3 February 2010
DAFF10/189T
E&OE
KIERAN GILBERT: Coming up on AM Agenda, our panel Mike Kelly and Steve Ciobo. First though joining me, the Minister for Agriculture Tony Burke. Good morning Mr Burke.
TONY BURKE: G’day, Kieran.
GILBERT: Providing incentives for business and farmers, obviously in your area of responsibility, to make emissions reductions voluntarily. What is wrong with that? Why will that be any less effective than your plan?
TONY BURKE: Well it comes back to something you used in the sentence, in the question, and that’s emissions reduction. The starting point of any response to climate change is meant to be that you’re reducing your carbon pollution. Under what Tony Abbott put forward yesterday there is no cap on carbon pollution. There is nothing in that plan that prevents emissions from continuing to go up. And your starting point on anything about climate change is meant to be that we’re trying to reduce carbon pollution, not continue to let it rise.
GILBERT: But they say they’ve got expert advice that says that they can achieve this 5% reduction by 2020 and that they will.
TONY BURKE: Well the proposal that they put out yesterday allows big polluters to continue to keep polluting, it allows that to continue. It puts no cap at all. You need to put a cap on pollution if you’re going to reduce your carbon pollution. What they’re allowing is for it to continue to increase. You’ve then got a situation where they say ‘well, if you go above the business-as-usual model, you’ll pay a penalty’. That gets kicked back to households in higher prices. But with no compensation. No compensation going back to households at all. At every level, whether it’s about trying to get a decent deal for families or whether it’s trying to reduce carbon pollution, what was offered yesterday fails the test.
GILBERT: But Tony Abbott says that his plan is modelled on a NSW Government approach. Sea Gas which is already secured 80 million tonne of reductions in emissions, a Labor Government approach operating in NSW, he says it’s working already.
TONY BURKE: Only at a Federal level can you put a total cap on pollution. The starting point of anything – and when we talk about the carbon pollution reduction scheme, it’s a cap and trade model. They keep criticising the trade part of it and forget the starting point is to have a cap. If we’re going to have a response to climate change, principle one, you stop increasing your emissions, and Tony Abbott won’t even get to that.
GILBERT: Well, it’s a simpler policy though to explain. You don’t have the trading, you don’t have the fees, the licences and so on. It’s simple – they’re going to purchase emissions reductions. That’s their argument, it’s a simple case to prosecute. Politically, have you got a challenge ahead of you to try and combat this?
TONY BURKE: Allowing carbon pollution to continue to increase is simple, and that’s what they’re doing. Point one, there’s no cap. Point two, there’ll be higher costs passed on to families whenever people go beyond the business-as-usual. And point three, you get the increased prices with no compensation for people.
GILBERT: But some of these things are going to resonate with people, like farmers contend [inaudible] the Government to store carbon in their soils. This is a practical measure that is going to resonate with farmers, people in your constituencies, the Minister for Agriculture. Why don’t you do something similar?
TONY BURKE: Well, we have in the proposal that was rejected by the Senate last year. Specific proposals that allow these opportunities for soil carbon. We’ve been – we’ve already, long before the legislation was put to the Senate last year – we’d already embarked on major research projects to get the nuts and bolts together to be able to do this, and in part of what was put to the Senate and rejected by the Senate last year, was an offset scheme that would allow farmers to be able to get a line of credit for storing carbon in the soil. But what we didn’t do was fudge the figures. And Tony Abbott was involved in a massive fudge yesterday. Because soil carbon at the moment, while it is something that we know and the science is increasingly telling us while it’s difficult to measure it will help in terms of climate change, it’s not part of our international obligations. It doesn’t meet that 5% internationally agreed target that until yesterday was bi-partisan. What Tony Abbott’s doing, is he is counting soil carbon as though it’s part of international accounting and it’s not. Two-thirds of his plan won’t meet the 5% target.
GILBERT: But you obviously see the merits in these sorts of practical measures, if you’re trying to pursue a similar one yourself. And things like planting 20 million trees by 2020, these sorts of things are likely to go down well in the broader electorate, these practical measures.
TONY BURKE: The measures that he’s got are unfunded, we don’t know where the money is going to come from. It can only result in higher taxes at the same time that we’re going to see a process leading to higher prices with no compensation for households. What he has put forward, he’s been able to talk about trees, been able to talk about a few different things but what he’s got is a media release to last him 24 hours. He does not have a policy that gets us anywhere by 2020.
GILBERT: The Copenhagen collapse though, the collapse of those talks into just rhetoric has certainly hampered the Government’s case though, and it’s opened the door for Tony Abbott on this.
TONY BURKE: No one’s pretending that Copenhagen achieved everything that we had hoped it would achieve. But lets also not get into a space where the world didn’t move forward at all at Copenhagen, because that would be incorrect. For the first time we actually got all the nations to be able to agree that we do have to get to binding targets. Now that is a massive shift to where we’ve been previously. So while we’re not pretending that Copenhagen delivered everything that we want, and there’s still a long way to go, to frame it the way that the Opposition are framing it I don’t think is an accurate call on what happened.
GILBERT: But the Prime Minister, on the politics of this, he’s conceded that the Government hasn’t sold its achievements well enough, yesterday at his news conference. Isn’t it fair enough to say that the Government hasn’t sold the emissions trading scheme well enough either? There’s too much confusion, people that don’t understand exactly what you’re on about.
TONY BURKE: Well what the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme does -
GILBERT: But do you concede that you haven’t sold it well enough?
TONY BURKE: The Prime Minister has been completely public about that. That’s been said. Australians do know we need action on climate change. You don’t have to look too closely at Tony Abbott’s announcement before you realise this is about increasing pollution, not decreasing it. And you don’t have to know too much about climate change to say that’s a policy that sends things in the wrong direction. You’ve then got a taxpayer bill that at the moment is completely unfunded, and he’s got to let the public know today where that money is going to come from.
GILBERT: On another matter, thousands of farmers protested about property rights yesterday here at Parliament but you didn’t attend, as Minister for Agriculture. Why is that?
TONY BURKE: The issue they were complaining about is an issue where, I’ve had this raised with me ever since I’ve had the portfolio. It’s a grievance running more than a decade. It dates back to before we came to office. Some of it’s state, there’s some anger at a COAG agreement that the Howard Government was involved with as well. On the face of it you’d think this is a good demonstration for a Labor minister to turn up to because there’s a lot of anger at what John Howard did and anger at other levels of government. There’s one thing though that I objected to, and objected to strongly, that protest was directly linked to the self-harm by Peter Spencer. Now as I go around the country, I see what has happened to communities following instance after instance of self-harm in the bush. And to see someone up a pole starving himself and to have protestors want to describe that as a ‘Tower of Hope’ – I find that quite sickening. The cause that they were wanting to talk about, in terms of wanting to be able to do more things on their land, it’s a legitimate thing to protest about. But under no circumstances when someone engages in self-harm will I do anything other than say they should stop.
GILBERT: The Prime Minister said he didn’t understand the exact point that they were making when it comes to what the Government’s done in terms of its own climate policy. Do you understand what they’re on about?
TONY BURKE: Well that’s why I say the complaints that they make, if you want to level them at a Federal level at all, there’s a fine argument they can get that has some criticisms against the Howard Government. There’s certainly nothing, nothing that this Government has done that in any way has interfered with what a farmer can do on their own land.
GILBERT: Okay, just one final issue. The personal records of Chinese businesswoman Helen Lu, an associate of the former Defence Minister, seems to contradict the statements that he made last year and suggest that she was spending money to cultivate political influence in that regard. Does this require further explanation?
TONY BURKE: Well I think these issues came to a conclusion when Joel resigned as a minister. I think that that brought these issues to a close. If there’s further information that somebody believes should be reported to the appropriate authorities, that’s what they ought to do.
GILBERT: Alright Tony Burke, appreciate your time.
TONY BURKE: Thank you.