TRACY MCKELLIGOTT, HOST: Joining me on the line now and it is 10.20pm in the evening in Glasgow, it is still Sunday, good morning and thanks for your time the Federal Member for Shortland, Pat Conroy. Is it cold over there?
PAT CONROY, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE PACIFIC, SHADOW MINISTER ASSISTING FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: It is very, very cold. I am looking forward to coming home for many reasons and one of them is warm weather.
MCKELLIGOTT: How did it feel to actually get on an aeroplane and go to the other side of the world?
CONROY: It felt very strange. Just going to Sydney Airport and getting on a plane and then the crowds here are massive, sort of 20,000 or 30,000 people. And you sort of – they’re doing it the proper way so you have to have a COVID test each morning before you can enter the conference sort of region of Glasgow, but just sitting in places with lots of people next to you, some who aren’t wearing masks, and you just feel strange, a bit wary.
MCKELLIGOTT: It really would be quite strange and I have seen some of the vision of exactly what you’re saying as people enter each day, and I am having a COVID panic attack so I don’t know how you’re going inside it all.
CONROY: (laughs) I am very glad we are taking daily tests.
MCKELLIGOTT: I bet!
CONROY: Everyone has to have a test before they get in. But yeah, it took some getting used to that’s for sure.
MCKELLIGOTT: I bet, I bet. Now listen, you’ve had a couple of very busy and exciting days and I know that each day of the conference has a different theme. We know that the world leaders have left and it’s now down to the people who will actually get the job done. What have you found so far?
CONROY: Well I think I’ve found a mixture of good and bad news, and the good news is that a lot of the countries around the world have ramped up their ambitions for 2030 including the United States and the United Kingdom, and that means for the first time the Nationally Determined Contributions of all countries - if the governments actually implement them - mean that we can keep global warming to about 1.8 degrees. Now we need to get it to 1.5 degrees, but that’s a real breakthrough.
So this conference has been successful from that point of view, but the bad news is that it just puts, it makes it even starker the refusal of Mr Morrison to increase our target because it yet again demonstrates that we are global laggards when it comes to action on climate change.
MCKELLIGOTT: Now there was quite a few, 40 nations that actually have decided that come 2030 they are no longer going to use coal fired power stations. How has the reaction been to that over there and in particular the fact that the big carbon emitters – Australia, the United States, a lot of those major countries – haven’t signed up to that agreement? What’s been the feeling over there?
CONROY: Well I think it’s generally positive. So 190 countries and companies have signed up to ending their support for coal fired power, and the big news is that it wasn’t just countries that didn’t have much coal fired power to go. Poland - which is even more dependent on coal fired power than us- has committed to phasing out coal fired power, Vietnam which was the first South Asian nation to commit to that, and Indonesia as well. And Indonesia just for context exports the greatest amount of thermal coal in the world, so for them to say ‘we’re planning on phasing out coal fired power’ is a really big deal.
So yes, the United States and Australia weren’t in it, but the United States is also the driving force behind the big methane initiative. So I think there is generally some momentum, and certainly South Korea made announcements, and all of that points in the direction that we need to be investing in new industries because our traditional industries that have brought so much wealth to our region, they’re not going to be there forever. And that’s scary, and that’s worrying, but that’s what this conference is all about and we need a plan. We need government policy to create new industries, and we’re not getting that at the moment.
MCKELLIGOTT: Now Pat, you’re the Opposition’s spokesperson but you’ve also got such a strong affinity for the Pacific Islands and I know you spent a lot of time and you are very dedicated to what’s going on over there. You have seen some quite disturbing presentations or displays over at that conference haven’t you?
CONROY: Absolutely, and the two that stand out in my mind and will forever, I will take them to my grave, is one, the presentation by Al Gore which just demonstrated the great challenge we have in terms of combating climate change and the impact it is having on people’s lives right now through floods and famines and human misery.
And then the second is a lot of countries have pavilions and the pavilion for Tuvalu is quite stark. There’s some sculptures of polar bears in lifejackets and a penguin with a rope around its neck. And for them it symbolises the fact that climate change isn’t just about surviving more heatwaves or losing a bit of waterfront property. It’s an existential threat to their nation’s survival. If we don’t keep climate change under 1.5 degrees, a lot of the Pacific Islands will cease to exist and we shouldn’t forget that.
MCKELLIGOTT: Absolutely, and look I must admit that obviously I keep an eye on, you know, I have been keeping an eye on your Facebook page and seeing what’s been going on over there, and I must admit Pat that was the image that - obviously I haven’t seen it live, but that is the image that will forever stay in my mind when I think about COP26 because to see, you know, polar bears in lifejackets and as you said that penguin, you know, hanging itself, it is quite confronting. But that is what the reality of it is like for the Pacific.
CONROY: Absolutely, and I met with some young Pacific leaders and other parts of the delegation who were really passionate about it, and I know a Pacific Islands Minister provided his address to the COP while standing in a foot of water to demonstrate the movement of water that is already happening in this particular island nation. And this is really important to them and it’s really important to us because they are our friends. They are our family as the Prime Minister likes to say, and quite frankly we are dogging on them by not taking climate change seriously.
And it’s obviously going to have a huge impact in Australia. The bushfires we are experiencing will get more intense, they are getting more intense and more frequent. The cyclones are getting worse and worse, so the Pacific Islands are the canary in the coal mine, but they won’t be the only ones massively negatively impacted by climate change unless we get our act together.
MCKELLIGOTT: Now I am sure it’s reached you over there in Glasgow that we have a visit today here in the Hunter by the Prime Minister. Now he’s going to several places, one of which is Ampcontrol and I understand that you did see the battery that he will be basically launching today. You saw that battery over there at the conference.
CONROY: Absolutely. It’s a battery that’s called LAVO and it’s a form of storing hydrogen power. So it’s a metal hydride battery where they produce the hydrogen gas that they store in the metal and then it’s sort of an alternate thing to the Tesla battery and it’s based on technology developed at the University of New South Wales in conjunction with great local companies like Ampcontrol and R&R Murphy, another great local company. And it’s an example of the great technology that’s being developed in our region that can deliver tens of thousands of new jobs for the Hunter and hundreds of thousands of new jobs throughout Australia.
The challenge is that they need a market, and a market will be driven by government policies. And this Government - before Mr Morrison turning up and cutting a red ribbon, unless they provide the policies, the legislation to take action on climate change, there won’t be a market in Australia which means those jobs will go overseas. To give you an example from a previous generation, 90 per cent of the world’s solar photovoltaic cells - the cells on people’s rooftops - are based on technology developed at the University of New South Wales, but we got very little jobs out of that because that technology was developed when Mr Howard was in government and that was an anti-renewable energy government.
So we could have had tens of thousands of renewable energy jobs, but instead those jobs went to China and Germany because they had governments that supported building those industries. So I welcome the fact that Mr Morrison is coming to our region, but unless he’s going to reverse his course on climate change, it’s a pretty hollow gesture.
MCKELLIGOTT: Yep. You’re with Tracy Mac on Newcastle Live radio, I’m speaking with Pat Conroy live from Glasgow where he is at the COP26 conference. Now obviously the other pat of today’s visit is to announce significant funding for the Port of Newcastle’s hydrogen hub. Now this is another study. This is not actually a change of legislation. It is not actually moving forward with something. It’s just another study. What do you put this down to at the moment Pat? Is this just grandstanding after COP26?
CONROY: It’s grandstanding and catching up. So I had the privilege of designing Labor’s hydrogen policy which we took to the last election, and that policy was $1.1 billion worth of funding to grow a hydrogen industry that could employ tens of thousands of Australians. And what we’ve got instead is the Prime Minister announcing $3 million and in fact he and his Ministers bagged Labor’s hydrogen policy as pie in the sky. Now they are trying to copy it and do it on the cheap.
And it’s a real tragedy because we need to be much more aggressive in developing this industry. We are in direct competition with countries in the Middle East and countries like Norway who are really investing in this area because they know it’s the way of the future. So it’s got huge potential not just producing hydrogen, but combining it with iron ore from the west of Australia and making a new steel industry. A new steel industry that could be centred in Newcastle according to a Grattan Institute report.
So there are hundreds of thousands of jobs in play, but we need to move much faster than we are doing now, and we need proper policy settings in Canberra that will drive this forward. I was talking to another company that had a display at the Australian pavilion and they were making the point that they could easily go offshore to Europe tomorrow and have a market 10 or 20 times as big as what they’ve got now in Australia. And that’s because in Europe there are governments who are driving policies to combat climate change and pull these technologies through.
So I am glad that Mr Morrison is going to the Port. Hopefully he can change the view on the container terminal while he is there -
MCKELLIGOTT: Yeah, that would be good.
CONROY: So that we can diversify our economy, but it smacks of coming up to an election for me I am sorry to say.
MCKELLIGOTT: Pat I know this is pie in the sky and I often get accused of being Pollyanna, but you know, we are at the stage now where, you know, this has almost got to be like COVID. This has to be bipartisan, we have to begin to really work together as Government, not as an Opposition and an in-Government. Do you ever see the day where we will actually get on the one page?
CONROY: I hope so. I honestly hope so. And for example, we successfully negotiated the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation with Malcolm Turnbull in 2009 and unfortunately he got overthrown by Tony Abbott and that legislation failed in the Senate and the Greens voted with the Liberals. And we supported Malcom Turnbull when he was Prime Minister’s National Energy Guarantee not because it was the best policy, but because it gave us the best chance of a bipartisan approach.
It doesn’t have to be a political knife fight. If you look at robust working democracies like the United Kingdom and Germany, they’ve had bidding wars where each political party would say ‘no we are going to do more on climate change at elections’, not this political knife fight. So it can change. And I honestly think that climate and energy policy is the greatest failure of Australian politics since Vietnam.
MCKELLIGOTT: I agree, both sides, anybody. It’s been the greatest policy failure. I mean this sounds ridiculous Pat but I can remember, I grew up in Adamstown Heights and I can remember driving down Princeton Avenue and when they extended that up into The Hill and they knocked all of those trees down, and I was a Greenie at that point in time because, you know, when you’re 12 everything is green. But you know, it’s been going on for that long that we’ve known there’s an issue. We’ve just ignored it and ignored it and ignored it. We can’t ignore it anymore and we’ve got to come together.
CONROY: Oh well exactly. And for example, the first world leader to point out global warming was Margaret Thatcher, and you can’t get more right wing than Margaret Thatcher. The greatest champion for action on climate change in the last 10 years would be Angela Merkel, a very conservative German politician.
This does not have to be a left-right issue but unfortunately – and I am not trying to be partisan, you can actually look at independent studies – the Liberal-National Party think that they win votes by keeping this as a polarising issue where they can scare people about Labor’s policy. It’s doing the nation a great disservice, and we are losing huge economic opportunities, we are losing out on jobs, and we are losing out on – losing time to take action on climate change. And I don’t want to moral-off too much because no one in politics is squeaky clean, but I honestly think that future generations will condemn all politicians but especially the current Liberal and National Government for their action on climate change. They are betraying future generations. I don’t say that lightly. They are betraying our kids’ future to win votes.
MCKELLIGOTT: And it’s not good enough, it’s really not.
CONROY: No. It’s a disgrace to be quite honest.
MCKELLIGOTT: Mate, when do you head back home? How much longer are you in Glasgow for?
CONROY: About another 36 hours. I’ve got one more full day at the conference tomorrow which is chock-full of meetings and then we jump on a plane around lunchtime on Tuesday. So I will be very keen to get home. It’s been an enormously interesting and important conference, but it’s the longest I’ve been away from home for at least two years thanks to COVID so I am looking forward to getting home.
MCKELLIGOTT: I can imagine. Well listen when you are home, I’d love for you to come into the studio and have a chat because no doubt you’ll be presenting a report of some description to your Parliamentary colleagues so I would love to just have a bit of a chat in the studio and just talk you through the entire process and where we go to from here. But travel safely, and I am very pleased tat you’ve been able to use your passport, I feel very jealous.
CONROY: (laughs) well definitely, let’s set a date and I’d love to catch up and brief you on everything.
MCKELLIGOTT: Sounds like a plan, thank you. Travel safe home.
CONROY: Take care, cheers. Have a great morning.