Pity the baby born in Australia today, the day federal Parliament voted to end effective action on climate change.
The Senate has voted down the carbon tax, leaving Australia with no central policy mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Pollution is free once more.
Faced with a difficult, serious policy problem in climate change, policy-makers have squibbed it. They have voted to ignore the scientists and the economists who warn of unchecked climate change.
That’s why you should pity the baby born today. The Parliament has voted to leave the problem of climate change to them. That problem will get much worse, and more expensive to address, in the interim. Today’s children never voted for Tony Abbott and his band of climate deniers but they will bear the fallout.
Abbott is not solely to blame for this profound failure of policy-making. Labor stuffed around and some now think the Greens should have taken the chance to pass an earlier ETS.
But Abbott’s Liberals are primarily responsible for the fact that Australia now has no climate policy. In the decades to come, as the droughts and bushfires worsen, and the heatwaves rage, and the tram tracks buckle, and the coral reefs die, future generations will look back at July 17, 2014, and ask why politicians didn’t even try to address the problem.
And it will be very hard to come up with an answer.
Because the bottom line profits of sponsors and donors came first.
Sure you can blame Labor, and the Greens, but that is not blaming, that is just scapegoating.
The Greens did the right thing. Rudd squibbed it on the greatest moral challenge of our time, or whatever that phrase was, but he may well have been badly advised by colleagues (Gillard and Swan)
But the coalition are fully to blame for the current debacle, and you are right, it is the greatest inter-generational rip-off of our time.
Shame, shame, shame. Where is Derryn Hinch when you need him.
Sad to think that for the sake of one party room vote back in December 2009, the re-elected LNP leader, Turnbull, would’ve reacted to climate change with an ETS policy.
Instead, we have a non-thinker behaving like a prime ministerial ostrich & actually celebrating the fact that carbon pricing has been rolled. Imagine the comments his descendants will be making about him in the coming decades.
This is an act of environmental, economic, scientific, and cultural vandalism! And I hope we never forgot this act of bastardry and the political party that enabled it! If you care, tell your children and grandchildren to never vote Liberal again, they always lie, they always cheat, and they care for nothing but themselves!
You have said it all Bernard! Wish that all Australian Media carried similar editorial comment. There is no comfort in knowing proportionally, that Politicians of all colours, are responsible for Carbon Tax debacle. At least, Labour under Shorten now committed going to an ETS Policy at next Election . . subject to no more backsliding!