Tony Abbott has promised to be a prime minister of action. Since coming to office on September 18, he has streamlined ministerial responsibilities and titles, sacked three public service chiefs and promised to cut 12,000 public service jobs over four years. As outlined in our cover story, Mr Abbott wants to be known as ‘an infrastructure prime minister’, and the government has made major infrastructure commitments across Australia.
But possibly the Coalition Government’s highest priority when it came to power was abolishing the carbon tax. Australia now has what The Age columnist Kenneth Davidson calls ‘a climate denial government’. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its September report it was ‘extremely likely’ that human activity was the dominant cause of climate change since 1951. It’s extremely worrying that as the science on climate change becomes more certain, our nation’s leadership on environmental issues is heading back into the dark ages. Under an Abbott government, we no longer have a Minister for Science for the first time since 1931. The Climate Change Authority, the Climate Commission and the Clean Energy Finance Corp will all be scrapped.
Supposedly this ‘streamlining’ of government will save money, but Mr Abbott’s short-term cost cutting measures will be at the expense of Australia’s long-term future.
On a positive note, local government has proved itself willing and able to proactively respond to climate change. Local Government Focus has run stories on cogeneration, trigeneration, aquifiers for heating, methane gas extraction to reduce gas emissions from landfill and energy efficient street lighting to name a few.
Public support for the scrapped Climate Commission has allowed the group’s former chief commissioner, Professor Tim Flannery, to relaunch the climate science body as a ‘clear, credible and authoritative and independent voice’ on the science and economics of carbon pricing. We can’t afford to leave climate change off the national agenda. Hopefully at some point our Federal Government will follow the lead of councils and concerned individuals across Australia and make our environmental future as high a priority as stopping the boats.
