World leaders are arriving in Paris for the COP 21 climate change conference, with the global environmental forum set to dominate the news internationally and domestically in coming days.
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Australia has come come under fire in recent years for its lacklustre attitude to combatting climate change.
“This absolutely is the largest climate change rally we have ever seen in Australian history”, rally organiser Victoria McKenzie-McHarg told an estimated 60,000-strong crowd in Melbourne. For a man who once declared he wouldn’t lead a party that wasn’t as committed to climate action as he was, it’s a sad sight. Mr Shorten says that’s simply not acceptable.
Based on his earlier, vigorous support for dramatic and effective climate change initiatives, Mr Turnbull should recast the goals crafted by Mr Abbott’s administration. The agreement of 20 countries includes the United States, China and India and would take Australia’s investment to $200 million by 2020.
In 2010, Mr Turnbull told Parliament that decisions had to be made today on climate change and costs had to be borne today “so that adverse consequences are avoided – unsafe consequences are avoided – many decades into the future”.
As hopes of a deal increase, Mr Turnbull said the Paris agreement was only a “step along the way to achieving a net zero-emissions world”. He refers, of course, to the Coalition’s Direct Action policy – a policy Turnbull himself has variously described as a “fig leaf” over emissions reduction and “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale” – and its low-ball emissions target of by 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Mr Turnbull and his opposite number Bill Shorten are in Paris for the United Nations climate talks.
“They have contributed the least to climate change but are suffering the most from its impacts, from shifting seasons making it harder for people to grow food, to more intense cyclones”. “At times it appears, amid the heated debate, we have lost sight of the key goal – to reduce emissions so as to safeguard our environment, the wellbeing of all Australians and our way of life”.
Speaking on Sunrise on Monday, Labor Senator Sam Dastyari also asked the government to do more on climate change.
“But above all we do not doubt the capacity of humanity to meet it – with imagination, innovation and the prudence that befits those, like us, who make decision that will affect not just our own children and grandchildren but generations yet unborn”.
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While Monday in Paris was taken up by the slew of world leaders at the conference that hard grind of negotiations over the text of a new climate deal is yet to kick-off.
