David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Resources and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

In speaking to the motion, I want to briefly look at where we are at with respect to both Kyoto and the long-term evolution of greenhouse gas caps and a carbon trading scheme. The 108 per cent of 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2008-12 was of course established by the Hon. Senator Robert Hill after much negotiation at Kyoto. I am very proud to say that he was an outstanding minister for the environment and did a wonderful job. Indeed, I note that the government has not said that there is anything wrong with that target for emissions levels. We are tracking to meet this target and have been for some time now.

I note that on page No. 4 of the prime ministerial statement it states:

Under the previous government’s policies, the projections showed that Australia would be around 6 million tonnes off our target.

There is no doubt that this Prime Minister is more preoccupied with spin and the scoring of political points than he ever is with the substance of this very, very important subject. He cannot leave it alone. His government has the huge responsibility of delivering us compliance not just with Kyoto but with a scheme that will see us into the future for two or three generations. When I see the tacky and quite reprehensible political points being taken it makes me wonder whether there is any credibility in what this government is going to do with respect to this very important issue.

As I have said, we are tracking towards meeting this target, with emissions in 2005 being only 2.2 per cent above the 1990 level. In 1990, emissions of CO or equivalent gases were 550 million tonnes. In both 2004 and 2005 they were 560 million tonnes. We are doing better than almost all developed countries in meeting our international targets. Unlike many countries, we are meeting our goals on the basis of national actions alone. In light of this achievement, the Labor Party should explain why—and this is a very important point—it has been silent about countries such as New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Spain and others who are failing to meet their targets. It is all very well for us to be shackled and compliant and to do the right thing. But let me say this: there is only one atmosphere on this planet. We are battling away doing what we should be doing and shouldering the moral burden, yet these other countries are not complying with what they promised to do and our government is now silent in that regard. I note the Prime Minister for New Zealand was here the other day. Did the Australian Prime Minister mention this to her? Was it a topic of conversation or are we just, in a blase fashion, muddling along saying, ‘Well, that’s all right; we won’t worry about that’?

I want to make the point that, whilst those other countries are failing to meet their targets, they have been attacking Australia for not ratifying Kyoto. Yet here we were complying with what our obligations were stated to be—and they take time to criticise us. All this time the Australian government, as it now is, is quiet and docile. That is why the global response to climate change must involve, firstly, all major emitters of greenhouse gases. This government really needs to shoulder the burden, particularly with respect to India and China. I make this point. I asked the minister in estimates: in 2012, if India and China refuse to take on equitable controls and emission targets, what will Australia do? I got obfuscation and dithering and I got ‘I’ll tell you when I get there’ answers. This is simply not good enough.

Our response to climate change must involve the avoidance of distortions of economic activities and emissions with no environmental benefits. The fact is that, if China and India do not provide emissions targets that are fair and equitable and responsible—and, heaven knows, those of us who have been to Beijing know that they have a huge problem, a public health problem—then we will be exporting manufacturing jobs offshore. That is the simple answer. We will be putting Australians out of work. We should also recognise the different national circumstances. I think it is very important that we recognise that China needs to come to the party on this. But we also need to shoulder responsibility, as the Howard government did, to assist China with respect to a whole host of technologies, technological advances and technological exchange, particularly in the area of coal and gas.

In Bali we endorsed the Bali roadmap for a post-Kyoto agreement well before the new government, which was then the opposition. We did so based on five principles. Firstly, there was the inclusion of developing world countries, especially China, India, Indonesia and Brazil, in future greenhouse reduction commitment regimes. That is fundamental to where the opposition stands on this. I think that is a very proper and responsible clause. We said that there should be no binding developed-world targets in the 2007 document. We said there should be no specific target for Australia in the 2007 roadmap, even if only indicative. We said that the ability to do the economic modelling before Australia even considers any possible future commitments was a very important priority. We also said there should be the inclusion of incentives against developing world deforestation and incentives for developing world reafforestation. That is a very important point that the government has been absolutely silent upon. That is where the opposition stands with respect to this. It is a dynamic, precise, targeted approach to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions on a global basis.

I pause to note that, according to the prime ministerial statement, the initial report outlines the way the Rudd government is now measuring and using calculations to ascertain emission levels. This is a first here. We had 90 days to respond to the ratification of Kyoto at Bali, and the initial report outlines the measures we are using to calculate our emission levels. That is a very interesting statement. We took 92 people to Bali. We took a veritable army of people to Bali for two weeks. I asked the question in estimates—and this was a question to the ministry of climate change: did we seek to measure the carbon footprint of taking 92 people to Bali, including airfares, accommodation, food and all of the things that were used by our 92 people? It was obviously probably one of the biggest delegations outside of the Indonesians. The government said, ‘No.’ It is all very well for them, as a government, to talk about carbon footprints at the moment. This is what the Rudd government does very well: it talks about the obligation and the feelgood. But, in the practical analysis of what we are asking business and the mothers and fathers in our nation to do into the future, the government does not do it. The government flies 92 people to Bali and does not bother about the carbon footprint of that.

Against this background, there is a desperate need for a much more inclusive post-2012 agreement demonstrated by the addition of 800 new coal-fired power stations in China and India over the coming five years. That is a huge responsibility. There is an enormous amount of consternation out there that, unless we engage China and India properly, 800 new coal-fired power stations in the coming five years will defeat anything we do in Australia, given that we emit something less than one per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

Now let us get this into context. We emit something less than one per cent, and 800 new coal-fired power stations are going to be constructed in China and India in the coming five years. That sets the standard and heightens the huge responsibility upon the Rudd government to do more than just make nice ministerial statements about ratifying things that mean very little in practical terms. We have this huge challenge wherein domestic users of electricity are probably going to see their power bills quadruple or more in the next five years while electricity generators deal with emissions controls without compensation. (Time expired)

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

I want to look at the report Tracking to the Kyoto target 2007, which was tabled here this afternoon. It is a report on Australia’s greenhouse emission trends from 1990 to the Kyoto test period of 2008-12 and then onwards to 2020. The section on land use, land-use change and forestry starts on page 13. Then there is the section on forestry itself on page 14, and it says in the third sentence:

Under Kyoto accounting rules, no forestry sinks are included in the 1990 baseline and only afforestation and reforestation that occurred since 1 January 1990 on land not previously forested is credited.

I draw the attention of the Senate to what that sentence means because here we have an absolute deceit in the accounting procedures which were used by the Howard government and have now been adopted by the Rudd government in assessing the impact of the logging activities of the forest industries from Australia on the pollution of the global atmosphere.

Let me go back to the sentence. It says ‘no forestry sinks’. Forestry sinks are actual forests. Like a sink holds water so forests hold carbon. Trees are largely columns of carbon and water. So when the term ‘forestry sinks’ is used here it means forests, and I particularly refer to native forests and the logging industry. So the sentence really reads: ‘No native forests are included in the 1990 baseline and only afforestation and reforestation that occurred since then on land previously not forested is credited.’ In other words, the only thing this report looks at is land that had no trees on it where plantations have been put and are growing and absorbing carbon. But the thousands of hectares of forest in Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania which were growing in 1990 but have since been logged and burned are not taken account of at all. That is because, as this report makes clear in this hidden sentence, forest logging that takes place on land with forests on it previously is not credited. There is no account taken of this.

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett; the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong; the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd; and indeed the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke, are all well aware of this sleight of hand. And it is not going to be acceptable to the Australian people as it becomes better known.

Then we come to the proposed Gunns pulp mill, on which a decision on finance will be made this month, according to the company as recorded in the Mercury of Hobart this week. A final decision will be made in June. Gunns hope for a go-ahead in July. This vast pulp mill will entail the logging of 200,000 hectares—that is 200,000 football fields—of Tasmanian native forest in the coming 20 years and it is not accounted for and is not going to be accounted for under these rules. The ministers might say, ‘That’s how it was written in Kyoto in 1997.’ One of the reasons for that is that Australia lobbied very strongly to have this sleight of hand. But I doubt it will be acceptable into the future. Certainly it is hypocritical for governments, including the Rudd government, to say that we are motivated to protect the global atmosphere when we do our best to prevent logging—and they are talking about Indonesia and Papua New Guinea—when at the same time the government have now allocated more than $100 million in infrastructure to help Gunns build its pulp mill. That is money coming out of taxpayers’ pockets which is going to lead to the logging of vast areas of native forest and the pollution of the global atmosphere with greenhouse gases coming out of those forests. And yet no account will be taken of it.

This is a dishonest process and it is a sleight of hand officially endorsed because of the power of the logging industry over the Labor Party—and, indeed, over the coalition before that—which is simply not going to stand. When the public gets to understand that the logging of forests in this country is not accounted for when the government says it is on track to meet the Kyoto target—it is totally dismissed, but the same accountants employed by the government are counting plantations planted on areas where there was no previous forest—the public is going to become, rightly, annoyed. This is a dishonest process and it is cheating on the global account, which we must know is an honest process if we are going to take that leadership role that the Prime Minister espouses in this age of dangerous climate change.

We are about to get into the regeneration burn period in Tasmania and Victoria. That means that, in the coming autumn months, thousands of hectares of these grand forests—which were logged last year, with the logs taken out and primarily sent to Japan as woodchips—will have incendiaries, napalm-like materials, dropped on them to create a firestorm to burn every remaining stick, branch and fern and, goodness knows, the remains of any wildlife, which is eradicated completely from these logging areas. The carbon and other greenhouse gases from this process—which includes the burning of peat and the soil underneath, which holds 50 per cent of the forest carbon—will go into our global commons, into the atmosphere. When you look at these massive burns, you see a huge column of smoke going up after the firestorm has been deliberately created by the loggers under the imprimatur of Prime Minister Rudd and several state premiers, including Labor Premier Lennon in Tasmania. So intense is the carrying of the smoke and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that with it goes the heat. On top, a thundercloud forms, and you get this extraordinary event whereby a Hiroshima-like cloud appears over the destroyed forest on a clear day.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

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

Opposite we have got Senator Ian Macdonald, the former coalition minister for forests, laughing. He thinks that is funny. There are massive tonnages of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, where they will stay for decades, if not centuries, and it is not accounted for—and what I get is laughter from the coalition benches. It shows the appalling ignorance of people who should know better regarding the real tragedy of the failure of human communities to deal with catastrophic climate change, which scientists now warn is coming to us in this century. We are already seeing the initial symptoms of that with the melting of the Antarctic ice, the loss of our own ski fields and the record heat that is being experienced around Australia right now. It is a laughing matter for the opposition, but it should be a serious matter for this government to redress.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The dishonesty and hypocrisy of the Greens’ argument knows no bounds and it causes me to explode in laughter when I hear about the burns of the residue in Tasmania having a Hiroshima-like, mushroom cloud above it. One thing I will give Senator Brown is that he has a very expressive way of putting his argument—a way that has confused and fooled so many Australians over a long period of time. It is a totally dishonest argument, I have to say. If the Greens were at all interested in climate change, they would be doing something about the massive land clearing in Indonesia, the Solomons and the Amazon delta, about which they do nothing. They would be leaving alone the world’s most well-managed, most sustainably managed forest in Australia. Rather than using well-managed Australian timber, they would much prefer you to use illegally sourced, clear-felled timber from the rainforests of the Solomons, Indonesia and the Amazon basin. Never do they argue about that. They are always attacking a magnificent industry in Australia that is so sustainable, creates so many jobs and so much wealth and, in fact, creates carbon sinks for greenhouse gas emissions.

I did not want to spend my 10 minutes speaking about the Greens but, as always, Senator Brown, because of the dishonesty of his arguments, gets a reaction from me. I just hope that one day the Australian public will realise how it has been fooled by the ramblings and ravings of the Greens political party over many, many years. Fortunately, in recent elections the good people of Tasmania, and indeed federally, have not voted for the Greens. In fact, the Greens got the worst result that one could ever imagine at the last federal election. The result was far worse than ours, and ours was pretty terrible. Eight of the ‘Left Left’ senators—four Democrats and four Greens—are retiring and they will be replaced by just five Greens. The Greens political party has done enormously badly and I am delighted that the people of Tasmania are waking up to them at last. Perhaps it is too little, too late.

What I want to concentrate on today is the ministerial statement. As I interjected during Senator Wong’s answer in question time: when are the cyclones up my way going to stop; when is the drought going to stop? We have signed the Kyoto protocol now and everything should be fine! It is pointless for Australia to go through these symbolic exercises unless you can get the big emitters, as Senator Johnston pointed out, to the table. You could shut Australia down. Of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, 1.4 per cent come from Australia. I asked the experts at estimates committees—and they are getting back to me with a more precise answer—and they indicated to me that, if you shut Australia down and did absolutely nothing in Australia, it would not make one iota of difference to the changing climate of the globe. If we are going to make these symbolic approaches and, at the same time, shut down the Bowen coalfields, affecting all of the working families of Australia who rely on the Bowen coalfields for their living, and shut down the manufacturing plants that the working families of Australia use to earn their bread and butter, then we are going to be in a terrible position if we are the only ones doing it.

We always acknowledged in government that Australia had to show leadership, and we did show leadership. At the APEC summit in Sydney just last year, Australia succeeded in getting the United States, China, India, Russia and the other big emitters to the table—the very first step. Signing the Kyoto agreement will do nothing towards solving the world’s changing climate; getting the big emitters to the table and getting them thinking about it will. None of the symbolism that the new government have gone through, none of the pretty books that they are printing and tabling and none of the rhetoric that a fawning Australian media has given to Senator Wong—attention, I might say, that was not shared by any other media throughout the world attending the Bali conference, but then that is the way it goes—will make any difference to the world’s changing climate. It seems quite base to me that this government is talking about putting working Australian families in a really difficult economic situation over the next 20 years, and it will not make one iota of difference to the changing climate.

We have to get China, Russia, the United States, India and the developing countries to stop or severely rein in their greenhouse gas emissions. Then, and only then, will we as a global community be able to really start making some inroads into the greenhouse gas emissions which do change the world’s climate. I will continue to ask the Minister for Climate Change and Water what difference all of these initiatives that are being floated for the Australian people will have on the changing climate of the world. I keep emphasising that. It is not about Australia feeling good and it is not about some journalists around Australia getting on the bandwagon and saying, ‘This is pretty good stuff; we all feel warm and fuzzy about this.’ I want to know what impact it will have on the changing of the world’s climate, and we have to look at it from that point of view. You are not going to stop cyclones in the north and you are not going to stop droughts in the Murray-Darling Basin or anywhere else in Australia simply by signing a bit of paper and reducing Australia’s 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by a figure. You have to get the big emitters there.

I would like this government to forget the rhetoric, to forget the glossy brochures, to forget the huge media machine trying to convince people that we are doing marvellous things for climate change and to get real on the subject of those who are causing this. I was frightened to hear Senator Johnston’s comments about—what was it?—500 coal fired power stations opening up in China in the next few years. Imagine what that would do, but do you hear Senator Bob Brown or any of the Greens political party talking about these sorts of things? No, no. It is all to attack the Australian sustainable forest industry. Do not worry about India, about Japan or about China—they do worry about America, because they will take on any chance to attack the United States; you never hear that from the Greens political party.

I urge the new government to continue what we started in government and progress the sorts of initiatives we started at APEC in Sydney last year. You do not need a Bali climate change conference. You do not need Kyoto to do that, because the big emitters are not part of the Kyoto protocol. They have not signed up. A couple of them have signed up, but they do not have any targets or restrictions. It is pretty easy to agree when it does not cost you anything. You have to get those big emitters to make a real contribution, and then Australia should make the same sort of sacrifice. I am not for a moment saying we should not position ourselves and take a leadership role—we must take a leadership role and position ourselves—but talking about shutting down Australia’s industry and the coal fields that support so many working-class Australians, and working families that Mr Rudd is so keen on, without any change whatsoever to the changing world climate is, in my view, a futile exercise. Until you get the big emitters to reduce, there is nothing Australia can do. We have to continue to show the leadership Australia has shown over the last several years, and I encourage the new government to do that, but do not destroy the Australian economy for a pointless exercise until such time as the big emitters are making the same sorts of reductions and as those big emitters reduce their output to a point where it will have a real impact on the globe’s changing climate.

Question agreed to.