Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday called for greater intelligence sharing in Southeast Asia to stop a Paris-style terror attack and ordered local law enforcement officials to test their readiness to handle a mass casualty attack.
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Australia suffered its worst peacetime attack on its citizens on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali in 2002, when two Islamist suicide bombers set off explosives at packed nightclubs killing 202 people, including 88 Australians.
It is in line with that proposed by the Climate Change Authority, an independent expert body advising the government on climate policy.
Australia will aim for an ambitious net zero pollution target by 2050 under a Labor elected government, Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten has declared.
However, Shorten’s own promised target is not yet locked in.
“Bill Shorten’s policy, his thought bubble, 45 percent reduction, would require them to introduce or reintroduce a carbon tax at double the rate of the carbon tax before”, he said.
In a speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney Mr Shorten will say it could be done by making more use of biofuels and gas and improved land management.
It is also significantly higher than the 2030 target the Turnbull government will table in Paris.
“We will undertake this process mindful of the consequences for jobs, for regions and for any impacts on households”, Shorten will say. No amount of saying it reduces on a per capita amount is sufficient.
But Treasurer Scott Morrison disagrees with Labor’s calculations.
“We have some 2.5 million Australians who continue to smoke and we lose about 15,000 people a year from smoking-related diseases”, she said.
Federal Industry Minister Christopher Pyne went further, telling Channel 9 that Labor’s target would hit ordinary Australians – hard.
But the government has labelled the policy “mad”, warning of another carbon tax.
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Malcolm Turnbull’s honeymoon as Australia’s new Prime Minister continued with the poll showing that 64 percent of Australians viewed him as the preferred Prime Minister.
