Industry calls for Morrison to go further on climate policy - The Age

The policy does little to address carbon pollution from the nation's most polluting sectors such as electricity production and transport.

Critics say the government's climate announcement does not address coal emissions.Credit:Jonathan Carroll

Green Collar is the largest participant in the emissions reduction fund and Australia’s biggest provider of carbon abatement. The organisation works with land holders to design revegetation and other projects.

Its chief executive James Schultz welcomed the funding announcement but said action was needed in other sectors of the economy.

“I think it’s well understood that the emissions reduction fund is only one part of the puzzle. We still would like to see much greater action across the board as the climate change challenge is only growing,” he said.

“Any new funding for the environment is always a good thing but we still think the best way forward is to expand the scope of the safeguards mechanism and move back towards stronger market participation in driving market prices as soon as we can.”

The safeguard mechanism has been criticised for setting weak pollution limits and granting too many exemptions to companies wanting to increase their emissions. There is speculation that Labor will commit to tightening the mechanism should it win office.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox said the funding boost was “a useful and helpful bridging step to a longer term approach to emissions reduction” and his organisation had called for the measure.

However the emissions reduction fund was not “a comprehensive or permanent approach to climate policy, and it is likely to be expensive and impractical to try to make it so,” he said.

Mr Willox called for "longer term policies for the rest of the economy" that worked efficiently, were trade-neutral and helped underpin investments needed across industry to achieve net-zero emissions.

During a speech in Melbourne on Monday, Mr Morrison said the $2 billion pledge will “build on the success” of the emissions reduction fund which had contracted 193 million tonnes of abatement.

The climate solutions fund is expected to pay for a further 103 million tonnes in emission reductions to 2030 and help Australia meet is targets under the Paris climate treaty.

Mr Morrison spruiked the Liberal party’s environmental record dating back to the Menzies era, and said “no one political party, no one government, can claim a mortgage on understanding the obvious fact that we have only one planet”.

Labor’s climate change and energy spokesman Mark Butler said Mr Morrison, who once brought a lump of coal into Parliament, was trying to fool voters into believing he “suddenly had a change of heart on climate change”.

Labor's climate change and energy spokesman Mark Butler said the government was reviving a failed Abbott-era policy.Credit:Peter Mathew

“All that Scott Morrison has announced today is a decision to double-down on Tony Abbott’s failed carbon blueprint, throwing billions and billions of taxpayers’ dollars at a failed Tony Abbott plan that has seen pollution go up and up and up,” Mr Butler said.

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions ended the last financial year at their highest level since mid-2011.

The government has also confirmed to the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that, after over-achieving its 2020 carbon abatement task under the Kyoto Protocol, it will carry over 367 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent to help meet its Paris commitments.

Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman Gavan McFadzean said this approach was "dubious" and the climate solutions package “contains nothing about the energy sector, or transport, or agriculture, or major industry”.

Progressive think tank The Australia Institute on Monday said of all carbon credits issued by the emissions reduction fund, just 1 per cent were from emissions reduction in the high-polluting sectors of energy and industry.

The government has allocated a further $1.5 billion to the climate solutions package and flagged further measures including electric vehicles and energy efficiency.

With Michael Koziol

Nicole Hasham is environment and energy correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.