Former prime minister Paul Keating has savaged Greens leader Adam Bandt for branding Labor a “neoliberal” party in a row over the environment after Labor secured the numbers to legislate its 43 per cent cut to greenhouse gas emissions.
Hours after the Greens said they would vote for the government’s landmark climate bill, Keating launched a spirited defence of the Labor legacy on climate and the environment to reject the need to make concessions to Bandt on the policy.
Adam Bandt says he will keep fighting new coal and gas projects.Credit:James Brickwood
But a new test looms in Parliament after the Greens leader said the agreement on the climate bill was only “round one” because he would keep pushing to halt new coal and gas projects and to include tougher rules in environment law to reduce carbon emissions.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed the Greens’ support for the Labor bill as a sign the “climate wars” could be over, but he bluntly rejected a proposal from Bandt to use the government scheme to curb emissions as a way to halt new coal and gas projects.
With Labor and the Greens voting together on one issue while sparring on others, Keating intervened to tell Australian voters that they could trust Labor on the environment.
Provoked by attacks on Labor’s record in government, Keating denounced the Greens as the “enemy of Labor” and accused Bandt of distorting the truth by ignoring Labor achievements including Medicare, compulsory superannuation and the safety net for wages under workplace laws.
“The Greens preen themselves on what they claim is their environmental credentials,” Keating told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, but he rebuked the party for voting against an emissions trading scheme when a Labor government put it to the Senate in 2009.
“This is the same outfit that, with all purpose, destroyed Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, leading the country into a decades-long political morass on climate, putting the population and the country’s land mass at risk and degradation,” he said.
“The Labor Party is the primary environment party of Australia and always has been.”
The defence of the Labor legacy came after the Greens party room ended weeks of speculation by deciding to vote for the government bill to enshrine the 43 per cent target as the minimum in the cuts to emissions by 2030 under policies that include a “safeguard mechanism” to require big companies to reduce their emissions.
Former prime minister Paul Keating says Labor is the true party of the environment. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
“This is round one,” Bandt said at his Press Club appearance. “There is three years of this parliament and there are a number of points coming up where we will push to stop opening coal and gas. We are going to have to review the country’s environment laws and we want a climate trigger in those laws.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Climate Minister Chris Bowen welcomed the outcome but rejected the latest claim from the Greens by saying they would not use the new climate regime to halt all new coal and gas projects.
“The climate wars may or may not be over, but they are certainly in retreat under this government. We sought the mandate from the Australian people and we are delivering on that mandate,” Bowen said.
The main concession offered to the Greens in the argument over the climate bill was to make clear in the draft law that the government could achieve a more ambitious target than 43 per cent but could not replace it with a lower target.
Bandt signalled his next demands on climate by saying he wanted the “safeguard mechanism” to apply strict rules on emissions to stop new coal and gas developments, naming the Scarborough, Beetaloo and Narrabri gas fields as the biggest problems.
When Albanese was asked if he would do this, the Prime Minister said: “No. In a word.” Bowen said the government would take feedback on the mechanism after issuing a discussion paper this month.
The Coalition, meanwhile, has refused to vote for the Labor bill and set out plans for a nuclear energy policy instead, while signalling it might commit to deeper emission cuts than the target it had in government – a cut of 26 to 28 per cent by 2030.
Keating rejected Bandt’s claim, made in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, that Labor had pursued “neoliberal” policies like privatisation and engaged in “austerity” budget policy.
Credit:Matt Golding
“This is both a lie and a slur,” Keating said.
“How could any reasonable person describe the universality of Medicare as an exercise in conservative neoliberalism? Or providing the whole Australian community, every working person, with mandated capital savings leading to substantial superannuation assets and retirement incomes.
“How could any reasonable person describe these mammoth changes as ‘neoliberalism’, a word associated with the likes of [former British prime minister] Margaret Thatcher and [former United States president] Ronald Reagan.
“And more than that, the world’s leading system of minimum award rates of pay, a safety net superintended by the Fair Work Commission – a Keating government creation. Again, hardly an exercise in neoliberalism.
“But Bandt is a bounder and a distorter of political truth.”
Keating named the Labor government’s use of the external affairs power in the Constitution to stop dams on the Franklin River in Tasmania in 1983, when Bob Hawke was prime minister, as an example of Labor’s record on the environment.
“In my own case, I was the first ministerial person in the world to suggest the Minerals Convention in Antarctica not be signed by Australia,” he said.
”And that Australia led the way into turning Antarctica into a century-long wilderness park. I opened this conversation with the [former] French prime minister Michel Rocard and to his eternal credit, Bob Hawke locked arms with Rocard to defeat an American push to open Antarctica to mineral and oil exploration. Antarctica was saved by Australian Labor.“
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