gas industry; it is the big polluters, the coal fired generators. They are the ones who will benefit, but it is $18 billion that Australia will forgo. The Abbott government will forgo $18 billion in the next four years to allow the big polluters to keep that money. They will then stand up and say to the community, 'There is a budget emergency and, as a result, we need to take all this money out of the pockets of the community'. They stand up and say, 'We are going to return money to you in your power prices,' but at the same time they say, 'But we're going to take it out again as an even larger amount because we're going to take away from you universal health care, we're going to charge you co-payments, we're going to deregulate universities, we're going to have the HELP loans increase in cost and we're going to have insurance premiums go through the roof.' These are the kinds of costs that will happen.

People are going to recognise they are being incredibly short-changed and they are going to get especially angry when they discover that in fact the overwhelming drivers of increased power prices have been the poles and the wires and the complete failure of the national electricity market. What we have seen is disgraceful behaviour in the electricity market, with state governments in particular benefiting from more energy being transferred over massive networks. The result has been that communities have to pay for infrastructure they do not need because demand has fallen and renewable energy is coming on. We did not need this infrastructure that they have spent billions on, and now they are increasing power prices in order to pay for it.

Communities are going to come to realise all of this and they will get pretty upset. I asked the minister today about his response to extreme weather events, and I can tell the Senate that since this government has been in office it has changed the information on the Department of the Environment's website. It used to say that the intensity of extreme weather events was linked to climate change. Since the change of government, that has now gone. It has changed that; it has delinked it. There is now no reference to extreme and intense weather and intensity of weather events and climate change. It is as if we are living in a parallel universe from the real world that we actually inhabit.

As the old proverb says: time and tide wait for no man. It is true: time and tide are not going to wait for the coalition to catch up to the realities of global warming. It is happening now; we are living it now. This coming summer around Australia, and who knows where else, people are going to suffer from the extremes. They are going to suffer from more fires because we are going to have more hot days and more fire danger days. We are going to see areas that have dried out, and they are going to be subject to those fires. We are going to see people die in heatwaves; we have seen that already and we are going to see more of it. We are going to see intense cyclones. We are going to see all of the floods that we have seen before, and they are going to come more frequently, but we are not going to be in a position to rebuild that infrastructure.

And who is going to foot the bill when that happens? Do you think that we are going to listen to a Prime Minister who says: 'Yes, you lost your entire infrastructure in this town and you can all pay for it, but, hey, I gave you $100 back on your power bill. You should be grateful.' I do not think so. People are actually changing their minds on this. People are now saying they want Australia to take a leadership role. They are saying that they want serious action on global warming. They are embarrassed that Australia is not doing what it needs to do in the international community, in a global context. We are going into September with Ban Ki Moon's summit and into November and the G20. Then there are the Lima talks for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December. We will roll into 2015, the year that a global treaty is meant to be negotiated. How do you think Australians are going to feel when our Prime Minister will not even turn up to Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki Moon's summit; that we sent officials to the climate talks last year; that we are trying to stop climate change being on the agenda of G20; and that we have already tried to stop Commonwealth heads of government from putting money into climate packages for the developing countries? Now we are going to Lima at the end of the year and will no doubt reject putting money into trying to help the small island states like Kiribati, which I mentioned today, adapt to climate change.

What is going on in this parliament is shocking. When I think about it I think: this is the first time in human history when one generation will impact what life is like for every single generation that comes after it. What sort of a responsibility is that? We have had it before in relation to individual regions or individual cultures. We have lost cultures before—we lost the Fertile Crescent, we have lost cultures in South America—but we have never lost on a planetary scale, and that is what we are doing. Can you imagine how future generations are going to look back and think that more than one-third of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2050—by 2050—because of global warming? That is what the prediction is, and we are already seeing it. Koalas are going locally extinct in Western Queensland. We have seen it with the white lemuroid possum in North Queensland. It will possibly be the first Australian animal to go extinct because of global warming—if indeed that is allowed to happen. But we are also seeing it all over the planet. There are species of plants and animals heading for extinction. Emperor penguins are set to be one-third of their number by 2050. We have polar bears drowning because they cannot get between the ice flows. We are seeing it everywhere, and we are going to end up with a genetically poor group of animals stuck in zoos around the world. That is the best we are going to be able to offer future generations, who are going to look back and say, 'How bad was that?'

And I know that, because in Tasmania we lost the thylacine. People now look back and say, 'How on earth did we let that happen?' People could have excused that then because people did not know any better. People did not know the extent of the thylacine's trouble; they did not understand what would actually happen. But we do know that now; we know it absolutely right now. And yet it seems we are, as a parliament, set to allow it to happen because Australia will not take its fair share of responsibility for constraining global warming to less than two degrees. It is as simple as that. It is an issue of intergenerational justice and of intergenerational equity. It is stealing from the future to repeal the clean energy package and leave Australia without a climate strategy to reduce emissions.

Five per cent is a joke. We have to get to 40 to 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 and zero net carbon by 2050. That is the extent of the challenge. To do that you are so much better off starting early. We have already missed the early years, but we need to do it in a steady way rather than leave it to the point where you have massive dislocation. That is why economists are out today with their open letter, saying that the economy requires certainty for climate policy—innovation, research, investment, and new jobs need that certainty. That has been backed up tonight in the United Kingdom, where the latest research there says that climate action, far from damaging the economy, actually sets them up well. We recognise that President Obama, China, UK and Europe are all entering into bilateral deals on climate finance, on green finance, on green investment and on green technology and that Australia will be bypassed. The revolution has occurred. Clean energy is happening. The world is moving. But the opportunity cost will be huge if Australia ties itself to the old fossil fuel past. And that is what is happening.

If you vote to lose the clean energy package you are voting for the old fossil fuel economy and to return massive profits to the coal fired generators, to the big polluters and to the coalminers. You are actually saying that you think the community should pay for the externalities of those activities rather than the people who caused the problem in the first place. You are shifting responsibility. That is wrong. It is wrong for coal billionaires to be benefiting from abandoning carbon pricing, because it is our children and every other generation henceforth who will pay. That is why people will be observing this debate. It is a tragedy that we have empty seats everywhere in this chamber. But I can tell you that in years to come people will look back at who was responsible for this and will ask the question: why did they do it when they knew? They cannot pretend they did not know. They absolutely went into it with their eyes open and that is what they voted for. But I do think that this Senate deserves an explanation as to why there has been a change of heart in the last few hours from the Palmer United Party.