Rudd on climate change
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