Tony Abbott will rally a “green army” to save the environment. But his anointed generals say it will be powerless in the face of climate change inaction.

The Opposition leader wants to boost the numbers of the long-running Green Corps program — rebadged “Green Job Corps” by the Rudd government —  to put up to 15,000 volunteers and jobless to work on tree-planting and environmental management projects. Abbott made it a centrepiece of an environmental pitch to the Sydney Institute last night.

“Over the next few months … I will be talking to organisations such as Conservation Volunteers Australia and Greening Australia — the bodies that formulated and subsequently ran the original Green Corps — about the potential for a much larger and more capable national conservation corps,” Abbott said.

That’s all well and good, says Greening Australia. But David Freudenberger, the group’s director of science, told Crikey “it will be a waste of time, talent and energy if it isn’t integrated with a mechanism to reduce emissions”.

Freudenberger is staying out of the political debate and the merits of the government’s emissions trading scheme. But he is clear on the need for a wholesale environmental management program that includes carbon management.

“A 15,000 strong environmental workforce will only be effective if it works in partnership with environmental scientists, industry and farmers to ensure land repair is resilient to climate change, provides tangible benefits to biodiversity, improves river health and supports community well being,” he says.

“The challenge of both sides of government is how do we work out a mechanism so that we start paying the true cost of production. We’re not challenging the right to pollute the environment. Two centuries of environmental subsidy has to end because the environment is losing patience.”

History shows direct investment by governments in the environment is inefficient in itself, Freudenberger asserts. “If you give the right signals with industry, rapid change can occur,” he says. “Fifteen thousand hard-working land repairers will be a drop in the ocean and the atmosphere without [economic reform].”

In attempting to recast the environment as a “good conservative principle” for the Liberal Party in an election year, Abbott admitted Green Corps has had “intermittent attention” and “largely failed to make a difference”. But he says the Rudd government has turned the scheme into a “virtual work-for-the-dole program” and he wants it boosted to include short-term trainees.

“It would be Australia’s first deployment of large numbers of people on behalf of the environment and the first time that we have approached environmental remediation with the same seriousness and level of organisation that we have brought, say, to dealing with bushfires or other local and regional emergencies,” he said last night.

“A concern to protect the environment should mean much more than voting Green or joining Greenpeace. It should mean preferring those trying to do good rather than merely to look good on this issue.”

But doing good, Greenpeace’s John Hepburn hits back, must go beyond “a 15,000-strong army doing battle with feral animals and noxious weeds for the sake of our planet”. He told Crikey:

That’s not to say that all of his proposals were wrong-headed. I have no doubt that a green army could do a lot of good work on reforestation projects and making our cities more liveable. Rehabilitating creeks and rivers is particularly important and nobody has any doubt that we need an urgent solution to solve the Murray-Darling crisis.

He is also right about something else: Kevin Rudd is full of hot air on climate change and the CPRS is indeed a dog of a policy.

If Tony Abbot was serious about obtaining Green preferences, there are many policies that he could announce in the coming weeks as part of his ‘direct action’ agenda: a ban on new coal power stations, cutting the billions of dollars of subsidies poured into the fossil fuel industry, adopting a serious industry policy for large-scale clean energy through a national feed-in-tariff.

Abbott revealed nothing of the coalition’s plans to reduce carbon levels, saying Rudd is obsessed with the issue and ignoring issues such as the plight of the Murray-Darling river system, which he called “Australia’s biggest environmental problem”. A coalition government will renew the “invitation” to the states to refer its power over water management of the system to the Commonwealth.

The revived takeover plans have little support among irrigators, according to NSW Irrigators Council CEO Andrew Gregson. “A few simple telephone calls would have told Mr Abbott that the irrigation industry across the basin and those that rely on it oppose a federal takeover and have consistently made a case against it,” he said.