Shadow Minister for Environment
Climate Change and Water
Date: 26 June 2014
Mr BUTLER (Port Adelaide) (09:17):
I am happy to rise to speak on the package of bills that are before the
parliament, which are presented by the government as bills to abolish
the carbon tax. The bills do do that—consistent with the position taken
to the election by the Labor Party as well—but the bills do much, much
more than that. If passed by the parliament the bills will also abolish
any chance of Australia having a formal legal cap on carbon pollution
and any chance to move to an emissions trading scheme, which I will
address in some detail.
The bills also abolish the Climate Change
Authority—an independent, strong voice set up to advise the parliament,
the government and, perhaps most importantly, the Australian community
about the very difficult and highly contested issues associated with
climate change. This continues an emerging theme with this government to
abolish strong, independent voices and make sure that all advice to the
Australian community and all advice to the parliament is filtered
through ministerial offices or, more often, the Prime Minister's office.
The bills also abolish tax cuts, or changes to the
tax free threshold established for the future, completely contrary to a
promise made by the Prime Minister to keep the household assistance
package put in place by Labor in full. And, as the House knows, the
bills also seek to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
These bills represent the culmination of the most
hysterical and mendacious campaign in modern Australian political
history. It is a campaign that rests on 10 whopping falsehoods about
climate change that have been peddled across this country by the Prime
Minister and his fellow travellers. In the time I have to deal with
these bills I want to deal with those 10 whoppers.
Whopper No. 1 is that the jury is still out on the
science of climate change. That is a whopper peddled by the Prime
Minister right across this land over the last four years. As we know,
the Prime Minister famously described the science of climate change as
'absolute crap'. He only said that once; his usual formula is that the
science—he calls it the 'so-called science'—is not yet settled. The
member for Dawson, I read recently, said that this view represents the
view of many in the coalition party room. Many in the coalition party
room simply do not accept the science of climate change. To use the
language of the member for Dawson, and many on the other side of the
parliament, they do not 'believe in climate change', as if this were a
question of faith rather than a question of science.
This is not a new perspective from those opposite.
After his defenestration from the leadership of the Liberal Party, the
member for Wentworth famously wrote, in a Fairfax newspaper, about the
now Prime Minister's attitude to climate change but also the attitude of
the majority of the coalition party room. In that article, the member
for Wentworth reflected on the views of Nick Minchin. Nick Minchin is
the man who collected the numbers to do over the Liberal Party's policy
on emissions trading that had been taken to the election in 2007 by then
Prime Minister John Howard. He dangled those numbers in front of any
candidate for the leadership willing to go with his views.
The now Treasurer, apparently, to his credit
resisted that temptation and stuck to his then principles of supporting
an emissions trading scheme—unfortunately he has since discarded those
principles—but the member for Warringah, now the Prime Minister, happily
took the temptation. The member for Wentworth wrote in the Fairfax
papers, immediately after that, that it was Nick Minchin's view,
expressed to all of the candidates, that the majority of the coalition
party room simply did not believe—again using the language of faith
rather than science—in 'human induced global warming', to use the term
of the member for Wentworth.
It is simply misleading to say that the science on
this question is not settled. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change issued its latest report—its fifth report—in September last year,
and in that the 209 lead authors, supported by more than 600
contributing authors, lifted their level of certainty about the
existence of climate change and its cause by human activity to 95 per
cent. The member for Dawson complains that that is not 100 per cent. If,
in coming to this place, the check-in staff at the Adelaide airport had
said that you have a 95 per cent chance of making it from Adelaide to
Canberra on your flight, then I might have declined to get onto the
aeroplane. But, in scientific terms, 95 per cent certainty is seen as a
gold standard. It is equivalent to the level of certainty that relevant
scientists ascribe to the link between tobacco and lung cancer. Even at
its highest, if it is only a 95 per cent risk—and the member for Dawson
is right to complain that it is not a 100 per cent risk—what sensible
person or member of parliament would not take reasonable action to hedge
against a 95 per cent risk, which scientists have been telling us for
years, if found out, would have such significant and serious
consequences.
Morris Newman, the Prime Minister's senior business adviser, tells us in regular op-eds in The Australian newspaper that
the IPCC—those several hundred leading climate scientists who authored
the fifth report—are a fringe group that do not represent the mainstream
of scientific opinion. He is simply not right about that either. This
is a view that the Prime Minister has peddled as well. That hotbed of
left-wing conspiracy, NASA, told us last year that some 97 per cent of
climate scientists who regularly publish in this area agree with the
IPCC—97 per cent agree that the climate is changing because of human
activity. Our own institutions, such as the Bureau of Meteorology and
the CSIRO—very widely respected institutions—have expressed the same
view on many occasions.
Whopper number two that is peddled by the Prime
Minister is that, if there was any global warming over the course of the
20th century, it has stopped. There is nothing to worry about here, it
has stopped. Even the Prime Minister has once said that the world has
actually slightly cooled since the 1990's, so if there was anything to
worry about, do not worry anymore. This is something, again, peddled by
Morris Newman—the PM's leading business adviser—who wrote earlier this
week in The Australian newspaper that it is actually since September 1996 that the warming has stopped. Again, that is just not true.
The World Meteorological Organization told us only
some months ago that the decade of the 2000's was warmer than the
1990's, which was again warmer than the decade before it, and so it goes
on as you go decade by decade back into history. NASA, over the course
of the southern summer, told us that the 20 hottest years in the world
on record are all since 1990 and that 13 of the 14 hottest years on
record are all since 2000. The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have
said time and time again exactly the same thing—that global warming
continues to impact the world and continues to impact the world's
oceans. In their latest State of the Climate report, the Bureau of
Meteorology and the CSIRO remind us that calendar 2013 was the hottest
year ever in Australia, in spite of not being an el Nino year, which
will usually see the hottest temperatures in Australia. In spite of not
being an el Nino year, 2013 was the hottest calendar year ever in
Australia, and there were 28 days in that calendar year that were among
the 1 per cent hottest days ever in Australia—28 of them out of 365.
That is the same number of days to get into that top 1 per cent band in
temperature for the whole 30 years between 1910 and 1940. The world is
continuing to get warmer.
Whopper number three by this Prime Minister and his
fellow travellers is that the Prime Minister consistently refuses to
acknowledge any link between climate change and an increase in the
frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as droughts,
heatwaves, fires, storms and more. There are countless examples of the
Prime Minister talking about this lack of any evidence or of any link
between these things, but perhaps the most unseemly example of it was
the slinging match into which the Prime Minister entered with the senior
official in climate change from the United Nations about the Blue
Mountains bushfires which afflicted so many communities in New South
Wales last year. The Prime Minister said that there was no evidence of
any link between extreme weather events and climate change, and I have
said—as many others on our side have said—of course you cannot draw a
link between climate change and any single event. But that is not what
the Prime Minister said. The Prime Minister said that you cannot draw a
link between climate change and an increase in extreme weather events
generally, and that is what conflicts with very clear scientific
evidence.
I remember the minister resorted to some advice
from Wikipedia—I am sure he remembers this as well—to point out that
Australia has had bushfires for as long as records go back and as long
as our Indigenous memory goes back, and we all know that to be the case.
That is not the question. The question is whether there is an increase
in risk, whether there is an increase in the frequency and the severity
of this type of extreme weather event, and you do not need to go to
Wikipedia to find out about this. You can go to our own advice from the
Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. You can go to the ministers own
Country Fire Authority from Victoria that talks about an increase in
risk, severity and frequency of bushfires associated with climate
change. The minister could have gone to his own departmental website,
which talks about a quite clearly established increase in risk of this
type of extreme weather event. You could have gone to the Climate
Commission's report before the government abolished it.
The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, again in
their latest State of the Climate report published earlier this year,
tracked the forest fire danger index—an index which has been tracked for
many years here in Australia—and very clearly found that the risk of
forest fires since 1970 has risen markedly associated with climate
change. It is up by 50 per cent in the area around Melbourne Airport.
The Bureau of Meteorology provides similar advice about the risk
associated with climate change with Australia experiencing more frequent
and more severe heatwaves. All of this advice is quite clear—another
whopper from the Prime Minister.
Whopper number four from this Prime Minister and
his fellow travellers is that world leaders need not trouble themselves
with this issue; that they should focus on the important things like
economics and security. They should leave these things to environment
ministers, because it is not an economic issue; it is simply a fringe
environmental issue. Well, shortly before the Prime Minister's visit to
the United States, President Obama said that this is 'one of the most
significant, if not the most significant, long-term challenges that the
United States and the planet faces'. The Tory Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom, David Cameron, said climate changes is 'one of the most
serious threats the United Kingdom and the world face'. Asked about
this, our Prime Minister simply said, 'I don't think so.'
Blocking this from the G20 agenda has been a
consistent position that the Prime Minister has taken in his position as
chair—again, as if this is not a matter for world leaders but simply a
matter that the Minister for Environment and his colleagues around the
world should deal with, a fringe issue. Well, that is not the view taken
by the rest of the world. In March, the United States and the European
Union, together responsible for about half of the world's nominal GDP,
signed a joint statement saying that 'sustainable economic growth will
only be possible if we tackle climate change. This is a central economic
challenge for the world's future'. In February, just a few weeks before
that statement, the Premier of China, Li Keqiang, and the US Secretary
of State, John Kerry, signed an expansive memorandum of understanding
about the view of those two nations—the two largest economies in the
world, the two largest emitters of carbon pollution in the world—that
recognised 'the urgent need for action' leading in particular to 2015.
This month Premier Li of China and UK Prime Minister David Cameron
signed a joint statement recognising that 'climate change is one of the
greatest global challenges that we face'.
And it is not just an economic challenge. President
Obama has talked about the quadrennial US force posture review
conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff there. In particular, he remarked
on the fact that the Joint Chiefs had identified climate change as one
of America's greatest threats to national security. Of course, why
should any of that concern the members of the G20? We will just leave it
to the environment ministers!
Wopper No. 5 by our Prime Minister and his fellow
travellers was enunciated in his famous trip to Canada. There the Prime
Minister said, 'There is no sign that trading schemes are increasingly
being adopted'—carbon trading schemes. 'If anything, trading schemes are
being discarded, not adopted.' Again, that is not right. The only
nation that is seeking to discard a carbon trading scheme is this one,
under this government. It is simply not right to say that others are
doing it. I will talk a little more in my remarks about the position of
China. But South Korea, our third largest export partner, introduced a
few weeks ago a tax of about $20 a tonne on thermal coal imports. South
Korea is our third largest market for thermal coal. They are introducing
a very broad emissions trading scheme on 1 January 2015. This adds to
the long list of emissions trading schemes in place among many of our
oldest trading partners—the United Kingdom, Germany, France and many
others—and also many states and provinces in North America.
After the warm embrace of the Canadian Prime
Minister, who shares the Australian Prime Minister's views on this
matter, we know that the Australian Prime Minister let it be known to
Australian journalists that he was going to set about building a
'coalition of the unwilling' who would fight the Americans, the Chinese,
the Europeans and the Koreans—all of those other leaders who were
intent upon taking real action on climate change. He said he would build
that coalition in partnership with the Canadian Prime Minister and he
even named the other members of the coalition—the New Zealand Prime
Minister and the United Kingdom Prime Minister. But the problem was that
he did not actually consult with those other members of this so-called
coalition of the unwilling. And we know what then happened: to the great
embarrassment of the Australian Prime Minister, the New Zealand Prime
Minister was forced to say at a press conference some hours later that
he was caught completely unaware by the Australian Prime Minister's
announcement about his apparent membership of this coalition of the
unwilling. And he restated New Zealand's commitment to taking strong
action domestically on climate change but also to being a responsible,
constructive part of international progress. And I have stated a number
of times the position of the UK Prime Minister. Suffice it to say that
the UK government came out very quickly to confirm that they had no
intention of being a part of the Australian Prime Minister's coalition
of the unwilling.
Wopper no. 6 that the Prime Minister and, frankly,
also the environment minister have repeated time and time again over the
last several years is that China will never take a serious action on
climate change and certainly would never introduce carbon trading.
Mr Hunt: No, that's not what we've said.
Mr BUTLER:
Perhaps the environment minister has not gone to the extent of saying
China would never introduce carbon trading but certainly the Prime
Minister has; this has been repeated by him and many others. I will
concede that that is an important point because China has quickly become
the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the largest polluter in terms of
carbon dioxide pollution. Despite the fact that China still only emits
about a quarter of the carbon pollution per head of population that
Australia does, in aggregate terms, being a very large country, it is
now by far the biggest carbon dioxide polluter. It has been responsible
for about two-thirds of all the growth in carbon pollution that has
occurred since 2000. So I will concede that the Prime Minister is right
to be focused on what is happening in China because it is such a
significant part of what is, after all, a global problem. But again he
is just wrong. Maybe it was a reasonable position to take a few years
ago, but he should admit now that he has been wrong and China has
changed. Anyone who takes an interest in this area of policy will have
noticed an extraordinarily significant change in policy from the Chinese
leadership in the last 18 months, particularly because of the awful air
quality in the northern part of that country.
I have talked about a number of the bilateral
agreements, statements and memoranda of understanding that at a
leadership level, particularly with Premier Li Keqiang, China has
engaged in with the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United
States. These are incredibly important statements of intent by China not
just to do a whole lot of things domestically—which they are doing—but
also, following the disappointment of Copenhagen, to be a leader, along
with the United States, as one of the two largest economies and powers
in the world leading into the very important conference that will take
place in Paris next year.
Last week the seventh emissions trading scheme
started in China—some of them are at the provincial level, for example,
in Guangdong, and some of them are starting up at the city level, for
example in Shenzhen—with the expectation that the Chinese leadership
will try to move to a national carbon trading scheme in the second half
of this decade.
The Minister for the Environment often says that
these permits are given away for free. Such may be the case in some of
the different markets, but what is clear is that in all of those six
markets that have been operating for a while there is now a burgeoning
carbon trading market. If you look at Shenzhen, for example, which I
think was the first emissions trading scheme introduced in China, a
permit was trading last week—and I have not looked at this week's
price—at the equivalent of about 8.5 euros, so higher than the price at
which the permits would trade, on Treasury advice, under Labor's
emissions trading scheme with a linkage to the EU scheme, higher than
the price at which permits would trade under the amendments that I will
be moving later in this debate.
Whopper No. 7 is that the carbon price mechanism,
the framework that the government seeks to demolish entirely, would be a
wrecking ball through the Australian economy. The Prime Minister used a
whole range of different colourful epithets for this. He said it would
be a cobra strike at the economy. He said that the South Australian town
of Whyalla would simply disappear off the map. I think he made the same
prediction about Gladstone and some other parts of Australia as well.
Again, the truth is entirely different. The truth of the impact was
exactly as Labor predicted. The economy did keep growing. More than
160,000 additional jobs were created in the first 12 months of this
carbon price mechanism that, according to the now Prime Minister, was
going to have a wrecking ball impact on the national economy.
Also what it started to do, along with our
renewable energy policies, is drive down carbon pollution, particularly
in the electricity market, which is the largest source of carbon
pollution in Australia. We saw a reduction in carbon pollution of around
seven per cent in the National Electricity Market in the first 12
months and, as we predicted, there was simply a modest impact on prices.
That impact was more than covered through our household assistance
package, particular for low-income and fixed-income households, like
pensioners, and for middle-income households. The impact on power prices
again was exactly as we predicted and again was covered by our
household assistance package, particularly for low- and middle-income
households.
Taking my own state of South Australia for example,
power prices went up by about 4.6 per cent as a result of the
introduction of a carbon tax. If our amendments are passed to move to an
emissions trading scheme, Treasury's advice to us in government is that
that impact would be reduced by about three-quarters. So the ETS impact
on South Australian power bills would be in the order of 1.1 per cent
and that is way more than covered by the household assistance package.
To put that into context we should compare it to the increase over the
last four years in SA power bills of 43 per cent because of investment
in poles and wires—the network investment that has bedevilled
electricity systems all around the country. That very significant gold
plating of network infrastructure has led to very significant increases
in power prices, which again the Prime Minister mendaciously tried to
attach to the carbon price on many occasions.
Whopper No. 8 was the Prime Minister's statement to
Alan Jones earlier this year that the renewable energy targets 'are
significantly driving up power prices right now'. Again, that is simply
wrong. Report after report released recently has put the untruth—I was
going to use some other word—to that statement. The renewable energy
policies that the Labor Party put in place over the last several years
have been an unambiguous success. They have seen renewable energy
capacity expand significantly. Wind power tripled under our time in
government. When we came to government we saw the number of households
that had PV solar panels go from 7,500 to more than 1.1 million
households. They are getting out of the power bill race, getting out of
the power bill trap, creating their own power and relieving enormous
pressure on the grid, particularly in those parts of Australia that are
impacted by heatwaves.
We saw the tripling of the number of jobs in the
renewable energy sector. We saw billions of dollars come into this
sector in investment to the point where by the middle of last year
Australia was rated, along with the powerhouses in this area—China,
Germany and the US—as one of the four most attractive places in the
world to invest in renewable energy. It is no surprise that, since the
election of the new government, Australia has slipped in that index a
couple of places every quarter. I think it is now about eighth in the
world when it was fourth.
This has been an extraordinary success. As every
renewable energy program in the world does—and there are dozens and
dozens—it does have modest up-front costs but it also has swings and
roundabouts benefits in the sense that it is suppressing wholesale power
prices, particularly at the peak times for power during heatwaves when
power might be sold for thousands of dollars, particularly in the
south-east of Australia. Those prices have diminished by as much as 90
per cent in those peak times and that flows through to consumers.
I mentioned some reports that have been clear about
this. The ROAM Consulting report that was released I think a month or
two ago, the Bloomberg New Energy Finance report that was released a few
weeks after that and even ACIL Allen's report, the consultancy engaged
by the government as part of its renewable energy target review, have
confirmed that prices will go up if the renewable energy target is
removed because that suppression effect on wholesale power prices will
be removed and consumers will be exposed to the almost certain increase
in gas prices that we are going to see as the LNG capacity comes on in
Gladstone.
Whopper No. 9 is that the government's direct
action policy will achieve the bipartisan minimum target to reduce
carbon pollution by five per cent by 2020.
There is not one serious commentator that agrees
with this whopper—not one serious commentator. It is a whopper that has
been repeated by the now Prime Minister and by the now Minister for the
Environment for four straight years with a straight face. I commend them
for that, because there is not a serious commentator that agrees with
them.
I had the opportunity to address this at length in a
debate yesterday, and I do not propose to go through that again, except
to say that in the most recent report about this, from RepuTex, a very
expert modelling firm that works in this area, it reported that the
direct action policy would fall about 70 per cent short of the target.
Ken Henry, the former Secretary to the Treasury, confirmed earlier this
year that, for the direct action policy to achieve the target, the
government would have to spend between $4 billion and $5 billion of
taxpayer dollars every single year to pay polluters to start to reduce
their carbon pollution—rather than having an emissions trading scheme
that has the polluters pay.
Whopper No. 10 was a whopper that the Prime
Minister engaged in, again in his overseas trip. It was after President
Obama released his Clean Power Plan, a very significant plan to start to
reduce carbon pollution in existing power plants. This follows on from
the President's plan to impose emissions standards or pollution
standards on motor vehicles and on new power plants. This was about
existing power plants, a reduction of 30 per cent in that pollution by
2030. The Prime Minister said—again with a straight face—that President
Obama's plan was 'very similar to the actions that my government
proposes to take'.
Once one gets through the laughter about that
statement, one goes back to the member for Wentworth because the member
for Wentworth expressed it better, I think, than anyone else has when he
said about Direct Action that it is simply a 'fig leaf to cover a
determination to do nothing'—and, for that matter, 'a recipe for fiscal
recklessness on a grand scale' was the statement that the member for
Wentworth made in the debate in this place. The direct action policy has
no discipline on pollution whatsoever. The so-called safeguards
mechanism has been discarded by this minister, so all you have is a
dressed-up slush fund to pay taxpayers' dollars to big polluters to
start to reduce their pollution.
Labor's position on these bills will be no
surprise. It will be the position we enunciated clearly to the
electorate in September, a position we have been advocating ever since,
and that is to terminate the carbon tax now and to move to an emissions
trading scheme that has a formal, legal cap on carbon pollution for the
first time ever in this country, a cap that reduces over time and then
lets business work out the cheapest, most effective way to operate. I
foreshadow that, in the consideration in detail stage, I will be moving
amendments to that effect.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Vasta): Is the amendment seconded?
Mr Clare: Yes.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I thank the member for Blaxland.
