Page 3521 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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Minister, the commonwealth and the Liberal Party are engaging in on carbon trading and Kyoto.
Mr Mulcahy: I take a point of order, Mr Speaker. We can have a debate a debate on Iraq, but it is not relevant to the question.
MR SPEAKER: Yes. Come to the subject matter of the question, please, Chief Minister.
MR STANHOPE: I do welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has now accepted that he was wrong on Kyoto and that he has now accepted that he was wrong on carbon trading. I have offered to refer to the Prime Minister and have invited the Prime Minister back into discussions with the states and territories on the possibility of a national emissions trading network. That, of course, was the subject of the discussion paper which the states and territories released in August of this year, released without any commonwealth involvement, despite at the last COAG meeting actually seeking the commonwealth’s support and collaboration in relation to the issuing of that paper.
It does give us some indication of the suddenness of the seismic shift in commonwealth thinking that at the last COAG meeting premiers and chief ministers invited the commonwealth again, even at that late hour, to be associated with and party to the national emissions trading framework that had been developed by the states and territories in the absence of any commonwealth leadership on this issue. It was as recently as that, as recently as the last two to three months, that the commonwealth again rejected and refused to be associated with the work which the states and territories had done on a national emissions trading scheme, the very scheme which the Prime Minister now appoints a task force to develop and pursue.
The work has been done. It was an exhaustive 18-month development and consultation process that led to the development of that discussion paper and it would be, I think, welcomed by all states and by me, if I can speak for myself, and the Northern Territory for the commonwealth simply to engage now with the states and the territories in the further development and implementation of the national emissions scheme which we have already proposed or floated as a possibility for Australia.
The about-face of the Prime Minister on this issue, as I say, does give us now, I think, the potential to deal within this region and certainly with the world in relation to carbon trading. I think we all recognise that. We have all known it always intuitively, despite the stubborn position of opposition which the Liberal Party have taken to the issue, that really, if there is one single initiative that could be pursued by the world to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, it is the establishment of national and international emission trading regimes.
Nine years after the development of the Kyoto protocol we have this first thawing by the commonwealth government in relation to its total opposition to the prospect of ever engaging with Kyoto. We have this new notion of a new Kyoto. How about that for a weasel word or a euphemism for actually seeking to invite oneself back into the camp by creating or confecting the conviction that “we will not sign up to the Kyoto
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