Mr MURPHY (9:19 PM) —For the fourth successive year farmers in many parts of Australia face inadequate rainfall and above average temperatures at the same time as climate scientists warn that the Pacific is heading for a new El Nino and an intensification of the ongoing drought. These destructive changes in our weather patterns are firmly linked to global warming driven by growing levels of carbon dioxide pollution, and yet the Minister for the Environment and Heritage and the Prime Minister remain dogmatically opposed to any measure that would reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, as we have heard repeatedly, the minister for the environment and his leader, the Prime Minister, refuse to sign the Kyoto protocol, on the grounds that to do so would damage Australia’s economic interests—all the while ignoring the billions of dollars that are being lost annually by the rural sector as the climate changes to a drier and hotter regime.

Australia could be adopting affordable measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, yet the government apparently expects that we should simply adapt to climate change and just get used to the hotter and more arid conditions that are now destroying the countryside and drying up urban water supplies. The technologies needed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are practical and affordable. The Howard government behaves as if climate change will never happen and despite unequivocal evidence refuses to make even the most minimal precautionary policy changes.

In contrast, in the United States of all places the federal government offers its citizens an income tax reduction of up to $US2,000 for purchasers of fuel efficient hybrid vehicles, while the state of Colorado offers new car buyers a hybrid electric vehicle tax credit of up to $US3,929. Here in Australia the Howard government offers buyers of the largest and least efficient family vehicles—imported four-wheel drives—a preferential tariff of five per cent, a subsidy that costs taxpayers on average $500 million per annum, to encourage the purchase of high-polluting gas guzzlers.

And now it appears that new car buyers, fearful of the threat posed by oversized four-wheel drives, are turning to larger sized passenger cars for protection against these overweight road locomotives. Here we have a perfect example of an ill-considered policy that encourages people to buy inefficient vehicles, together with the inevitable consequence—other road users being forced to buy larger vehicles for protection. Instead of taking measures to reduce vehicle fuel consumption and the concomitant emission of greenhouse gases, this government’s negligent policies are causing a rapid growth in carbon dioxide pollution from motor vehicles.

There has been much progress in other parts of the world in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. For instance, the Germans already generate eight per cent of their electricity from renewables and are on target for renewables to supply half of all of their energy needs by 2050. By then they will have reduced their carbon dioxide emissions to one-fifth of their 1990 levels.

From 2007, New Zealanders will pay $NZ15 per tonne of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. This tax will add an average of $NZ208 to householders’ bills, but our friends across the Tasman evidently believe that the price is one worth paying for climate stability. Here is a warning from Robert Nicholls from Southampton University about the number of people that may be flooded out of their homes by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The estimates vary from a few hundred thousand per year to a few hundred million per year between 2020 and 2100, depending on different assumptions about population growth, economic development and climate sensitivity.

Many of these people may well end up on Australia’s doorstep with no possibility that the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs will be able to deport them to their place of origin. When will the Prime Minister and his government recognise that there is no time to waste in taking action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?