Page 3795 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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I was interested to reflect on the fact that we saw some of the usual lines from the Liberal Party in Ms Lawder’s speech. She brought up the term “climate deniers”. I do not think anybody else used it in the debate, and it points to a little bit of sensitivity there. She referred to the fact that the Liberal Party took a 30 per cent target to the 2008 election. That was okay, but a 40 per cent target is the end of Canberra as we know it. The Liberal Party has never explained the difference between those two policies, other than the fact that it is obviously numerically 10 per cent. How come a 30 per cent target is okay but a 40 per cent target is not? It really is an incredible exercise in duplicity to run that sort of argument.
I also utterly dismiss and reject the notion when we hear, “Why should Canberra try? We are a small part of the global emissions and our efforts make no difference.” I dispute it for the reasons I have already outlined. Things like the energy efficiency improvement scheme actually deliver economic benefits to our community, so that is one reason to do it. But another simply is that there is no silver bullet when it comes to tackling emissions. Every community in every part of this planet has to do its part. We cannot just say, “China’s got to do it, India’s got to do it.” Everybody has to do their part to make this a more sustainable world we live in.
I reject out of hand the selfish ones, the ones who are not prepared to make the contribution, who are prepared to stand here and say, “Not my problem. I live in the wealthiest city in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but I don’t have to do anything. It’s somebody else’s problem. China, you go fix it. India, you go fix it.” That is morally reprehensible and it should be beneath this community.
Let me turn to the renewable energy target, which Ms Berry has also mentioned in her motion, and focus on the fact that the Abbott government has proposed to slash the renewable energy target from 41 terawatt hours a year by 2020 to about 27 terawatt hours. We know that demand for power has declined since the target was set. We now have the coalition saying, “We need to set a real 20 per cent target.” This seeks to hide the fact that the original commitment was 41 terawatt hours. Everybody knows it. Businesses plan on that basis. The Liberal Party come in here and say, “Government should create a receptive business environment.” The ones who are providing the true sovereign risk are, in fact, the Liberal Party. They are doing it through dismantling a policy that their previous Prime Minister, John Howard, put in place. It just gets more and more bizarre as you work through the various steps of what is actually being done here.
The Greens’ very firm view is that there should be no compromise on the target of 41 terawatt hours by 2020. It is simply an example of the current federal government going entirely in the wrong direction. Minister Macfarlane admits that the RET review is designed to protect big polluters. He has said that there is a surplus of 9,000 megawatts in the system, and that is why he needs to reduce renewable energy, to make sure there is not that renewable energy in the system to protect the coal-fired power stations and simply make them more viable. So we can see very clearly that the agenda here is to protect the fossil fuel industry. Not only is it a rejection of the need to act on climate change but also it is reinforcing the most polluting industries in terms of their contribution to Australia’s emissions.
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