The major parties have failed to deliver an energy policy that protects Australia

Although he didn’t say so directly, the Prime Minister made a telling admission in an interview in The Sydney Morning Herald  in August.

He effectively acknowledged that his Government’s climate change policies have failed to convince voters that the Government is actually addressing this issue. And in a tight election where the environment and climate change are proving to be important issues, this is a worry.

So far, the Government’s election strategy on environmental issues has been not to go beyond its current policies. It portrays these policies as sensible and effective, while anyone who goes beyond them, as the ALP does, is portrayed as extreme and economically irresponsible.

Ian Macfarlane, the Minister for Industry, said earlier this year that "The only way the greenhouse policy will change will be a change of government".

By shifting the environment debate onto economic grounds, the Government’s plan was to deny the ALP oxygen for their environment policies and instead confront them on an issue where the polls show it has a clear advantage.

This strategy was perfectly illustrated by the Government’s energy white paper, released in June. This policy contained additional subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and failed to increase Australia’s target for clean, renewable energy. This was the latest in a series of backward-thinking climate change policies from the Government, putting Australia at greater risk.

The Government claimed that going further than the policies in the white paper would threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investment.

The paper met with widespread criticism from environment groups, the renewable energy industry, many commentators and others concerned about the impacts of climate change, such as the Australian Medical Association (AMA).  In fact, just about the only praise came from major greenhouse polluters such as the coal and aluminium industries.

The Government appears to have misread the public mood.

It now recognises that the environment and climate change have emerged as major election issues.

One of the reasons for this is the current drought, which scientists have identified as being made more severe due to climate change.

Another reason is that the debate is moving and the Government is struggling to keep up.

As long ago as January 2000 business and political leaders meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos declared that "Climate change is the greatest challenge facing the world at the beginning of the 21st century".

Many prominent scientists agree, with the UK’s Chief Scientist, Sir David King, making worldwide headlines recently with his assertion that climate change is a greater threat to the world than terrorism.

The mainstream scientific consensus is that climate change is real, caused primarily by human activities, in particular the use of fossil fuels, and is already happening.

In early August, the National Farmers Federation, formerly sceptical that climate change was happening, declared it was one of the key issues facing Australian agriculture.  The West Australian Farmers Federation went further, calling on the Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Last year the Business Council of Australia dropped its long-standing opposition to the treaty.

Groups as diverse as the tourism industry, engineers, insurance companies, the AMA and renewable energy companies are publicly calling for further action on climate change, including Kyoto ratification and a ten per cent renewable energy target.

The Government’s record on climate change speaks for itself. The Prime Minister has personally rejected the Kyoto Protocol on several occasions, citing reasons that fail to stand up to close scrutiny.  His Cabinet has rejected proposals for emissions trading, a carbon tax and to increase Australia’s target for clean, renewable energy. Instead, Government policy has, judged as a whole, clearly favoured the major greenhouse polluting energy sources and industries.

Their own polling, by the Australian Greenhouse Office, has shown that 50 per cent of Australians believe the Government isn’t doing anything to address climate change.

It looks as if the Government is beginning to realise that this is an electoral weakness.

In The Sydney Morning Herald interview, the PM confirmed that the Government would release more environmental policies "across the board" during the election campaign, including ones to address climate change.

This is about as clear an admission as you will get that the Government’s energy white paper failed to convince voters that it was doing enough on climate change.

The Government has been forced to rethink its strategy and has decided to respond with further policy announcements.

The key question is whether these will contain anything of substance or just be existing policy re-launched or merely window-dressing.

The same day as the Prime Minister’s interview appeared, Mark Latham was reported in the media stressing the importance of climate change as an issue for Australia and repeating Labor’s long-held policy of ratifying Kyoto. 

The ALP’s commitments to ratify Kyoto, insert a greenhouse trigger in Commonwealth environment legislation, increase the renewable energy target to five per cent and in-principle support for emissions trading and greater energy efficiency measures mean the ALP’s climate policy is currently clearly more progressive than the Government’s.

However, despite this being the case, neither of the major parties current climate policies will protect Australia from climate change. They need to do more.

So what is needed to protect Australia from climate change – to prevent more frequent and severe droughts and bushfires and to save the Great Barrier Reef from coral bleaching and Australia’s ski fields from disappearing?

In what can often seem an overwhelming complex problem, the answer is refreshingly simple.

The latest science shows that Australia’s greenhouse pollution needs to be reduced by at least 60 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050 if Australia is going be protected from climate change.

It will require strong and visionary political leadership to get there. But it’s not impossible - the UK Government has already committed to such a target.

In the last Federal election campaign, the politics of climate change shifted quite dramatically when the ALP announced it would ratify Kyoto. The Prime Minister’s comments opened the door for further progress on this key issue.

Greenpeace calls on both major parties to commit to reducing greenhouse pollution by at least 60 per cent by 2050.

This is the measure by which they should be judged because it is the only one which will protect Australia from climate change.