UPDATE 2/12: Australia’s government has failed to pass laws to create a carbon-trading scheme, ahead of next week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, after the country’s Senate rejected proposed legislation for the second time. [More at Nature News.]
The leader of Australia’s opposition party has been voted out in favour of a replacement who will backtrack on the party’s support for government climate change policies.
Former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull had made a deal with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to get cap and trade legislation passed in Australia’s Senate (see: Climate change induces meltdown in Australian opposition party). However the deal has backfired badly, with Turnbull ousted and the legislation stalled.
Tony Abbott, who ousted Turnbull by 42 votes to 41, said today, “Now this Emissions Trading Scheme legislation, which is really an energy taxation scheme, does deserve the most rigorous scrutiny by this Parliament. This is a $120b tax on the Australian public and that is just for starters.”
He added that is would be “grossly irresponsible of us to wave this through the Parliament”, so the under-new-management Liberal Party will attempt to refer the bill to committee for more debate, pushing it back into next year. If this doesn’t prove possible they will oppose the legislation in the Senate.
As noted previously, this will likely mean the bill falls and as it has already been rejected once by the Senate this will allow Rudd to call a general election. Some previous suggestions have been that Rudd would cruise to victory on a platform of dealing aggressively with climate change.
Abbott says this does not concern him. “I am not frightened of an election and I am not frightened of an election on this issue,” he said.
Media reaction below the fold.
With the Liberal’s hard-Right faction taking over, the Rudd Government will fall short of the seven Senate votes it needs for the ETS to pass. And the Opposition is poised to launch the mother of all scare campaigns on a scheme that Mr Abbott describes as a “great big tax” on electricity, petrol and energy.
…
Greg Combet, the Government’s ETS spokesman, lashed out at the Liberals for lurching to the Right. “The extremists, climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists have clearly gained control of the Liberal Party,” he said.
Acting house leader Stephen Smith … returned the chamber to the business of the day – waiting for the Senate to deal with Labor’s emissions trading scheme.
“We are, of course, in continuation awaiting the Senate’s consideration of the carbon pollution reduction scheme,” he said. The house could sit “possibly tonight and possibly tomorrow”.
As it happens I know Tony Abbott slightly, and once spent a very pleasant morning with him some years ago in his office in Manley, discussing green issues among other things. I even, at his request, gave him a line for a speech he was preparing. So it came as a bit of a surprise a little while ago when I heard that he had called the argument for climate change “absolute crap”. But, then it may have surprised him too, for this morning – in a quote to cherish – he said this “was not my most considered opinion”.
– Daily Telegraph environment correspondent Geoffrey Lean
A journalist asks: Why did he say at a Liberal branch meeting of heated members that climate change is “crap”? Answer: “It was a bit of hyperbole. It is not my considered position…. climate change is real.”
– Columnist Andrew Bolt, in the Herald Sun
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Australia is experiencing the world’s first political crisis of the climate change age. … It is a test case of political will – especially on the right – to pay the price of global warming.
– The Guardian (pre Turnbull’s ousting)