The Saturday Paper

Rudd on climate change

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Your May 1-7 editorial (“Hint and miss for climate targets”) reprised the utterly false premise that, during my leadership,

I framed climate change principall­y as a moral challenge rather than a practical economic, geopolitic­al and environmen­tal one. If you’d actually re-read those remarks in 2007, rather than lazily internalis­ing Tony Abbott’s talking points, you’d know that I did no such thing. I said: “Climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation. Climate change is not just an environmen­tal challenge; climate change is an economic challenge, a social challenge, and actually represents a deep challenge on the overall question of national security … Because the dimensions of this challenge are so great and they reach so far and they extend over such a wide period of time and cross so many of the traditiona­l portfolios within government and between government­s, we should be at a stage now in this country where climate change is beyond politics.” I don’t resile from describing climate change as a moral challenge; it remains the core question of intergener­ational justice.

But I was equally clear about its concrete consequenc­es. At every turn, Labor has been ready and willing to take substantiv­e climate action. Yet when the Greens party subculture surveys our lost decade, it blames Labor! Give us a break from this smug riposte that ignores the contradict­ion of Greens senators siding with Abbott to kill carbon pricing in 2009. Australia’s most effective national climate reform remains my government’s mandate for 20 per cent renewable energy by 2020. Despite pigheaded conservati­ve attempts to scuttle progress, Australia blew past that benchmark last year with 27.7 per cent renewables. It’s hard enough to drag conservati­ves to the climate table without other progressiv­es providing them cover by laying blame on those who’ve been at the forefront of change against a wall of political resistance.

– Kevin Rudd, Brisbane, Qld

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