The Dreyfus Files - The Age
Last week the Federal Opposition’s climate-change policies were effectively rejected by its conservative political allies locally and internationally.
Locally, the new Victorian Liberal Minister for Environment and Climate Change, Ryan Smith, stood by the former Labor government’s target of a 20 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
He also significantly backed our federal Labor government’s carbon price objective: ''as a whole of government, we acknowledge that a [national] carbon price is going to be the way to go and it is just a matter of looking at the detail.''
I am pleased that the new Victorian Liberal Government, in stark contrast to the Tony Abbott-led federal Coalition, wants to help with looking at the detail. As the federal Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change, I welcome Smith’s statement that ''we’ll try to be involved in that as much as possible''.
One of the Opposition Leader’s international political allies is even more directly opposed to the federal Liberal Party’s policy on climate change. The most senior British Conservative minister to visit Australia for many years, foreign secretary William Hague, spoke in Sydney last week about the Conservative-led government’s commitment ''to being the greenest government ever in Britain''.
He spoke with considerable pride about how Britain was the first nation to pass climate legislation with binding targets, set five-yearly carbon budgets to help with business and investment certainty, and to set up an independent institution - the Climate Change Committee - to ensure it meets its target of an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050.
''We are making use of a whole range of instruments to do that - an emissions trading scheme, tax systems and direct action - to reduce our emissions and transform our economy for the future,'' Hague said.
It is a great pity that when Tony Abbott made time to attend the British Conservative Party conference last year, he did not pay more attention to the climate-change policies the party has adopted with great enthusiasm.
With friends like the new Victorian Liberal government and the British Conservative government showing the way, it is surely only a matter of time before Abbott is forced to drop his stubborn and out-of-touch opposition to a carbon price.
It is in the interest of all Australians that Abbott drops his false claim that the Liberals’ incredibly expensive so-called ''direct action'' plan can achieve anything like the emissions cuts that are needed. As the British and Victorian conservative governments understand, a price on carbon is required to achieve a significant level of emissions cuts.
