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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-03-25 Daily Xml
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CLIMATE CHANGE

The Hon. M. PARNELL (16:01): Today I want to speak to the climate emergency and the failure of governments—state, national and international–to deal with it. Nicholas Stern, in his famous report from only three years ago, described climate change as the greatest market failure ever. It was a very sombre warning of our need to act fast. Only in the past week or so he is back in the media and saying that politicians do not understand the risks of climate change and that, therefore, they are not taking sufficient action. He further said that his estimates of the cost of dealing with climate change were likely to now be as much as 50 per cent higher than he calculated in 2006. Members may recall that he likened the cost of not dealing with climate change as similar to the cost of all world wars added together.

In Copenhagen recently the world's scientists got together and released their toughest yet communiqué. The scientists are saying that urgent action is needed and governments should no longer pander to vested commercial interests. Denmark's climate minister (Connie Hedegaard) said:

If we do not act now, we risk catastrophic changes to our climate, causing destabilising conflict and massive migration of refugees due to water and food shortages in many parts of the world.

The scientists' communiqué is all the more remarkable because it is directed to politicians and, therefore, it is beholden on all of us to listen carefully to what they say. The communiqué emphasises that the worst-case scenarios of previous records are now common scenarios and, in fact, the most likely outcome unless drastic action is taken.

On Friday, there will be a national day of action with people around Australia coming together to express their concern and alarm at the commonwealth government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. That is now being called the 'carbon polluters reward scam'. Most people who have any understanding of the science of climate change would agree that a 5 per cent reduction target is absolutely pathetic. It is also pathetic that we are giving free pollution permits to our nation's biggest polluters. However, at the South Australian level we have the Rann government's Climate Change Act.

When that act went through with great fanfare we made a big deal of the fact that we were the first state to legislate. However, the legislation is weak. It provides for a target that is now discredited—the target of reducing our emissions by at least 60 per cent by the year 2050—and it has been referred to as 'legislated volunteerism', which is virtually meaningless as a legal instrument.

Yesterday we had tabled in this place the South Australian government report under section 16 of the Climate Change and Greenhouse Emissions Reduction Act 2007, and that pointed out how little the government has in fact done to achieve the objectives of the act. The first thing to note is that we still do not have in place a target greenhouse pollution reduction by the year 2020. The debate we had at the time, members will recall, was that we should go back to 1990 levels, yet what the scientists are now telling us is that that is far too weak. The scientists who met in Poznan in Poland recently basically said that weaker targets for 2020 increased the risk of crossing tipping points and making the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult.

With the document that was tabled yesterday I was particularly worried that the government has completely dropped the ball on reaching sector agreements with its own agencies. SA Water was not completed, and excuses were given. It has only just started talking to the Land Management Corporation, and it has just started talking to TransAdelaide, many months after these negotiations should have resulted in sector agreements. I remind members that this is not an academic exercise: this is the future of the planet that is at stake. We will be judged by our children and by their children, and we cannot make the excuse that we did not know the science and we did not know what was going on.

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