The House of Representatives has voted in favour of legislating Labor’s climate target – a 43 per cent cut in emissions from 2005 (a big year for land clearing) by 2030. In September, presuming it gets past the Senate with the help of the Greens and former Wallaby captain David Pocock, it should be law.
In the house on Thursday, the Greens voted in favour of Labor’s bill, and so did the Teals. Bridget Archer crossed the floor. The rest of the Peter Dutton-led Coalition, channelling the common bedfellows of climate denialism and nuclear advocacy – they both attempt to kick climate action into the next decade – voted against it and any amendment at each and every turn.
After decades of political bastardry – from the Howard government at Kyoto, to the Abbott regime on the CPRS and the carbon price, to the political decapitation of party leaders on both the left and the right – the vote is an important and landmark moment.
But it is largely symbolic. Yes, it sends a signal to the business community that should encourage investment, but there is also the fear that this target is so modest business might be tempted to think they can get away with little more. There aren’t many business groups advocating that we should be respecting the science.
And that’s the problem here. The 2030 target – so much better than the Coalition’s derisory offering of 26-28 per cent – is still not in the same ballpark of where the scientists say it needs to be.
It should be at least 60 per cent, if not 70 per cent by 2030, if the aim here is truly to do the best we can to protect the future for those who follow. The Greens proposed to increase the target to 75 per cent. Labor joined with the Coalition to vote against that amendment.
Climate and energy minister Chris Bowen is doing a good job.
He was thrown a shit sandwich on his first day as minister when the fossil fuel industry went rampant and created a new market crisis, and he sounds like he really cares, drives an EV, and has taken time to negotiate with the Greens and is fully behind the landmark move to put environment back into the energy market rules.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese is another matter. He professes to want to end the “climate wars”. But in the very week that he talked of the importance of climate action, he has been digging up old grievances and busily chipping away at the Greens for voting against Kevin Rudd’s CPRS all the way back in 2009.
Former prime minister Paul Keating, and others, are repeating the same mantra. I know footballers who are still angry at the scars from sliding tackles from decades earlier. But this is ridiculous. The reality is the CPRS had been reduced to near uselessness by months of compromise with a Coalition party that then reneged on the deal.
The Greens were right to vote against it, because Labor refused to even negotiate with them to restore some credibility and make it useful. That lost opportunity was amplified by the extraordinarily successful package put together a few years later by the Gillard government, the Greens and the other independents.
It can actually be done, although the Coalition’s cynical dismantling of the carbon price legislation shows it can just as easily be undone too.
The dismal fear is that Albanese hates the Greens and is blinded by it. They have forced him to work hard to retain his inner city seat of Grayndler, and anyone attending a candidates’ forum at the Marrickville town hall over the past decade or so will have witnessed his fury and contempt of his rivals.
It’s enough to question exactly where he stands on climate action. In the past week, Albanese has been parroting Coalition and coal industry talking points about the clean virtues of Australia’s fossil fuel exports. Did someone forget to move the ex Mineral Council of Australia operatives out of the PMs office after Morrison departed?
Albanese’s fossil fuel export defence is bad enough, but in a wealthy country that boasts of so many alternatives and solutions, where so many experts point to the riches – economic and environmental – from a rapid shift to green energy and green industry, it is as untenable as it is unforgivable.
A few weeks ago, my first grandson – hello, Felix – entered the world. It was a moment of such joy and emotion that the last thing I wanted to do was work. So I didn’t. You could, for a time, shove and store your capacity mechanism where the sun don’t shine and the wind is intermittent.
The reality is, however, that we owe it to these new generations to work even harder, to give them half a chance of enjoying the same standard of living, and the same natural beauty, that we have been blessed with.
The Greens and the Teals were right to vote in favour of Labor’s climate bill. Greens leader Adam Bandt showed some strong political nous to push it through his party’s ranks.
Yes, it was largely for political optics, and there were strong words said at the Greens gatherings in the Gold Coast hinterland last month and in the party room in Canberra this week, but at the very least it provides a platform for what comes next.
When the ceremonial parts of climate action are over, Bandt and the rest of the Greens and the Teals and the other climate independents will need to push Labor in every corner, in the bowels of the budget, in the grants systems and the subsidies, in the approvals process, the environmental regulations, and the redesign of energy markets. And, most importantly, challenging new coal and gas projects that risk being the carbon bombs of the future.
Climate action, whether Labor likes it or not, needs to be ramped up. And quickly. Bowen “hopes” and “expects” Australia can do better. But as Bandt told parliament on Thursday: “We are not doing this just to cut pollution a little bit. We are doing it to try to stop climate change becoming a runaway chain reaction.”
Otherwise, there’s not much point. There are opportunities to be seized, futures to protect, battles to be fought. We need them – the Greens, the Teals, and Labor too if it cares – to go hard, very hard. We voted for it. Our lives – and those of Felix and his mates, and your children and grand children – depend on it.
See also:Â Ministers to put environment back into energy market rules in landmark move for renewables
Plus: Too slow, too coal: ESB capacity market proposal slammed by nearly everyone
And:Â Energy Insiders Podcast: Why this should be Australia’s last energy crisis
