Yesterday, the ALP shared this image from the Climate Commission on Facebook with this simple message:
“Today the Climate Commission released a report linking the extreme weather events experienced around Australia this summer to climate change. SHARE if you take action against climate change seriously.http://climatecommission.gov.au/report/the-angry-summer/“
The message is part of a simple narrative; as a party that supports a carbon price, the ALP is the true party of climate action. It is a message that is steeped in rank hypocrisy that needs to be called out.
The ALP’s hypocrisy comes in two forms; the history of the carbon pricing scheme, and their range of other climate policy disasters.
Let’s have a look at the history of the scheme to start off with. After the original Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was dumped, and with the rise of Julia Gillard to the Prime Ministership, the ALP looked to be heading nowhere on climate change. There was the Citizens Assembly on carbon pricing, which would have pushed any action to at least 2013, and the infamous “there will be no carbon tax under a Government I lead”. The current carbon pricing scheme only came about because of the minority government and the insistence from the Greens that the ALP support it. These facts are important to remember, as it shows a party that was kicking and screaming to the current system – not one that was as willing to embrace it at it seems to be now.
But even with this newfound embrace, the ALP still can’t hold its head up high. In a range of other policy areas, the ALP have been awful on climate change.
For example, beyond our own emissions, it’s clear that the biggest impact Australia has on carbon emissions is through coal mining. We mine huge amounts of coal; with Australia being the world’s largest coal exporter in the last decade. On this issue however, the ALP Government has been next to useless. Over the past few years, the Environment Minister Tony Burke has done basically nothing to halt to growth of coal mining in this country. He has approved significant coal infrastructure, including recently the Maules Creek Mine in NSW (even though there were allegations that it fudged elements of the approval process), a new $6.9billion coal terminal at Abbot Point, and Gina Rinehart’s Alpha Coal Mine in QLD.
And this doesn’t look like it is going to stop any time soon. The Government has declared itself a lover of coal mining. After a story was leaked in March last year that Greenpeace was setting up a fund to legally challenge coal mine development, the Government was quick to attack activists, and strongly defend Australia’s coal mining
Environment Minister, Tony Burke said:
“That’s (the carbon price) the way to make sure that as a nation and as a planet that we do the right thing by the atmosphere.”
“I’m not supportive for a minute of further actions on top of that that are simply designed to undermine people who are doing their jobs and doing them legally.”
Trade Minister Craig Emerson went much harder:
“We would have a global depression if we just said that’s it, we’re out of coal, we’re just going into complete renewable energy now.”
“Some of the people behind this believe that’s good for the world.
“It would mean mass starvation. It would be a global depression, and they ought to wake up to that instead of living in a fantasy land and organising these sorts of campaigns.”
And it’s not just coal mine development where the ALP have been awful on climate change. A report in 2011 from the Australian Conservation Foundation for example showed that the Australian Government spent 11 times more on fossil fuel subsidies than it did on climate change programs – a massive number. Despite numerous rumours that these subsidies have been planned to be cut at successive budgets, they still sit on our balance books.
Finally, despite what you may hear, the Labor Party’s approach at international negotiations has not been climate friendly. For example, in the climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, the Australian Government was slammed for bullying a number of Pacific nations to agree to a 2 degree limit on global warming. Following questions in the lead up to last years climate negotiations, it was revealed that the Government would only be taking a 0.5% on 1990 levels to the negotiatingtable, well below what nearly all other developed countries were bring to the fore.
The thing about supporting action on climate change is that you can’t just ‘do one thing’ and then suddenly be a climate hero. If you’re cutting emissions out at one point, but then putting many more into the atmosphere at another, you’re not actually doing anything to help the climate in the long-term. You have to do it all – work on our domestic emissions, as well as helping the international effort. Whilst the ALP has a carbon price, and it makes some nice noises on the importance of climate change, it pretty much fails everywhere else when it comes to the issue. And it’s about time this is called out.