TRACY BOWDEN, PRESENTER: Climate change was a key issue in the federal election and remains a political hot potato.

In one of its first actions on taking office, the Coalition government abolished the Climate Commission, which had been established by Julia Gillard to provide the public with information on global warming.

Now the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that there is a 95 per cent probability that humans are responsible for global warming.

The Environment Minister Greg Hunt has promised the Federal Government's Direct Action plan will reduce carbon emissions by five per cent by 2020, but environmental groups claim this is nowhere near enough.

Greg Hunt joins me now from Canberra.

Greg Hunt, the IPCC report paints a picture of rising sea levels, bushfires, higher temperatures. How urgent is it that Australia act on this?

GREG HUNT, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: Well I do think it is important that we act, and one of the great tragedies of the previous government's system is that in fact our emissions between 2010 and 2020 go up during the period of the carbon tax from 560 to 637 million tonnes. That's why I'm determined that we take real action to actually reduce emissions. So, do we accept the science? Yes. Do we accept the targets? Yes. Do we think that there is a far better way of both taking pressure off households and reducing emissions? Absolutely.

TRACY BOWDEN: Let me just pick you up on the comment you just made about the reports showing that emissions would go up in the next seven years under the carbon tax.

GREG HUNT: Correct.

TRACY BOWDEN: What you failed to mention is that under the very same modelling, emissions would go up even further without a carbon tax. You just failed to mention that.

GREG HUNT: Look, this is the report Australia's emissions for 2012, which was not just released last year, but it was provided in form to the United Nations only days before the election. And the critical point here, which you would never hear from the ALP in government, is that under the carbon tax between 2010 and 2020 Australia's emissions go up, not down. They go from 560 to 637 million tonnes.

TRACY BOWDEN: But I don't want to harp - I don't want to spend all our time on this, Minister, but the fact is that the report shows that they would go up even further without a carbon price. Do you disagree?

GREG HUNT: The real point here is that we end up having to buy 100 million tonnes of emissions reduction from offshore, whether it's from Europe or from Kazakhstan or elsewhere, at an average price, according to the Government during the election campaign of $38, as they then were, or $3.8 billion a year. So, what does this mean for Australians? If you care about climate change, you'd look at the carbon tax and you'd say, "It didn't even do its job." The whole reason for having this was to reduce emissions. In the end, it didn't do its job, it doesn't do its job, the ALP said they'd terminate it, we're still living with it and it's not going to achieve the outcome of reaching our targets without having to go offshore to buy $3.8 billion a year by 2020 of emissions reduction.

TRACY BOWDEN: Let's not talk about the past, let's talk about what you're going to do.

GREG HUNT: Sure.

TRACY BOWDEN: You're saying you can achieve a five per cent emissions reduction by 2020. How certain are you that you can do that?

GREG HUNT: I am very confident. I am certain that we can do that.

TRACY BOWDEN: Is there any independent analysis that supports your projections?

GREG HUNT: Sure. At the time of the policy being released on 2nd February, 2010, we set out 10 different papers, including the work of Frontier Economics. Since then I haven't become less certain, I've become more certain and really for three very simple reasons. Firstly, the actual size of the task has decreased. We now know that instead of a task of 750 million tonnes over eight years, we're looking at a task closer to 440 million tonnes - exactly the sort of thing we said pre-election. Secondly, the cost of these emissions reductions - so we'd actually go and clean things up; cleaning up waste coal mine gas, waste landfill gas - is less than we had anticipated at the time of the policy. And the third thing is - and this is very important - the pool of potential emissions reduction or what's known sometimes as abatement is likely to be greater than we'd anticipated in 2010. So on all three fronts everything has moved in the direction of a policy which cannot only be achieve, but when you look around the world you'd say, "Where exactly has a carbon tax worked?," because it didn't work in Australia - the Labor Party said they wanted to terminate it - and it hasn't, I've got to say, been particularly successful in the European model.

TRACY BOWDEN: Now let's talk about this, this undertaking you made when in opposition that you'd honour a Labor government commitment to increase the emissions reduction target if necessary. Do you stand by that? Will you increase that target if necessary?

GREG HUNT: Well we haven't changed our position and we've always had bipartisan support for the five per cent target and the conditions for any change. So that's not an issue of debate. The debate isn't about the targets. I'm not saying that we're there yet; there's a long way to go. We've always said we'd do the review in 2015.

TRACY BOWDEN: Under the Cancun Agreement Australia said that it could potentially go as high as a 25 per cent reduction. So there is room to move there, isn't there? Is that the case? You could go as high as 25?

GREG HUNT: Look, I don't want to set particular figures. We're committed to the minus five per cent and we have given bipartisan support to the conditions for any change in target. That's something that we'll assess further down the track in 2015. The important thing is that we actually do things that don't hurt the economy, but do reduce emissions. The problem with the carbon tax is it does hurt the economy and it barely has any significant impact on emissions. That's why we want to get rid of that and we hope that the ALP will respect the will of the people and that's also why we want to take direct action to clean up waste coal mine gas, to clean up power stations, to clean up waste landfill gas, to capture carbon in our soils and our trees and through a grand initiative on energy efficiency.

TRACY BOWDEN: Now the Prime Minister's said that he won't budge on the budget. There's a certain amount of money allocated and whether you reach ...

GREG HUNT: Correct.

TRACY BOWDEN: ... the target or not, that's it. Does that suggest you won't reach the target? There's a possibility you won't. And what does that say how about serious the Government's taking this?

GREG HUNT: No, we said from day one, again, back in February, 2010, that the budget is capped. It's an allocation of $300 million, $500 million and $750 million a year. That compares with a carbon tax of $9 billion a year in its current form. So it is a very different approach. But remember, the carbon tax is just an electricity tax. What we're doing is proposing to go and directly clean things up, so there is a very different approach. Is it a capped budget? Absolutely. I argued that it should be a capped budget when we were setting this out because I thought that was the right way to do it. And since we set out those very conservative figures, I think that we were generous in the allocations, as I say, the price of abatement or emissions production has dropped, the volume of potential abatement has increased and the gap which we have to bridge has decreased. So am I confident that we can reach our targets? Yes. Am I certain that we can reach our targets? Yes.

TRACY BOWDEN: Well we shall see. Greg Hunt, thanks for speaking to us.

GREG HUNT: Thanks very much.