Page 273 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 7 March 2007
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waste problem instead of a greenhouse problem—actually, as well as a greenhouse problem. We have to think it through.
Ian Lowe has written an article I want to mention. Ian Lowe is a scientist. He talks about what has been happening to scientists who have spoken out. CSIRO has been a particular part of that agenda. We have had the CEOs of large companies like BP, Westpac and Origin Energy prepared to call publicly for the very measures that I mentioned in my motion and that are rejected by Mr Mulcahy. These are obviously not the business voices that the Howard government is listening to—the ones that I believe Mr Mulcahy is representing here today. Ian Lowe writes:
The depressing conclusion is that the present government has gone to extraordinary lengths to silence independent opinion within the research community. Individual academics, the university system as a whole, government research organisations and individual scientists now practise what a colleague called the “pre-emptive crumble”, falling over before they are pushed and taking great care not to antagonise Canberra.
That is because, of course, Canberra is where the money comes from.
We might see some interesting things happening here. Mr Mulcahy says we are a resource-rich country. But what if other countries decide they do not want to buy our coal? China is making a lot of noises. China is very well aware that it is losing social and environmental amenity due to its incredibly polluting industrial nature. China has a 20 per cent renewable energy target. It might stop buying our coal. That will show us, won’t it?
Mr Mulcahy said that we should have realistic targets. The only realistic targets are those that will achieve the reductions that are clearly necessary. Let us get realistic here—not about what industry wants: it wants to continue with the same old same old; it wants to use up every bit of coal and then move on to nuclear power production. Here we have someone who is speaking as though the economy can exist without ecology. How can we have an economy if we do not have the resources upon which it is based: clean water, and plenty of it; and clean air, because people need to breathe and be healthy. We need healthy people to have a healthy economy; we need a healthy environment to have a healthy economy.
Furthermore, Mr Mulcahy’s motion ignores all the work from economists that shows that a strong economy is possible without burning fossil fuels at the rate we do. We know that clean coal is a furphy at present. Carbon sequestration, underwater sequestration—all these sorts of ideas are at least a decade away. The amount of money that is being spent on these technologies could be much better invested in things like wave power—which is just sitting there waiting for harvest—and exploiting and supporting our solar industry, which is our major industry.
With the very interesting conversation that we are having now, it is as though Mr Mulcahy has not read the literature. I will be very interested to see his comments. I was expecting him to deliver to me an annotated version of the Stern report, with the refutations of the arguments within it. I believe that, unless he can convincingly refute those arguments, he does not have any economic credibility in relation to this issue.
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