 Good evening and welcome to the Australian National University 7th panel discussion on the vote. So this is a 2016 election series seminar and probably many of you have been to other issues in this series. As I went off, we're in the Coombs Theatre tonight, as we were graciously, we've had to give up our usual venue for the Crawford Leadership Forum, which I understand at least some of our panel members have been attending today. My name's Mark Kenney, I'm the Chief Political Correspondent for Fairfax Media, which means I write for the Marsteads, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age and even the Canberra Times. So some of you may read some of those old media forms, or the online version perhaps. Every Tuesday, since the federal election was announced, the ANU public policy experts have been discussing the key issues of this 2016 election. It's what I spend my days doing as well, discussing the key issues and trying to report on them. And this series is presented by the in partnership with the Policy Forum Net, which is based at the Crawford School of Public Policy. If you wish to take part in this conversation via Twitter, the hashtag is OsVotes and our ANU. Tonight I'm joined by four of the university's climate, energy and environmental experts to discuss an issue which has been an incredibly powerful issue in Australia for a long time, indeed globally of course, but an incredibly powerful policy issue and political issue in Australia for a long time. But which arguably in this election seems to have taken something of a back seat to some other issues. And I guess that's one of the key things we're here to discuss, to talk about the issue and to talk about why that is and how that can be changed. Our first speaker in the brown suit, well what I say first speaker, the one I'm first introducing is Professor Ken Baldwin. He is Director of the Energy Change Institute at ANU. He's also Deputy Director of the Research School of Physics and Engineering. He's a fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics, the Institute of Physics in the UK, the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. I believe that's correct. Our next speaker is, our next that I'm introducing is Professor Mark Howden. He's the Director of the Climate Change Institute at the ANU. He's on the end and he's also an honorary professor at Melbourne University's School of Land and Food. Dr Paul Burke is an economist, he's here in the black suit, closest to me. Dr Paul Burke is an economist based at the Crawford School of Public Policy. His work focuses on environmental energy, transport, developing countries and particularly in the Asia Pacific region. And Lily Dempster, closest to me, is currently completing a master of energy change research at the, or energy change, research masters at the ANU. And there's a strong background in the Australian environmental movement. So would you please join me in welcoming our expert panel tonight. Now, as I said, climate change has been an issue that has been absolutely formative in the political fortunes of a number of key Australian politicians and governments, has had an absolutely epic impact on Australian politics as a political issue, but the policy response to it has been patchy, sometimes better than others and often just completely traumatic. So it's an absolutely crucial issue and certainly one that needs to be getting a higher priority than it's currently getting in this epic and long election campaign. We might start with some opening statements from our panel. If I could ask you, Professor Baldwin, to kick off and maybe make an opening statement. Certainly Mark, thank you very much and thank you all for coming on what is very cold, windy and almost snowy evening here in Canberra, perhaps not evidence of warming, but certainly evidence of maybe an extreme event on the way. So I guess I'm couching my language in terms of climate change and indeed this is one of the big drivers behind energy change, which is what my institute is involved in. What I'm seeing over the last decade or so in Australia is enormous government policy uncertainty and this has led to changes in laws, regulations and has meant that there's not been the atmosphere and the environment for industry to invest in new energy sources that there should be. And as we look at the policy platforms of the major parties, so I'm talking about here the coalition Labour and the Greens, what we see is a diversity of approach and now at least with the Turnbull administration there's an agreement about climate change and what we're seeing now is a diversity of approach to solving climate change and of course energy is one of the big solutions in that space, but nonetheless we are still in a very uncertain environment and indeed what we've seen in the past and we're going to see in the future is what I call a destructive adversarial politics of opposition. In other words you simply oppose something because it's the other party that's put it forward and there are many examples of this, the NBN is a good example, the GST when it was originally formulated back in the early Howard News, that sort of thing. So this isn't very helpful when it comes to dealing with issues of national, little and global importance, you need a combined approach to solutions and so bipartisanship is essential in this space and for example we need the certainty of a price on carbon so that everyone can plan to invest whether it be energy sources or in other parts of the economy based on the knowledge of what the carbon price is going to be and first of all you have to have the price on carbon, we didn't have one and then we did have one and now we don't have one again and maybe we'll have another one and all this is incredibly destructive when it comes to industry trying to invest so we need to change that, we need to have bipartisan agreement over particularly these types of issues. I'd also say that although we have a very good electricity market in Australia it's a 20th century electricity market and it needs to move into the 21st century in order to adapt not just to the imperatives of climate change and the need to shift our energy generation sources, it also needs to adapt to modern technology for the ability for you as individuals to generate your own electricity, to store it in batteries in your own home, to re-export it onto the grid at a price that suits you and I'm talking about a price that follows the demand curve on a diurnal on the seasonal cycle. At the moment you can't do that and there is technology out there that can do it and the market just won't let you do that so this shift to distributed renewables in particular needs to be reflected in market rules so I think those are things that really this election should be focusing on. Like Ken I'd like to welcome you to ANU to this series as well so my name is Mark Houghton and I'm the director of the Climate Change Institute here at ANU. The Climate Change Institute brings together the research capabilities across the ANU connects those and also connects them externally to ANU. So in terms of this sort of absence of climate change in this election campaign I think it's really important is that I actually see that dealing with climate change effectively is a core plank in terms of attaining a just and sustainable society both here and internationally. It's not an add-on it actually needs to be integrated into the the main game of actually getting towards that sort of goal and when we actually start to look at the sort of pathways to meeting the Paris Agreement and also the goals more broadly of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that's avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Often this is seen with very much accountancy framework it's all seen as about costs it's the cost of reducing carbon emissions it's the cost of adapting to climate change. It's actually not seen in the way I think it should be seen which is actually an investment in our future in terms of having sustainable systems energy systems environmental systems. So I think we actually need to start thinking about this as part of a national investment strategy which is part of our innovation system it's not separate from our innovation system. So when we actually start to think about this adaptation which is adjusting to future climate changes and we expect we've seen a lot already but we expect to see a lot more of those changes and it makes a lot of sense to adapt to those changes if you don't adapt to those changes you'll either incur unnecessary risk which costs money or you'll actually underperform say if you're in agriculture you'll actually produce less than you otherwise would and neither of those are desirable from a business point of view individual point of view or a national point of view. So we really need to get on the front foot in terms of adaptation and dealing with climate change and if we actually look at the platforms of the three major parties that's Labor National Party and the Greens none of them full stop have anything significant to say about climate adaptation. They talk about energy they talk about emissions reduction they don't actually talk about adaptation to climate change yet that's actually an equally important part that's the other side of the climate change coin and it's completely missing and that I don't think that's in the national interest and the other thing that is missing is largely mention of the 65% of emissions that aren't associated with the electricity generation sector so it's the agricultural emissions the industrial emissions the waste emissions the fugitive emissions things like that so we're actually missing a big part of the adaptation picture and we're missing a big part of the mitigation picture so I think we actually have a lot of room to do better. Now Australia has a history when we actually get our act together of having really pragmatic and effective innovations and if we do this well I don't I think it is not only a contributor potentially to our innovation system but I think we can actually make a really big difference internationally as well. Thank you. Thanks very much Mark. Paul can I invite you to make an opening statement. Hi good evening everyone I'm Paul Burke an economist here at the Crawford School at ANU welcome to ANU. So we have come to the end of a term of parliament in which we've definitely made some big step backwards in terms of climate policy so we did have a carbon price of course which was in place for two years as an economist I of course was was rather fond of the carbon price as most economists actually were especially ones who were thinking much about the problem of climate change so we had the carbon price in place for two years and actually was doing the job that was expected of it so emissions for example in the electricity sector were falling they had been falling a little bit before the carbon price was in place but they they kept falling and fell quite quickly by about altogether about 9% during the two years of carbon pricing. Of course the carbon price was removed and since then we've had a rebound in emissions they've gone up a few percent in the electricity sector for example so that was as expected and it is a pity from a from an economic point of view and from a climate policy point of view that we have gone through this turbulent time in terms of our policy settings and that's introduced uncertainty going forward as well. Economists often often say that we can judge how seriously someone takes this issue of climate change by what they say about the carbon price and I guess actually the tone in this election has has improved somewhat in that the scare campaign of previous elections has been toned down somewhat in this one but then at the same time the carbon price hasn't been spoken about much as well. If we look at the policies of the different parties well Laborers is proposing to introduce two emissions trading schemes so one for the electricity sector a baseline and credit scheme and a second one for industry as well which would be what is called a cap and offset scheme so both of these schemes probably they would start as being quite light touch schemes with probably quite a low carbon price but at least that would put the infrastructure in place and they could be tightened up over time. The coalition it's a little bit harder to read exactly what they plan to do but there is some speculation that perhaps their policy in terms of the safeguard mechanism could one day be tightened up into an emissions trading scheme as well but we're yet to see that in terms of some other parties the NIG Xenophon team is proposing an emissions trading scheme a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme the Greens are proposing a carbon price. Just one policy at the moment which I've been looking into quite a lot and really is the centerpiece of our climate policy at the moment is the direct action scheme so this is a subsidy scheme to pay for emissions reductions from specific individual projects across the economy so there are quite a few problems with this scheme. The scheme is doing some good activities and purchasing some abatement or emissions reductions but some of that spending is going to actually to projects which most likely would have happened anyway. Quite a lot of the funding has gone to preserving some trees near or some scrub near Cobar and Burke in northern New South Wales and so that spending whether it has actually bought emissions reductions is very questionable would those farmers have been planning to clear that land without that spending and some of the other projects as well have not been particularly impressive in terms of the emissions reductions they are providing so that direct action might be something we can talk about tonight. Absolutely I think direct action does need certain you know further progress and I think just the overall complexity of the architecture you laid out there is very interesting because it says one of the key things about this whole area that I think keeps it alienated from from the political process and that is just its sheer complexity the technical aspects of it. Lily can I invite you to make an opening statement. Thanks Mark. So my background is a little bit different I'm a community advocacy campaigner most of my work has been with get up working on clean energy consumer campaigns so I have a slightly different perspective and I think the the main concern for me looking at both major parties policies is you know they both have emission reduction targets you know in line with the Paris Agreement the 26 to 28 percent reduction on 2005 levels for the coalition government and a 45 percent reduction both by 2030 but the 45 percent reduction target for the Labor Party so that's fantastic given where we were a few years ago. The concern really is how well and how quickly can we help Australia transition to a clean energy economy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and when you look at the 2.55 billion dollar emission reduction fund and as Paul's already pointed out you know that issue with additionality and the fact that you're basically paying polluters to reduce their emissions through taxpayer money there's obviously better policy designs available and I think also the other thing that I've kind of noticed is that both major parties have at this point are not reviewing the very large amount of annual fossil fuel subsidies so an obvious one is the fuel tax credit scheme that goes to the mining industry predominantly and that if you're trying to set a price signal to reduce incentives to pollute and you want to reduce carbon emissions having you know about six billion dollars per year in fossil fuel subsidies probably is reducing the effectiveness of those either a carbon price or emission reduction fund grants programs so that's been concerning for me just that neither major party wants to review those fossil fuel subsidies or conduct a kind of cost-benefit analysis and if you think about in the past you know we had a national debate on whether we should be providing a subsidy to the Australian car industry for much much less money and that's something that I don't think has been mentioned at all much in the commentary around the climate policy in this election. Thank you Lily. I might just go to some of these issues now that have been raised. Obviously the question of the politics of all of this is really almost the primary question because if we can't get some level of political agreement if someone cannot core out a political mandate to do to take action then we seem to be stuck in at least a second best position rather than you know moving at the speed we need to be moving and Malcolm Turnbull I find it fascinating I imagine many people in this room find it fascinating and surprising and perhaps depressing in some ways that we actually have now presumably a fairly high level of consensus across political leadership of this country about the need or first about the primary question about climate change about the human impact of climate alteration and and we have a Prime Minister who famously has built his political career partly around this issue and yet we now have policy which I think mostly is regarded around the world as fairly mediocre fairly very much a political compromise so I wonder if if anyone would like to jump in on any of those points and take it up from there. Can you perhaps? So certainly what you say is true I mean our omissions targets of 26 to 28 percent reductions for what the sort of tail end of the OECD countries I think only Japan lies behind us and so we're not exactly leading from the front we're leading from the back and that's not a good position to be in we are don't forget from a an export perspective one of the world's great energy exporters we export huge amounts of coal we're going to export huge amounts of gas we export around about a third of the world's uranium usage and and so we have a in some sense a very strong moral high ground or depending on how you look at high ground in terms of being a major energy exporter so we also have a responsibility in that direction as well if you look at us as a domestic energy user we derive 85 percent of our energy from fossil fuels and that picture hasn't changed in recent times even though renewables are increasing in usage and we are the most carbon intensive economy in the world in that regard now in terms of you know how this is moving in the political sphere which we we certainly have as Mark said agreement about climate and the need to do something about it the real point of difference in this election and if you look at the election policies there are points of difference so let's let's not say that we're not hearing anything in the press about climate change just because everyone agrees they don't agree that the methodology for doing something about climate change is different in every party and we'll come back to this question as to why it's not a media but if we look at direct action direct action is all about if you like an auctioning process of trying to buy the carbon back out of the atmosphere so that we don't admit it and this is fine in certain sectors but as Paul says some of these things might have happened anyway whereas an emissions trading scheme is being proposed by the Labor Party and carbon price proposed by the Greens that aims to hit the carbon pollution everywhere in the economy and especially in the energy sector so Labor has a two-tier process there's a emissions trading scheme to the energy sector and something else for everyone else and you need to do this through a carbon price because everyone gets the price signal then if you only have a price signal for some parts of the economy you're not driving behavior change in the other parts of the economy whereas if it's in the carbon price everyone will try and minimize their costs of production and the cost of their product to sell to you and if that means getting rid of the carbon content in your product because it's going to cost you more they'll do it whereas without that price signal the only part of the economy where there will be a reduction in emissions will be those where you actually directly purchases which is what redactions all about so there are clear differences in approach between the parties and we need to examine what we believe to be the most effective would anyone else like to make a comment on that just on the question of the I suppose that what we're talking about here is the disconnect between that the science the policy and the politics and how we can actually address that I've been to the Hifmu Paul actually on direct action and whether it is actually a market mechanism this is a claim the government makes it would you say as an economist that it is well the auction the reverse auction process for deciding which projects will be funded is a market mechanism but this is not the type of broad market mechanism that can trigger a change in the direction of an economy but just going back to the next term of parliament I mean I think there is just a scary of optimism that could be held and for several reasons one one is that renewable prices are just reducing so quickly and in a way that was by some unexpected several years ago number two is that some of our coal-fired generators are really getting rather old so these are underlying factors and I guess the number three as well as that we've just sort of bleaching event in the Great Barrier Reef we have increased understanding I believe in in the science of climate change so there's just a chance if we had some leadership from the next government and also really leadership from the next opposition as well because for important reforms ideally we would we would have some type of backing from the opposition or at least an opposition type of campaign that is not toned up to the maximum so there is I think just a little bit of a prospect for some some for a better outcome certainly next parliament than this one I just the comment that the government's committed to a review of climate policy to come out in 2017 but they haven't actually specified really how they're going to reduce how they're going to meet their emission reduction target you know the the amount of money committed to emission reductions under the direct action doesn't extend past the two point five five billion dollars and they have a suite of other measures that they've announced basically borrowing or taking money from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation's original ten billion dollar allocation you know and the announcements they've made about the Clean Energy Innovation Fund and now reach protection from that bucket of money so that's been kind of interesting just in terms of while there hasn't been much talk about climate policy explicitly the government are making a series of announcements during the election campaign that make it look like they want to do things to support clean energy but with money that's actually been already committed and that they haven't been able to they haven't been able to repeal the body that initially was was able to make that money available to clean energy groups which is the clean energy finance corporation so so is it possible that in some ways we're kind of stumbling towards some sort of policy process some sort of policy progress I should say yeah I mean now in turn well technically the coalition when it came in was utterly committed to getting rid of arena getting rid of the clean energy finance corporation which was you know Hillary does Bob Brown's bank and all this sort of stuff but now the clean energy finance corporation is a critical part of the policy infrastructure of the architecture of the of the government we've just seen an announcement about how a section of that's going to be used for protecting or at least helping to protect the Great Barrier Reef we also know that Malcolm Turnbull would have gone further had he been able to but he had done a deal as part of his gathering of the numbers to knock off Tony Abbott he had done a deal not to change the the government's not to accelerate or argue for a higher target at the Paris climate change torch or to change that policy along with same-sex marriage which is not related to this but nonetheless a fairly important issue as well for a lot of people so I'm wondering do you think does anyone on the panel think that you know as Paul said there is at least some optimism that maybe we're going to get there in in a slightly messy young coordinated way but that this political goodwill and belief that exists at least at the top of the coalition government that may get us there mark you have a view of it probably not not wanting to engage on this particular part of it I would just responding to your previous comment which was really about differences between the parties when it comes to climate adaptation which is dealing with other climate changes that are happening now and may happen in the future there is no difference between the parties because none of them have a policy and so so when they actually start to bring that out then we'll actually be able to judge how significant they are now in terms of why this might be it could be that they see you know admission or a policy on adaptation is an admission of failure in terms of their mitigation programs that their emission reduction programs whereas in fact I think it would be much better seen as an acknowledgement of reality and an effective and appropriate response to those changes which thing so so I actually think there is a dose of reality that needs to come into this and I would welcome some leadership by any of the key players in terms of acknowledging that and starting some action is there too big a gap between between experts such as yourselves and policy makers I mean it seems to me this gap I can almost feel it here right now that we have to get the politics right in order to get the policy right if you can't if you can't drive the change politically then it doesn't really matter how pure the policy description you know the scriptions are that you come up with or the research that you do if it can't drive policy I think I mean it's a good point but I think a bigger gap there is not so much the research community and the politicians rather than the policy makers but the politicians it's actually a gap between public viewpoints and the policy makers and politicians so for example vote compass says that 74% of Australians who participated in that survey want more action on climate change so in political terms that's a vast majority and and yet we're not seeing that connecting to appropriate policy responses so I'd actually say that rather than us being the key source of the gap between us and the politicians it's actually the politicians and the public where the key gap is well I think there's an interesting point I accept that I think it's a very good point but there is nonetheless a job to be done in terms of designing the policy responses here and it is highly technical it is it is bewildering for the average voter many of the terms that are being used here tonight would be bewildered and so there's an alienation process it seems to me and that gives that allows politicians to get off scot-free to some extent it allows them to construct an eight-week election campaign which is interrupted by you know one of the worst East Coast laws we've seen for a long time and which many would say is a function of a more turbulent climate and yet it doesn't really manifest as a you know major political issue so you know that somewhere here there's a pretty big disconnect I think that when it comes to engaging directly with government survivor persuasion it's up to universities to engage closely so that we can provide expert advice and indeed as in my institute we have a policy of being both technology and policy neutral so we will push every form of technology will push every policy idea as hard as we can and then offer them up as options for people to take up and and it's really important that we do that because if we disconnect for whatever reason from from either government or opposition then they no longer have a trusted source of expert advice to call upon and and so really if universities can't provide that advice who can so it really is a very important role for us to continue to stay engaged and I think we are engaged I mean we've talked to both government and opposition over the years on many occasions but I think that as you say there is probably more of a disconnect between what the parties are doing in this election and what the public want them to do than we've seen for a long time in fact I'd like to pose a question to the audience doing the vote compass thing here so how many people think that we should be doing more about climate change okay so that's it more than 74% you're a random sample right and those against so so now I'm going to ask another question a very different question how many of you think that climate change is being addressed adequately by either side of politics in this election how many think is being addressed adequately doesn't matter what particular party you're talking about by either side of politics how many think it's addressed adequately in this election okay so there's a disconnect that is a very big disconnect it doesn't say a lot for I mean it seems to me that Labor feels that it is leaning quite a long way into the wind Bill Shorten obviously had some people no doubt had some people in his ear saying don't go anywhere near a carbon tax again after what happened to Labor in 2013 one of the most politically toxic issues that we've seen prosecuted in Australian politics and and yet he has gone back to a carbon price as Paul said he's come up with a policy which I suspect very few Australians would be able to articulate but nonetheless it's a it's a it's a stronger policy than some conservatives would have wanted to see so it's interesting to hear that not only is our you know not only are fairly mediocre official targets not inspiring people but even the opposition's tougher policy doesn't doesn't get a single hand in the room I think one interesting point is looking at the polling on climate change and certainly that vote compass piece by the ABC which was of over 250,000 people and that was awake you know waited to be proportional with the population and that was I think it was 63% of those people who participated in the vote compass poll supported a carbon price but that doesn't actually tell you whether they'd be willing to change their vote based on whether a particular party supported a carbon price and the reach out poll in May that showed people would be willing to change their vote about 66% of people on the protection of the Great Barrier Reef so that's why you see these these big policy announcements from both the Labor Party and the coalition on protecting the reef I think 500 million committed from labor and over five years and a billion from the coalition government over 10 now we might take some questions now from from you we're going to get microphones to you so that so that everyone can hear what you have to say we have one just here in the middle microphone making its slightly awkward way to you now can you identify yourself when you ask a question and we'll take it from there sure my name is Rob Holsgrove a few things I think there is a clear difference between Labor and certainly the coalition but I think what we're hearing is correct for some reason Labor's not coming out with I think they've got I mean there's four big areas their targets that's mission pricing scheme on renewables on the land sector and I think on some stuff on cars for example but it's just not coming out I think there's a fault there on labor perhaps mark you're right they've been frightened off or shortly been frightened off I think also there's a the you're right mark that it's a technical issue and the media don't seem to be able to handle it when you ever hear interviews and I tend to it's mainly ABC I listen to they they just can't ask pertinent questions on policy which is a little bit of a shame because some of the stuff is pretty straightforward a price as we've heard from Kim for example the the pricing you can pretty well easily explain you know it's how important it is but it's not being it's never been brought out it's not being brought out in this campaign I should also say I'm not optimistic about the future I don't know if Turnbull wins I think he's going to have a reduced majority and the right still going to be there so whether he's going to be able to do anything much on climate change and I just say to Mark as I was in the environment department some years ago there there wasn't work for labor for time so you can probably see my bosses but there was labor did have some stuff on adaptation which I think CSRO had too which may have gone I don't know whether you can comment on that but yeah there's nothing there now it certainly hasn't been addressed by other party I agree with that so it's more comment I'm afraid just on this topic of the complicated nature of climate policy I mean many other areas are actually very complicated as well for example superannuation or the health system or Gonski funding for example they're complicated policy areas and actually climate change policy does not really need to be quite as complicated what is happening with our emissions that are going up or down currently they're going up do we have a policy that will be able to credibly get us to to a target in the future currently we don't and what are the targets of the different parties and when we look across those targets there's of course lots of variation the government 26 to 28 percent by 2030 and labor 45 percent that's quite a big difference so on some basic parts of the policy it should be easy to communicate but what really is just needed is leadership and focus on the topic and can I just respond to your comments about the media and given our media chair here I'll be diplomatic so I actually don't think the media are that bad the journalists that I talked to all get it I mean they're pretty good at understanding tricky technical discussions I get very good questions from them and you know you might listen to the ABC and watch the ABC the ABC interviewed me for three minutes during a news program on prime time and that's unusual I mean that's very unusual they could get into depth and detail and ask me tricky questions and I think that's a good thing there should be more of it but when it comes to the politicians reaction to the media we had a dinner last night with Arthur Sinodinas and and with our shadow treasure of our own they both commented about the 24 hour media cycle okay so this is a serious issue it means that people speaking sound bites they don't get into in-depth discussions and they don't have time to think about things well Chris Bowen had a solution to that he was running up one morning and asked to comment on something that was announced by the opposition and he realized that this was actually quite a difficult issue and so rather than doing what his media advisor said which was to give them a response right now otherwise the Twitter sphere will go nuts he said no you tell them I will come back to them later in the day and I'll give them a considered response and that's exactly what he did and did the media go away no they didn't so it's about your own perception of what the media are going to do that is the key issue if you say bugger off and I'll come back to you later with a considered response that will still work okay so the 24 hour media cycle in some sense is entirely a structure of our own making and we can still do something about it I don't know what your thoughts are my well my thoughts are with the 24 hour media cycle is that I never seem to get to knock off and and and I mean that I mean it's I was just talking with Chris you want about this today just before the press club lunch and we were agreeing that the the problem is that you know comparing this election campaign so from previous election campaigns is that that we just have rolling deadlines now everyone's doing everything so we're doing video on our websites and we're doing we're putting up stories contemporaneously and so it is everything's accelerating like that and it's it's full of opportunities but there's there's no downtime so I'd make that observation we have another question we have one here in the middle if you could just state your name please hey my name is Ram I'm a student of the energy masters of energy change here at the ANU so can you make an interesting point about Australia's large energy exports so my panel my question to the panel is how do you think Australia should take responsibility for our exports our energy exports considering for example that we want to take responsibility for our live exports should we you know do something similar so you want us to comment on our responsibility for our dead exports is that right okay so that's so it's a really interesting question so one way of approaching this is to join with all the other countries that signed the Paris agreement and commit to a reduction in our emissions using a worldwide framework that will take place once 55 nations representing 55% of global emissions agree to do this and you don't need to necessarily take some unilateral position on exporting energy to other parts of the world to be a part of this process let's say that you know down the track the post Paris agreements come up with a worldwide price on carbon that means that over time fossil fuels become a thing of the past well that is one way of participating in this global process so taking unilateral action and saying oh I'm not going to export coal tomorrow because it's dirty is going to consign large sections of the developing world to poverty and to inequality simply because they cannot meet their energy needs in the short term while we're making this transition to a carbon-free world so we have to think very carefully what unilateral action in the energy export domain might mean and the same is also true of uranium so we are custodians of these commodities and we sell them to the rest of the world but I think it's very difficult position to take that we should tell the rest of the world what to do we should participate in a global scheme that has the goals that everyone wants to make as carbon neutral globally but beyond that I think taking unilateral positions very do it it's an interesting let's make a clarification we'll come to you it's an interesting point this question about leadership and what what role we should play in how far out in front of the world we should get on in some of these policy areas in in climate carbon abatement and perhaps in the in as you say in an area like taking responsibility for our energy exports Malcolm Turnbull recently in criticising Labor's policy and criticising Shorten's harsher targets said that what Bill Shorten was doing was giving away Australia's bargaining position in international negotiations it was a very novel argument and I'm being kind you know to me I it was loyally was it was it was the a skillful barrister taking an apparently hostile set of facts and turning them to advantage that's the way I saw it you know I don't mind saying so but nonetheless I suppose this does feed back to some extent into the the complexity of this overall area Australians for example are told that you know we have here all this debate about what we should do and what what it's going to cost the economy and how much risk there is involved in it and so forth and then we're told and by the way we produce less than 1% of global emissions so none of what we do even if we killed off our carbon production completely would have any implication for you know for global climate for example so I think it is politically and technically complicated at the same time I was just going to comment around that Australia there's a figure running around I read it in an Australian Conservation Foundation report that we need we can't burn 90% of our fossil fuel reserves in Australia if we want to stay under the 450 parts per million limit so I mean there's there's some physical limitations if we want to do our fair share on emissions reductions as a country but we are heavily reliant on on coal you know it's it's still a major export for Australia and both the coalition and the Australian Labour Party support coal continuing to be a major export for Australia into the future what's difficult about the current policy discourse is it doesn't acknowledge that that physical constraint around the global carbon budget and Australia's contribution you know that it could potentially blow the global carbon budget if we do just continue to export our fossil fuel reserves I think the other point that's interesting is that countries like India and China are really trying to improve their energy independence just for their own energy security they're both heavily investing in renewable energy but also trying to rely more on domestic coal production rather than importing from Australia so I think the economic reality for Australia's coal export market is that we actually have to have a sophisticated plan for how we're going to transition away from relying on that export market and obviously both parties see investment in clean energy as a component of that but I don't think we've gone far enough in really addressing that problem and there is another sort of element is RAM which is actually about alignment with the international process for assessing emissions so for example all of the greenhouse gas emissions are associated with combustion at the point in point of emissions or you know production of the emissions and so those are slated to particular nations and so the importance of that and this was designed into those inventory systems a long time ago because it was recognized there had to be an alignment of responsibility and accountability in terms of those emissions and the only exceptions for those are called bunker fuels which are the international shipping and international air flight fuels for aeroplanes which are actually sort of sit outside that national based accounting so if you wanted to start you know going and saying okay well who's responsible for the emissions associated with Australian coal you actually start to get real problematic things say if that coal goes to you know country A and then it goes country B and then it goes country C before it gets combusted you actually have to track it all the way along that cycle which just becomes a nightmare so from point of view of simplicity a point of view of aligning responsibility and accountability and that's why we've got national based emission inventories I have a question in the middle here thank you if you could just take your name just Julie changes my name I just wanted to pick up on that discussion we had you had earlier about the gap between the political the major political parties support and action on climate change and the people's view on the matter but just add to that a couple of extra things one is that you know the role of the media in picking up these issues and running with them I think there's been a sea change in that over the last three to five years it was quite dismal some years ago but there's certainly been a lot of education amongst the journalists and the coverage is pretty good now but that is another really important and continuing aspect of bringing this debate in a sensible way to the people and to the politicians but one area that I I think is not given quite enough attention is the role of lobby groups on on the various political parties so you know it might be that the voters get some some of the the action but but from the other side the lobby groups are really important as well and of course is that you know the coal industry and the mining industry and then there's a unions but it's always seem to be very interesting that that in terms of the economic costs and benefits of action on climate change or climate change happening there's a whole second section of business that is really going to be impacted in one way or another which doesn't actually get much voice in this argument you know like the insurance industry for example the tourism industry you know even manufacturing using renewables or those sorts of things and I wonder whether whether anybody's got any comment on you know what what should be done to actually get those those companies and we're talking about big companies here that have major influence on government and who are losing out by governments not taking action what what we might be able to do to include those more in the debate and get them to speak out and be a little bit more brave about this issue yeah thanks for that I think it's a really important issue that question of what corporates do the question of business investment certainty in policy settings the sort of timelines that they need the the practical the essential pragmatism of business on these questions is there to be leveraged in terms of making progress on policy but in your final comments there you you made the observation I believe correct observation that business generally speaking is very timid in the public policy space and particularly so when it comes to you know highly partisan or contested political areas so it's real challenges there anyone else would like to comment yes I would like to echo that I think business does stay out of the public policy debate quite a lot but on the other hand they also lead it so when it comes to the realities of the world it's you know the big companies the big energy companies looking into the future they're thinking okay we're gonna have a carbon neutral world in 2050 okay let's make that the assumption what do we need to do to make money in 2050 they don't have a philosophical fixation to coal or gas or oil or whatever all they want to do is make money right so they change the way that they make money from now to 2050 that's their long-term goal and they might be ahead of the game because many companies now include a carbon price in their planning process so for example the current government's target of 26 to 28% emissions reductions by 2030 is the is the national indicated goal and so companies at this moment are looking at what effectively that means in terms of a price of carbon that would achieve the 26 to 28% by 2030 they then use that price on carbon to factor into their business whatever it is might be generating electricity it might be manufacturing might be agriculture and they work out what the carbon price equipment is and they use that even though there's not a carbon price so business is ahead of the game and business will be the solution look at what's happening in China China manufactures the greatest number of solar panels in the world and the greatest number of wind turbines in the world not because they want to save the world but because it makes money and big companies like you know the big oil companies are shifting the way in which they do business to still make money 2050 but they might be producing oil they'll be doing something else Paul I just like to agree with the comments from the questioner and when a future government or the current government does make more progress with climate policy if there is a new carbon price or an emissions trading scheme or similar then that really is a time when the Australian community needs to get behind them I think and the key challenge really is that people who are in the company is making money from a meeting are doing so at the moment and they are there and there's a lot of money on the line it's true so in our previous carbon pricing reform there were there was a lot of big campaigns from from companies and from from lobby groups to try to to end the price and in the end they were successful but next time around really the banks and others hopefully will come out of the woodwork a bit more and really get behind the government. We have a question from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry one of the major concerns raised out of the business communities the issue of carbon leakage which entails business investment basically being deflected to countries without climate policy and leading to higher higher emissions in the longer term what strategies do you suggest we take in convincing the business community that a carbon price or an ETS is the way to go given their concern with carbon leakage. Well the the previous I mean that is an important point what happens if we have a domestic policy maybe some companies will shift overseas our previous policy really considered that a lot and provided very generous provisions of free permits to emissions intensive trade exposed companies so the Gano review recommended that the government implemented that so companies that are particularly prone to that type of problem of leakage were really healthily compensated just talking about the Labor's Labor Party's proposal at the moment they're going to do similar so companies in sectors which are very prone to leakage will get a very generous really type of arrangement where they get they get a baseline if they emit above the baseline they can actually use 100% international permits to cover any remaining emissions above their baseline so in the end the effective carbon price for those companies in those sectors will be quite small. The Labor Party's also committed to a strategic industries fund of 300 million in the lead up to their ETS kicks in in 2020 so that's just try and help equip those industries you know with mechanisms to reduce their carbon emissions potentially to find new markets or new products if they're affected by the carbon price so Labor's factored that into their plan to some extent with that fund as well. Question over here. Now Mike Fahms is coming to you. Peter from SOS in the wake of Paris perhaps we can assume that in the Australian context where the election looks like it's going to be fairly close and the Greens may well constitute some sort of balance of power or close to it. Is it not reasonable to assume that the liberal incumbency is going to deploy tactics of green washing and popular techno fixes that sort of thing I mean I've noticed Turnbull has been very much revving up the idea of a very fast train from Sydney to Canberra. Obviously that is going to benefit the federal pollies in particular but it's also perhaps a bit of a spin-off from the whole sort of public interest in climate change and some desire to see some sort of a mirror to reform. Yeah it's an interesting point I'm not so sure that a very fast train I mean the thing about a very fast train is it's not very fast in coming. It gets talked about a lot usually around this point in the electoral side but I'm not entirely sure what its environmental impact would be anyway but I don't think too many of the politicians that are in Canberra at the moment are likely to benefit from it but nonetheless it will be very interesting to see what the political makeup of you know the House of Representatives in particular but also the Senate after this election and what what impact that will have on this policy area and a range of others. Did anyone else wish to comment? We're getting quite short for time here. I'm not sure whether we've got another question or if you wanted to comment here. Just you know I mean you mentioned whitewashing I think for greenwashing I think it's more like the cloak of invisibility actually. There's very little visible from either major either major parties when it comes to their their policy platforms in climate change energy during this election but you've raised one point though and that is electrification of transport. Now we've talked a lot about electricity production and sure that's a major part of our greenhouse gas emissions but so is transport and I think there's been quite a lot of cloak of invisibility around transport policy here and that's because there are a lot of incumbents out there with very loud squeaky wordless to use an analogy. So electrification is actually great for many reasons one is you can then produce electricity using carbon-free sources and that gets you to the transport problem. You also increase the demand for electricity and at the moment it's decreasing this is a threat to the grid and now and our national electricity supply security and also it's it's a good thing to do in terms of introducing technology that people want. Now the reason that we don't have a very fast train is because very big lobbies over the last four decades have argued very strongly against it and if we did go down the electrification route, rail electrification would be one of the key elements. Yes it was interesting I noticed that VW who of course got themselves quite a pertinent example this got itself into so much trouble for falsifying the emissions measurements and measurements in its in its vehicles has now announced that it's going to make a very heavy incursion into electric vehicles in the future so that's purely a sort of a commercial response but also presumably one that is aimed at rescuing its very heavily tarnished reputation. I have a question just here we might have to make this the last question I think. My name is Anna Van Duktrin I'm mainly a question for Mark but interested in other people's views. We know agriculture will be heavily is already starting to be impacted by climate change we know it's also a significant source of emissions in Australian emissions and I'm just wondering what does a adapted and CO2 reduced agriculture look like and is there anyone articulating that present in Australia? Thanks Anna probably the short answer for that is no but should it be yes so when you look globally at emissions from agriculture they're almost 30% across of the total so it's a very substantial component so that consists of direct emissions plus indirect emissions say from land clearing and and it's very much the same in Australia although our inventory isn't structured like that to add those numbers up quickly it's roughly something in the high 20s to 30% and so the really important thing is that in many cases there aren't cost effective ways of reducing those emissions we don't have cost effective ways of reducing nitrous oxide from cropland or methane from livestock and and yet there's a significant demand for those and they will continue to be a significant demand and growing demand due to increased population and consumption of food. Now one of the realities of the world is that people aren't very happy if they're starving and and when it comes down to it is that people will preference paying for food over paying for transport or paying for entertainment at the bottom of your Maslow's hierarchy as you know food water safety and so those are those are critical needs so when push comes to shove people will actually opt for food the importance of that is that that big sector that's 30% where we don't have much in the way of emission reductions is actually going to be there and be there on a continuing basis given our current R&D or lack of R&D to reduce it and even though other sectors are going to potentially reduce their emissions that will actually make agriculture a bigger and bigger proportion of the total and increase the pressure on agricultural emission reductions and so so what we'll have is is a almost like a fixed component in our system where we don't have too many options to do about it so I would actually argue that that is a really strong rationale for taking a really positive stance in terms of research and development connected with industry to actually start reducing those emissions in cost-effective ways thanks Mark would just have a very quick final question from the front here I'm Michelle Smith excuse me sorry I just like to challenge the suggestion that developing countries will be worse off if they don't have access to cheap coal and I wonder instead whether up to wealthy countries like Australia should be helping developing countries to develop renewables that's a good question I presume there is some work going on in this space but indeed so to address the second part of your question yes absolutely and indeed the ANU through the Australian Indonesia Center we're a partner in that is talking to the Indonesian government about ways in which they could increase their portfolio of non fossil fuel sources in the future we've got a delegation visiting this week actually to discuss exactly these issues in terms of the you know the impact of coal exports in developing countries so they have very little choice they have existing coal fired power stations they don't have a lot of money to invest they can't suddenly switch from coal to an alternative fuel source even if there was a political will to do so so to turn off the coal supply to those countries would be condemning them to a life of poverty and life of inequality that really it's not within our in within our responsibility to dictate and so that's why I'm saying coal won't go away immediately it'll transition out to 2050 when we need to be carbon neutral but in the meantime we can't condemn the developing world to a lower standard moving than they would otherwise had yes it's a very interesting point to finish on that I traveled to India with Tony Abbott when he was still Prime Minister and he was obviously talking to a Dhani officials there about the the giant karma for mine which is very controversial enormous venture and one of his justifications was that very point about delivering electricity to what he said was a hundred million people so you know in terms of Australia's coal exports to to India so those issues are you know I suppose that the sort of hinge point moments of policy where you have to work out how do you get from here to there and who gets who gets ground up in the process I think with the example of Indonesia I mean they're trying to expand their electricity grid they still have a large proportion is it 20% of the population without electricity larger and at the moment the Indonesian governments trying to do they also have a 23% renewable target for 2020 Mark did you want to interject two quick final comments just just in terms of that question because I think it is a really important question I think it is very context dependent and if you look at India there's a big push to get electricity out to you know huge portions of the population that don't have that electricity and and oftentimes that's presented as a centralized model so it's it's big coal fire power stations big grid systems to actually deliver that but the World Bank has actually come out with an analysis that says it's actually much better from point of view of economics and in terms of regional development to go to actually a small-scale distributed grid system which actually uses a lot more renewables than it does coal so so I think a lot of this is actually dependent on the context so where you are how close you are to existing grid power systems and it's dependent on the political context as well but but it's very clear now that putting in new renewable systems that's wind and solar PV is actually cheaper than putting in new coal so if you're actually going to scale out new systems the rationale I think is going to be increasingly that it's going to be a renewable yeah that's a really fabulous point Paul yeah coal is not going to be turned off overnight but certainly for new generation capacity in developing countries these days renewables are competitive so solar in Indonesia for example is competitive with coal but unfortunately there are still plans to build quite a lot of new coal fight generators in Indonesia and elsewhere but but I agree with the questioner for new field facilities the economics have changed and the advice would be if possible go renewables coal fight generators are around for a long time and they can create so much local pollution as well as carbon emissions so the economics does say if it's possible electricity provision is very important but we really should be aiming solar thanks very much I think we'll have to end it there it's a cold night and Hardy Canberans are out here talking about a very important policy issue I really want to thank you for staying with us through this very interesting discussion can we please thank Mark Howard and Ken Baldwin Paul Burke and Lee Bessler