TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS CONFERENCE ON GOVERNMENT'S DEAL ON DIRECT ACTION

Media Release

Mark Butler MP.

Shadow Minister for Environment
 Climate Change and Water

Date:  30 October 2014

MARK BUTLER, SHADOW MINISTER FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: Good morning everyone. Well, a report from Reputex this morning confirmed that the deal done yesterday between Clive Palmer and Tony Abbott, at best, will deliver 20 to 30 per cent of the emissions reduction that is needed by Australia to get to the five per cent target by 2020. This is a devastating report from Reputex, it confirms that the deal announced yesterday is utterly hopeless for Australia’s future. What it means is that in order to get to the five per cent target, the Australian Government, Tony Abbott is going to have to spend, on Ken Henry’s estimate, four to five billion dollars per year between now and 2020 just to get to the five per cent reduction. Or else, it means that Tony Abbott’s going to have to give up on any substantial attempt to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution. What it also means is that Tony Abbott is going to go to meetings like the G20 next month and a range of other meetings over coming months leading into next year, that will discuss climate change, whether or not he likes it, he’ll go to those meetings completely empty handed while countries like the United States, China and many others have serious plans to tackle climate change. The deal done yesterday between Clive Palmer and Tony Abbott has left Australia utterly empty-handed.

JOURNALIST: Is it a positive thing that the Climate Change Authority will at least investigate an ETS?

BUTLER: Well, the Climate Change Authority is a great authority filled with great people. It’s done work on this before. This is an assignment, frankly, you could have given a first year high school student who had access to the internet. This is an utter joke. And for Clive Palmer to claim that somehow he has saved the ETS – which was the headline on his media release – either shows that he doesn’t understand the deal that he has done with Greg Hunt or that he has developed an extraordinary capacity for spin.

JOURNALIST: [INAUDIBLE]

BUTLER: Well, Labor has been utterly steadfast on this. We took an emissions trading scheme to the last election, we argued the case for an emissions trading scheme in the House of Representatives and the Senate. There was a real, substantial emissions trading scheme before the Senate only a couple of months ago and Clive Palmer lined up with Tony Abbott to kill it. So, he’s not in a position to be issuing media releases saying he saved the ETS when he joined with Tony Abbott to kill an ETS only a couple of months ago.

JOURNALIST: Isn’t it time for Labor to introduce its own proposed alternative?

BUTLER: We had a proposed alternative for the last several months, we released draft legislation before the last election, we issued costings that would reflect the change from the carbon tax which we said we would terminate for an emissions trading scheme. You could not get more detail, it ran to hundreds of pages, it had been released and the subject of comment from business and dozens of other stakeholders. It was a proposal killed by Tony Abbott.

JOURNALIST: Do you think the safeguards for emissions in Direct Action will be able to stop them emitting too much without penalty?

BUTLER: Well of course it can’t. A meaningful safeguards mechanism will involve a substantial price on carbon pollution and Tony Abbott has made it clear he’s not interested in that. He’s just not interested. So what we have is a situation where billions and billions of tax payers dollars will be handed over to some polluters to make some change to the way they operate, changes that many of them would have been intending to make anyway, can now do so on the taxpayers’ chip. While on the one hand, they will do nothing to prevent other companies from blowing their carbon pollution, from massively increasing their carbon pollution.

JOURNALIST: You don’t have any faith that Australian businesses will do the right thing? You think they need a stick?

BUTLER: Well Australian businesses, as has been recognised around the world, will operate best under an economy wide cap on carbon pollution that then lets business work out the cheapest and most effective way to operate. That is the essence of an emissions trading scheme. You see it in all of our oldest trading partners in the UK and Europe, we see now seven emissions trading schemes in China, moving to a national trading scheme we think in the next few years, South Korea – not North Korea, South Korea, not North Korea to my knowledge – South Korea, our third largest export partner, starts an emissions trading scheme next year. Many other parts of North America have them. It is recognised around the world as the most effective and the cheapest way to reduce carbon pollution.

JOURNALIST: How are the negotiations going for the RET?

BUTLER: Well we are committed to doing all that we can to get this policy back on the rails. Tony Abbott walked away from the long standing bipartisan support for renewable energy that had meant that by the middle of last year Australia was one of the four most attractive places in the world to invest in renewable energy along with China, the US and Germany. So these were the power houses investment in the world, and what we’ve seen since is Australia plummet down the table to the point where now we’re 10^th, the 10^th most attractive place to invest and there’s been essentially no large scale investment this year. Now, we think it’s our responsibility as the alternative party of government to engage in good faith negotiations with Ministers Macfarlane and Hunt to see whether they’re able to come back to a position of bipartisan support for this industry because if there is not bipartisan support we will see no investment in the future, we lose thousands of jobs and we see carbon pollution in the electricity sector, which is the largest source of pollution in Australia, start to increase rather than start to reduce. So, we’re engaging in those negotiations in good faith, but we will insist that any deal between Labor and the Liberal Party will ensure that the renewable energy industry in Australia continues to grow robustly into the future.

JOURNALIST: That 41,000GWh target, is that going to be a prerequisite for any deal?

BUTLER: Well we’ve said that is our starting position for these negotiations. This is a policy that undoubtedly worked. It’s a policy that Tony Abbott voted for in the Parliament in 2009 and that he took to the 2010 and 2013 elections. Even his own handpicked panel, Dick Warburton’s panel, found that it worked, it created investment, it created thousands of jobs, it’s keeping down power prices – they’ll be lower under the RET than without the RET – and it’s also reducing our carbon pollution. So yes that is our starting position but our objective is to stop the renewable energy industry collapsing in Australia ensuring instead that it continues to grow, but grows robustly in the future.

JOURNALIST: How do you rate Clive Palmer’s negotiation skills?

BUTLER: Well frankly I just don’t know what Clive Palmer’s done yesterday. I said yesterday that Greg Hunt must have performed some Jedi Mind Trick to get Clive Palmer to sign up to this. He has lambasted the Direct Action policy for months – and for good reason, it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars that will do nothing to achieve meaningful reductions in carbon pollution. Now he’s back flipped on that, decided to support that hopeless policy, just for an authority to deliver a report you can get off the internet.

JOURNALIST: To take the Star Wars analogy a little bit further, Jedi Mind Tricks only work on weak minded forms, is that what you think Clive Palmer is?

BUTLER: Well, that’s not the case. Jedi Mind Tricks work on pretty much everyone except Jabba the Hutt. He was the only one I remember being able to resist Jedi Mind Tricks, so I pay no disrespect to Clive Palmer being vulnerable to Jedi Mind Tricks, I’m sure I would be as well, but the fact is – Star Wars analogies aside – this is a hopeless deal, an utterly hopeless deal which might be good for the Government, which is the only thing that Greg Hunt seems to be saying at his press conferences, but it is terrible for Australia’s future.

JOURNALIST: So he’s gone to the Dark Side?

BUTLER: Well there was always a question about whether Clive Palmer was on the Dark Side on this question before, notwithstanding his press conference with Al Gore, but I think he’s been exposed here. He’s sided with the Government on a hopeless policy that will waste billions of tax payer dollars, achieve nothing in terms of meaningful reductions in carbon pollution, for a fig leaf about a study on emissions trading schemes that, as I said, has been done countless times before and you could give to a high school student to do.

JOURNALIST: Glad you know your Star Wars.

BUTLER: Thanks very much.