GOVERNMENT TELEGRAPHS SAME OLD LIES AND SCARE CAMPAIGNS

Media Release

Mark Butler

Shadow Minister for Environment
 Climate Change and Water

Date:  10 August 2015

Once again, News Limited have teamed up with the Abbott Government to produce a story on climate change action that is utterly false. 

Today’s article is based on one huge inaccuracy: Labor did not adopt emissions reduction targets at its National Conference in July. 

Strangely, this fact was omitted from the story. 

It is true that Labor has committed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius on pre-industrial levels, along with the US, China, the European Union and, as the Daily Telegraph omitted from their story, the Coalition under Tony Abbott.

This article is conspicuously timed, just a day before Tony Abbott’s Liberals release their emissions reduction targets for Australia. The Government needs to demonstrate how their targets are consistent with their commitment to the Two Degree Warming Scenario. 

The modelling referred to in today’s article is ridiculously outdated and fails to take into consideration the huge fall in the cost of renewable energy or the decline in electricity demand due to the fall in manufacturing. 

The modelling relied upon by the Daily Telegraph is so old, the Department of Climate Change doesn’t even exist anymore. 

As the world’s biggest polluter per head of capita in the OECD, Australia has a responsibility to do its fair share to reduce pollution. 

Tony Abbott’s only response to this has been to line the pockets of the big polluters with $2.55bn of taxpayers’ money and to run ridiculous scare campaigns. 

An ETS is not a carbon tax and as Bill Shorten made clear at Labor’s National Conference, we will not be deterred by the pathetic scare campaign being run by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey’s Liberals. 

Two thirds of Australians have asked for the Government to take climate change seriously. If Labor is elected at the next election, that’s what we’ll do. 

We’ll put a legal cap on carbon pollution. We’ll increase the share of renewable energy in our electricity mix to 50 per cent by 2030. And we will create the jobs of the future through an Electricity Modernisation Plan. 

Tony Abbott is stuck in the past and wants to take all of Australia with him.