Greens Senator Christine Milne on the Hypocrites and Deniers in the Australian Parliament

Christine Milne, Australian Greens Senator, compares the Labor Party Climate Change Hypocrites (do almost nothing) with the Liberal Party Deniers (do worse than nothing), and compares them with Britain, where the Conservative Party has 'leapfrogged' the Labor Party in ambitious Climate Change policy, and in the polls.

Beyond Zero talks to Senator Christine Milne Greens Deputy Leader

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Transcript

Scott Bilby:  Hello. Welcome to Beyond Zero. This is a really cool little global warming show coming straight out of 3CR. We cover all the latest issues about global warming, including the latest news, the latest science, the latest community actions and all sorts of stuff. We’re broadcast weekly on community radio across Australia. The show is produced by the climate change campaign centre Beyond Zero Emissions; and we believe that human caused global warming has already exceeded safe limits and that we must act immediately to reduce our levels of greenhouse gas to zero and below. My name is Scott Bilby, and with me in the studio is Matthew Wright. Good morning Matthew.

Matthew Wright:     Good morning Scott.

Scott Bilby:  And we’re going to be talking about the ETS, the CPRS, and all manner of other acronyms this morning with Christine Milne, Senator and Deputy Leader for the Australian Greens.

Christine Milne:       Hi Scott.

Scott Bilby:  Hello Christine.

Christine Milne:       Hi, how are you Matthew?

Matthew Wright:     Good thank you. We’ve been watching the shenanigans in Parliament House for the past week….very confusing. Up and down – people supporting ETSs, people not supporting ETSs, can you set a base line for the listening audience as to a sort of a short snapshot of what’s actually been going on?

Christine Milne:       It’s been a completely rambunctious week. That’s the only way you could describe it….

Scott Bilby:  [Laughs]

Matthew Wright:     [Laughs]

Christine Milne:       ….where climate politics has got mixed up with leadership ambitions, with egos, and, tragically, the Press Gallery has become so mesmerized by who might cross the floor, who might lead the party, what Joe Hockey’s numbers might be and so on and so forth, that the substance of the debate got lost. And unfortunately - what actually was going on - it was a debate in - the Coalition chose to use a debate about emissions trading to talk about whether or not climate change is real.

So the deniers actually took over the Liberal Party. I don’t call them sceptics because scepticism is actually healthy in science, that’s how science progresses, but deniers are deliberately just refusing to take onboard the science.

So that was on one side. And then on the other side there was the Government who were arguing that if you believe climate change is real, then you have no option but to support its emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and that’s – I don’t know which is actually worse, the deniers or climate hypocrites, because the Government uses all the rhetoric of dangerous climate change, talking about the very real danger that the Barrier Reef will die, that we will lose the summer Arctic ice, that the Murray Darling will collapse, that Australia is vulnerable – all those things are true.

But then trying to suggest that by implementing a scheme which reduces greenhouse gases somewhere between 5 and 25 per cent will prevent those outcomes occurring - and that is wrong – they know it is wrong – and that’s why I say it was essentially a debate on both sides of the House between the climate deniers and the climate hypocrites. And the Greens were trying to argue that whilst climate change is certainly real and urgent, the Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will lock in the failure and actually push us over, because by the time anything happens we will have gone beyond the tipping point.

So that was essentially how the House went this week. To the very far right you had Stephen Fielding [laughs], who is a sort of cheerleader of the deniers, and Nick Xenophon, who wants higher targets and will work with the Greens for higher targets, but doesn’t support a cap and trade system – supports an energy intensity model. So that was really where the debate fell this week.

Matthew Wright:     So on one hand you’re saying that we had the Labor hypocrites and the Liberal deniers, and maybe Malcolm Turnbull and a small section of Liberals just trying a sort of get in sync with Kevin Rudd’s policy mission, and unfortunately being confused that that is action on climate change.

Christine Milne:       Well that’s the real problem here, and that’s where I think it’s really unfortunate. When Malcolm Turnbull took the leadership of the Liberal Party, I wrote a piece in the media at the time saying that he should take a leaf out of David Cameron’s book, the Tories in the UK, who have leapfrogged Labour on climate change, have gone for stronger targets, stronger measures, and as a result have basically taken a lot of the environment vote away from Labour in the UK. And I argued that he could actually win the next election if he did that, because Labor’s position on climate was so vulnerable because it just doesn’t do anything.

However, he went to England and he saw what David Cameron had done. He saw all the young people at the Tory rallies and thought, great – came back and said OK, we’re going to go with Kevin Rudd’s scheme and he failed to pick up the essential piece of the puzzle which was the reason David Cameron’s doing well is because he has leapfrogged Gordon Brown and wants stronger action than even the 34 per cent that Gordon Brown has put on the table.

Matthew Wright:     Now this is in a way a big coalition of the unwilling. It’s the ‘we can’t do it’ campaign and it’s got all the fossil fuel lobbyists, the peak industry groups, the think tanks like the IPA, and they’re all working as sort of as one, creating a false constituency, a movement and a media space that says that Australia will suffer if there’s action on climate change, industry will falter, jobs will be lost, and it’s all too hard.

Now, where do you see the alternative view entering the public discourse?

Christine Milne:       Well, the alternative view is not really being showcased in the public discourse very much at all, and that’s because all the power and money lies with the old economy, with the old resource based sector. They are of course split amongst themselves. Some of them wanted the emissions trading scheme as designed by Kevin Rudd and Ian Macfarlane to pass because they know they are never going to get a better deal than what was locked in.

I mean, $7.3 billion to coal fired power stations for loss of asset value is never going to be seen by anyone as economically rational, sensible, any way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and they know it.

Don Voelte who managed to rent-seek extraordinaire, and managed to get huge concessions for LNG when everybody knows that in a world of peak oil there will be a shift to gas as a transitional fuel, and that nobody anywhere suggests that gas is going to do badly out of the shift to a lower carbon economy and then a zero economy, and yet Don Voelte got massive amounts.

So those who would prosper under the deal desperately wanted it to go through because they’re terrified that if it didn’t go through and we get to next year’s federal election and the Greens get balance of power in their own right, then all of that rent-seeking might count for nothing. So they wanted it through.

Then on the other hand, there’s Mitch Hooke and the Minerals Council who just went for broke on greed, and that is: they don’t want a price on carbon, and so they threw themselves into the campaign about spreading denial about bias, spreading disinformation about what would happen. And the stupid Liberal Party – I can only put it that way – in negotiating this massive amount of money for the coal-fired generators, said, ‘Oh, it’ll protect jobs in the Hunter Valley and in Victoria’ and so on. But when you look at it, there is nothing in the deal that says that these multinational coal companies have to maintain any level of employment.

All it says is that they have to maintain coal-fired power generation out to 2020 in order to get the compensation. So we got the coal fire locked in but we certainly – the workers couldn’t take any comfort from the deal that was done.

Matthew Wright:     Now, we’ve been talking about billions of handouts that are being announced as a part of the package. But what about the fact that this ETS, compared to, you know, emission trading scheme, or the Government’s name for it is the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, actually creates an environment that locks in maximum action, and the maximum action is such a low base that I would call it – you know, like – Penny Wong calls it action on climate change. I call it a fraction of action. So….

Christine Milne:       [Laughs] Or faking action on climate change….

Matthew Wright:     Faking action….

Christine Milne:       …rather than taking action on climate change faking action on climate change.

Matthew Wright:     Can you let us know a bit about that?

Christine Milne:       Well, basically, that’s the real problem with the scheme. The idea of an emissions trading scheme is that it’s a financial mechanism to deliver a greenhouse gas emission reduction in the cheapest possible way. That is the argument for it. And cap and trade, the argument for that is, rather than a carbon tax, that it gives you some environmental certainty because you can set the environmental cap, whereas a tax will return you the money but not necessarily give you a sufficient reduction in emissions.

Well having said that that’s what it’s meant to do, the Government has completely botched it to the point where it doesn’t reduce emissions. And Penny Wong herself has to admit that under her scheme, Australia’s energy sector emissions, domestic emissions, will not come down until 2034, and only then if carbon capture and storage is commercially viable and in place, and so in my view that means never.

The other thing about her scheme is that it allows for 100 per cent importing of permits from overseas. So Australia could meet its 5 per cent, up to - and I don’t think 25 was ever real as far as the Government’s concerned, but even if it was - could meet the whole lot by buying cheap permits from overseas. Or, now that they have created these agricultural offsets in Australia, which at this point there’s no saying whether they would have any real, robust methodology to guarantee them, you could flood the market with a whole lot of cheap permits from land use and offsets from forests and things around the world, and not do anything to transform your economy.

The second thing that an emissions trading scheme was supposed to do is by putting in strong targets, you’d get a strong carbon price, and therefore you would make it more viable for investment in lower carbon or zero carbon technologies. In other words, moving to the renewables so that you would guarantee some investment in solar thermal wave power, investment in geothermal and so on.

None of that occurs with such a low carbon price. And as all the business analysts have said, because of this deal with the coal industry and coal fired generators to say that they, in order to get the compensation, they have to guarantee that they will continue to produce the power out to 2020 which locks in coal fired generation. And part of the deal, which didn’t get much publicity, was that the Government has also said that if these coal-fired generators invest in improved technology to reduce their emissions, not only do they get an additional payment for doing so, but they can keep the compensation that they otherwise would have had. So it’s a complete windfall gain. So as you can see, their scheme does not reduce emissions in Australia, and it is, does not do anything to transform the economy, therefore what is the point?

Scott Bilby:  Now, we’re speaking to Christine Milne, she’s Senator and Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens. Christine, so we’re looking like we’ve got, you know, with this ridiculous emissions trading scheme, we’re going to end up with – someone said last night quite nicely - that we’re going to be a country of bludgers letting the rest of the world act on climate change while we try and do nothing.

And that nothing means that we don’t get all those innovations and the transition of the economy, therefore we won’t get all those new jobs. In Germany, what have they got? Two hundred and sixty thousands or so renewable energy sector jobs now. And some of that have used Australian technology. It’s a sad state of affairs isn’t it? We really need to kind of break that nexus between the coal lobbyists and the fossil fuel lobbyists in general and business lobbyists in general and the Government.

Christine Milne:       Well, that’s absolutely right. And there is so much evidence to say that those who move first in innovation, those who increase their standards and make them high and meet those standards, then develop the technology, the intellectual property, the manufacturing sector, the export market - and it’s been shown time and time again in every other sector, and it would be exactly the same in the shift to a low carbon and then a zero carbon economy as quickly as possible.

And we are, as you rightly say Scott, missing out on all of that because our best graduates out of the university and ANU and the University of New South Wales and the people with this fantastic expertise in solar have all left the country. Because they just don’t see any point here, and when you see a situation where you have First Solar and Solar Systems, compare the two. One in Australia goes into receivership, the other in China is about to build the biggest solar plant in the world because China has a feed-in tariff and Australia doesn’t.

The same thing applies in terms of vehicle fuel efficiency. China has bought in a high standard of mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency in order to drive the development of the vehicle industry in China, and also to prevent the import into China of vehicles that don’t meet Chinese standards. And so it was a mechanism to make sure they developed an industry there that would have global prominence. Now Australia isn’t doing any of that. We have essentially got a government and a coalition who cannot see a future for Australia without coal as a major export earner or coal as a generator. And now we have the horrendous situation of Martin Ferguson in the face of peak oil, saying well, we can liquefy coal and run the vehicle fleet on coal.

So they just can’t get beyond coal. And that is the problem with both the Government and Coalition and we will never be serious players in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, or globally, until we can get beyond coal.

Matthew Wright:     Absolutely. And I think the thing here is, we need a shift for the country from a national imperative of digging coal out of the ground and putting it in the export terminal, in the ships, and to overseas markets. When in fact our national imperative in regards to coal should be, well we’ve got a domestic steel making industry and we need steel, so how are we going to get decarbonised steel? Now, I’ve said this to the Minister’s office, and I’m not sure if it falls on deaf ears. I guess from the continuance of their announcements it probably has.

How can we shift away from, or maybe even define it as thermal coal, metallurgical coal, and really aim for that - eliminating that thermal coal exports, given that our markets, our traditional markets, like Japan, are now adopting climate policy. And anybody who sees the writing on the wall is that the lowest common denominator, like the lowest value thing they do that creates….

Christine Milne:       Yes….

Matthew Wright:     …. greenhouse gases, is burn Australian coal. So that’s the first to go. First cab off the rank, out.

Christine Milne:       Look, it absolutely is, and I said when I brought out my report Renergising Australia back in the beginning of 2007, I said then what is Australia going to do when the rest of the world doesn’t want to buy our coal? Regardless of what you might think about greenhouse gases, at some point you have to realise you’re totally vulnerable when you’ve got an economy which depends on the export of a fossil fuel. [Laughs]. What are we going to do about that? And, you know, our loss of manufacturing and our refusal to invest in education.

Those three things have left Australia extremely vulnerable, and I think it’s a tragedy that our leaders, on both the Liberal and Labor side, think that Australians aren’t clever enough to do anything else other than dig holes, ship it away and then fill up the holes again. So it’s basically dig it up, cut it down, shoot it, put a road into it, or build a resort on it. That is the sum total of what it seems that Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, and now Tony Abbott, think that Australians, that’s all we’re capable of. And so it needs a big shift, and essentially that’s hard because it’s cultural.

Right from First Settlement, Australia has been a quarry for the Empire, as it was then, and now for the rest of the world. And we started off with the sheep’s back and we’ve continued ever since. What we have always done is export raw materials to the rest of the world and depended on bulk commodity markets.

And that has to shift, and the Japanese a long time ago said that that was the biggest weakness Australia had, that our – essentially our resource richness – has meant that we’ve been lazy in developing a clever economy, and of course that’s the same criticism that is leveled at many Third World or developing economies, that they are resource rich and so they’ve never invested in the human capital to do clever things to export instead of just digging up.

Scott Bilby:  And that’s quite sad because there’s been so much innovation in Australia, so many clever people who have done the right thing. And we talked to someone recently from CSG Solar, Renate Evans(?), and their technology, a new kind of crystalline silicon on glass solar technology.

Matthew Wright:     From UNSW.

Scott Bilby:  Yes. They could not get any funding here at all - it’s the same old story – and so they decided to look overseas, and within four months Germany had said, yes come over here. They’re building a factory; they’ve got jobs there already.

So and could I just say quickly the whole bulk commodity thing. The ETS, or the CPRS, or the emissions trading scheme, is not just about stationary energy, which we are lamenting about now, but it’s also about other things, like agriculture, like forests, and that’s another thing we send out, that’s another bulk commodity that we send out of this country. And would you like to just say a little bit about our native forests sector there Christine?

Christine Milne:       Oh look, absolutely. And just when the Government brought in the renewable energy target increase, we were horrified to see that they were going to allow the burning of forests as a green energy source, which means that Tasmania’s forests could be cut down and sent to Gunns’ pulp mill and burnt in their furnace and classified as green energy going into the grid. And that’s an appalling state of affairs.

But in particular, we have moved so many times to say to Penny Wong - and I did again in the course of this debate - if you want to do something that is important for biodiversity and for protecting our carbon stores and reducing emissions immediately, then you would protect Australia’s native forests. Right now. Because we’ve got enough plantations in the ground, in Australia, ready to harvest to meet all of our wood product needs. We do not need to be logging native forests and generating all these emissions. And, of course, the fires from the burns that go on here in Tasmania and elsewhere.

And of course, her simple answer to that always is, ‘we’ve got the regional forest agreements and we don’t intend to revisit those’. And that is of course because Labor perceives that Mark Latham’s flirtation with protecting forests was one of the reasons that Labor lost in the election in 2004. And they simply won’t revisit it. And when you go to the heart of the Rudd Government’s strategy and Penny Wong’s statements, it’s all about look what they’re doing to us in the coal electorate, look what they’re doing to us in the logging electorate, and so there is no comprehensive, internally consistent policy about reducing emissions. It is ad hockery in the extreme.

So you’ve got the Minister saying we must act on climate change whilst subsidising the logging of native forests, whilst ingesting and liquefying coal to a transport fuel, whilst refusing to have mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standards, whilst refusing to take solar hot water and the multiplier out of the renewable energy target and put it on top so that we actually have space for the expansion of those new industries.

So what we’ve got is a government full of photo opportunities and a lot of hot air, but not real action on climate.

Matthew Wright:     We now know that we’ve got firm base load renewables available, that we can meet our peak demands with renewables, that we can follow our demand curve naturally instead of having a base load which is about, you know, blowing steam at a coal plant at 3am when no-one needs the power.

Christine Milne:       [Laughs]

Scott Bilby:  [Laughs]

Matthew Wright:     We could actually have better than base load through, say, solar thermal with storage. Now we’ve got that, we’ve obviously got to get the message out there about it. But given we have got that, then – and carbon capture and storage doesn’t exist – there’s no coal plant anywhere in the world, not one light bulb powered by clean coal carbon capture and storage, haven’t we got a great platform to go to the electorate with, to say, ‘hey, this is the new Australia. This is our vision?’

Christine Milne:       Oh, we absolutely have. And the interesting thing is that federal parliamentarians have been told this over and over again. The people promoting and working in solar thermal have been to the Parliament and have made this known. But there is a deliberate decision to ignore it and a deliberate decision to keep on saying we have to have baseload power and, ‘Oh, what a shame’ the renewables are nowhere near being able to supply 24 hours electricity. And it’s a deliberate lie. I can’t explain it any other way because they know it’s not the case.

And this week it came out again when immediately that the Coalition decided they had to say something when they didn’t want emissions trading but have no climate policy, out they came with well, our solution is nuclear because we need this permanent power supply and so we’re going to go nuclear because that’s what we need to do. And of course that is just an excuse for not having a climate policy, and it’s part of the dig it up, cut it down and ship it away kind of mentality. And it’s of course – even as I pointed out to them – even if you decided you wanted to go nuclear you wouldn’t have a reactor built for 15 to 20 years, by which time we’ve lost the Arctic ice, the whole thing’s gone anyway. So, thanks very much, that isn’t a solution.

I don’t know how we take it out to the public when you have people deliberately misrepresenting the industry and a complete failure in terms of promoting the renewable energies. And, you know, I blame to some extent the Clean Energy Council for that. They have not run a pro-active campaign. And I think the renewable energy sector really has to ramp up its advertising because the Australian public loves new technology, the Australian public loves solar, and would take this idea up as quickly as, wildfire really, because we have taken it up - any new technologies we like get spread around quickly. So I guess we need some money and some advertising and a pro-active campaign to inform people that there is a real choice, and it’s now, and that nonsense like nuclear and ongoing coal are simply part of the oil and fossil fuel and minerals lobby to keep business as usual.

Scott Bilby:  And just before we hand over to Matthew, because he wants to ask a question here. But, yeah, I do want to reiterate and say to the people of Australia, it’s like, the same guys who are digging up the coal, the same guys who are, you know, mining uranium, the same big guys are pushing this same - these fallacious arguments.

Christine Milne:       Mmm. Absolutely.

Matthew Wright:     And that of course is the Rio Tintos, BHPs, Xstratas, Peabody coal, Centenary [sic] (?), the list goes on. These are the guys, it just happens to be in their interest to run these arguments. You know, it’s just a coincidence.

Scott Bilby:  [Laughs]

Christine Milne:       Ah, what a coincidence! I mean Machiavelli recognised this in the 15^th Century when he says that there’s nothing more difficult to do than bring about a change in the order of things because those with a vested interest in the old order fight like partisans and those with an interest in the new order are only lukewarm because they don’t really believe in things till they actually happen. And I think that’s what’s gone on here. That the vested interests are fighting like partisans and, try as we might, we just don’t have the advertising and media capacity at the moment to match them.

Matthew Wright:     Fantastic. Senator Christine Milne, Greens Senator for Tasmania, and we’ve just about run out of time, and so we’ll have to wind the show up.

Scott Bilby:  Yep, and Christine look, you know, post Copenhagen - Copenhagen meeting. The United Nations climate talks are coming up in – starting, might even be Monday I think, and is going for, like, a week or two, it’s coming up very soon. What’s the post-Copenhagen world for the Greens going to be like before Christmas?

Christine Milne:       Look, it’s going to be exactly the same as it is now. We will never, ever give up. We are not deluded about Copenhagen coming up with a legally binding treaty, because it won’t. Worst case scenario is if we get yet another press conference with world leaders saying ‘oh, yes, we’re all agreed, we’ll keep global warming to less than two degrees and sometime, somehow in the future we might work out how to do that, and we’ll have another meeting in June’. But I really think that is what is going to happen. That there will be a communiqué out of Copenhagen which will establish a Copenhagen Mark II for June next year, or they might even, you know, ramble along into Mexico at the UNFCCC meeting at the end of next year.

But for the Greens, we have said to the Government, we are ready to work with you when you are ready to come and talk to us about real action on climate change. We’ve written to the Prime Minister saying we’re ready and willing, and the great thing about what’s happened in Australia this week is Kevin Rudd cannot pretend, cannot hide behind saying that the Parliament legislated for five to twenty-five and therefore he can’t go higher.

He is not restricted by the Australian Parliament from agreeing to a higher target, nor is he restricted in terms of committing what’s necessary for financing. And it’s over to him – he cannot hide behind a directive of the Parliament – there isn’t one. But he can say that there are five Green votes in the Senate for a higher target and he’s empowered to go and sign up for one.

Matthew Wright:     And hopefully after a double dissolution election, if that happens, there’ll be more.

Christine Milne:       Hopefully that’s right, but we’d like to see the Government go full term. But we most certainly want them to start being ambitious and honest about the climate crisis. We need crisis action as well as crisis rhetoric, not just the latter.

Scott Bilby:  Thank you Christine, it was a joy speaking with you this morning.

Christine Milne:       Thank you.

Scott Bilby:  We were just speaking to Christine Milne, Senator and Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens.