An Activist Life by Christine Milne

Author:Christine Milne
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

12

What Price Carbon?

OBJECT: Christine’s full set of the eighteen Carbon Pricing Bills that delivered Australia’s Clean Energy Package on 8 November 2011, signed by her Green parliamentary colleagues. The set is held by the Museum of Australian Democracy.

AFTER THE 2013 FEDERAL ELECTION the Museum of Australian Democracy asked me to give them a document – or several – that had been the most significant for me as leader of the Australian Greens. I decided to give them the full set of the bills that delivered Australia’s Clean Energy Package. Those bills, which passed the Senate on 8 November 2011, represented a great achievement for the nation, for the Australian Greens and for me. After years of policy work, campaigns, enormous challenges and lengthy negotiations, we had produced and secured the passage of legislation that gave Australia an opportunity to address global warming in a holistic and serious way, and to begin transitioning to a 100 per cent renewable-energy-powered future. The legislation was described by the International Energy Agency as a template for developed countries.

I had kept a full set of the eighteen bills and had them signed by my Green parliamentary colleagues on the day they passed the Senate. When I handed them over to the museum, I was told that Julia Gillard had given them exactly the same bills. I was surprised but then realised that, in spite of her 2010 election promise ‘there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead’, she too must have reached the conclusion that history would judge her legacy to be the passage of the Clean Energy Package, which included a carbon price. It’s ironic really, since there is no doubt that if Julia Gillard had won majority government in 2010 there would have been no progress on addressing global warming. Gillard’s change from rejecting a carbon price pre-2010 to legislating one in 2011 had little to do with the realisation that it was the right thing to do and everything to do with power: it was the price she paid to secure government for Labor and retain the prime ministership in a minority government. Without the Greens in balance of power, it would never have happened.

To understand how this came to pass, some history is needed.

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IN THE 2007 FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition leader Kevin Rudd had promised to introduce carbon trading. The Labor Party won, with Rudd having said a few months before that ‘climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation’.1 One of his first official acts as prime minister was to announce at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Bali that Australia would ratify the Kyoto Protocol originally negotiated in 1997. This was way overdue – it had already been ratified and had come into effect globally in 2005 – but it was welcomed by the world as a major change of direction for Australia: at last, it seemed, we were taking global warming seriously. Prime Minister Rudd received a standing ovation and the TV cameras whirred.

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