Australia and world not moving fast enough to avoid 2C warming, Martin Parkinson says

Extract from The Guardian

Climate change

In wide-ranging interview, former top bureaucrat says using carryover credits to meet Paris targets will cause Australia significant problems

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Thu 19 Dec 2019 04.00 AEDT Last modified on Thu 19 Dec 2019 04.03 AEDT

Martin Parkinson, former head of Scott Morrison’s department, says, ‘We have missed a decade of mitigation action and adaptation action.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Governments both in Australia and internationally are not moving fast enough to avoid 2C warming, according to the former head of Scott Morrison’s department, and Australia is also creating a significant problem for itself down the track by deploying carryover credits from Kyoto to meet the Paris target.
In a frank and wide-ranging interview on Guardian Australia’s politics podcast, Martin Parkinson – the former secretary of the prime minister’s department and the bureaucrat at the centre of policymaking at the federal level on climate change during the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments – reflected on the experience he describes as the worst of his professional life.
Parkinson said John Howard pursued constructive climate action towards the end of his prime ministership, pursuing an emissions trading scheme, but progress was halted because of a “civil war” inside the Coalition and because of “truly appalling” behaviour by the Greens in sinking Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
The former top bureaucrat excoriated the Greens, declaring that from his vantage point, they “never wanted to see anything succeed. If you are the party of protest, you don’t want to take away your protest platform. Maybe I’m being a cynic, but I think that’s what happened.”

Parkinson said the Greens didn’t accept that you could put a mechanism in place and then dial targets up and down depending on where the community was at and the demands on Australia, courtesy of being signatories to international agreements. “I can’t see inside their minds but I’ve never heard anyone from the Greens apologise for what they have done.
“And let’s be blunt about it, 12 years on the [emissions reduction] targets are no more ambitious – if anything, they are watered down from where we should be, and that’s not the current government’s fault, that was Tony Abbott.
“We have missed a decade of mitigation action and adaptation action.”
Parkinson said the decade of inaction had prompted business to try and seek its own solutions to lowering emissions, rather than wait for the government to end the hyperpartisan war. He said business in 2019 was acutely conscious that climate change meant the risk of stranded assets, more natural disasters and a potential “tsunami” of liability when superannuation funds and pensions funds turn on companies for failing to manage carbon risk.
He said the outlook was really challenging. “I cannot see governments here or overseas moving fast enough to avoid 2C, let alone 1.5C, just to be really blunt about it.

“The International Energy Agency, which is hardly a bunch of crazy climate [change] believing leftists, says we are on track for 2.7C to 3.5C even if countries do what they are committed to do for Paris – and they are not doing what they have committed to do.”
Parkinson said the Morrison government’s decision to use carryover credits from the Kyoto period to account for about half the abatement required under Australia’s 2030 target was going to create significant problems down the track. Using the Kyoto-era accounting means Australia can meet the Paris target nominally while delaying a significant amount of practical emissions reduction.
“If you use the carryovers, then at the end of 2030 the gap you’ve got to close, as you go into whatever comes next, is that much bigger,” he said.
Parkinson retired from his position in August. Before heading the prime minister’s department, Parkinson was the secretary of the Treasury department and the climate change department. Under John Howard, he ran the Shergold review, which cleared the path for the Liberals to adopt the policy of emissions trading, and he remained at the centre of policymaking in the Rudd and Gillard eras, before being sacked from Treasury by Tony Abbott. He was brought back to run the prime minister’s department when Malcolm Turnbull took the Liberal leadership.

Asked whether the climate policy failure was the worst experience of his professional life, Parkinson said: “Yes, it was. It was awful on a number of fronts. We were so close [with the CPRS].”
Coupled with all this, Parkinson said he inherited responsibility for managing the fallout from the home insulation scheme. “We’d had four young Australians tragically die, and it was awful”. He said he and his colleagues had “many, many sleepless nights”.
“That whole period was absolutely terrible,” he said.
Parkinson said the broader cause of reform in Australia had faltered because there was no longer a consensus, either in the political class or the economic profession, about what needed to be done. He said some participants in public life wanted to “pretend that really complex problems are really simple” when the reality was there were a number of problems that government couldn’t fix.
While he maintained a positive view of ministers and their advisers, including the current prime minister, Parkinson said ministers often came to their posts significantly unprepared. Ministers were asked to assume awesome responsibilities without proper training.
He expressed disappointment that the Morrison government has rejected some of the central recommendations of the recently released Thodey review, such as adopting a code of conduct for ministerial advisers.
“I think the vast majority of people who go into parliament or ministerial offices are trying to do the right thing, so I don’t see training or a code of conduct for them as any way a negative – it would be about helping them do their jobs better and positioning them much better,” Parkinson said.

He says there was some antipathy in the government about the Thodey review process. “I think there’s a reasonable number of people in the government who took the attitude that this was a Malcolm Turnbull/Martin Parkinson frolic, and were never really committed to it, and definitely didn’t want to do anything that would have impacted on their freedom to operate.”