Continuing with its admirable commitment to bipartisanship in the exact ways its voters don’t want, Labor is seeking the opposition’s support for its watered-down, industry-approved version of the Environmental Protection Agency. And it’s not just the Coalition on Labor’s mind, apparently.
“If the Greens party doesn’t support the government’s EPA laws, this could be their carbon pollution reduction scheme mistake mark two,” Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said yesterday.
If you are among the huge chunk of voters for whom the CPRS barely rates as a distant political memory, worry not, Labor is always here to remind you (as are we). The CPRS — an emissions trading scheme for anthropogenic greenhouse gases — was widely regarded as an inadequate policy and friendless in all directions. After it was voted down in the Senate in 2009, including by the Greens, Labor replaced it with a more effective scheme.
That hasn’t stopped Labor from dedicating an exhausting amount of time on the subject in the nearly 15 years since. Here’s the story about how, as far as Labor is concerned, everything ever is about the Greens’ decision to vote against the CPRS.
January 2010
Labor’s attacks on the Greens started within two months of the CPRS bill’s defeat. MPs in the Victorian government conducted a mass mail-out aimed at inner-city voters that accused the Greens of siding with climate-change deniers.
“The Greens voted with Tony Abbott and the climate-change deniers to stop our nation taking this historic first step of putting a price on carbon pollution,” pamphlets sent out by Martin Foley, then member for Albert Park, told Victorians ahead of that year’s November state election.
June 2012
In terms that probably set some kind of record for understatement, then climate change minister Greg Combet told the Australian Financial Review, “I think there would be more than just myself in the Labor Party that bears some residual anger at the Greens voting with Tony Abbott to defeat the CPRS.”
“I would like to see more pragmatism . . . but that’s politics, they decided to do that.”
2018
After a few years of quiet, Whitlam’s Children, Shaun Crowe’s book on the relationship between the parties, gave senior Labor figures another opportunity to sheet many of Australia’s ills back to the CPRS. Combet was joined by Penny Wong, Lisa Singh and Wayne Swan lamenting the “political bastardry” of the act.
“If the Greens had voted for the CPRS legislation when Tony Abbott became leader of the Liberal Party in 2009, a carbon price would have been introduced and by today would have been embedded in the
Australian economy,” Wong told Crowe. “Instead the Greens voted with Tony Abbott.”
2019
December 2019, which marked a decade since the vote, kicked this bitter reminiscence up a notch. Perhaps to dull the pain emanating from Labor’s recent achievements in losing “unlosable” elections, a campaign emerged to convince everyone that the lack of energy policy in Australia (and most things) was the Greens’ fault.
New Labor leader Anthony Albanese, then shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong and a frontbencher Pat Conroy all brought it up within the same month. It’s barely ceased since.
2020
Conroy, then junior spokesperson on climate change, responded to the Greens having the temerity to link the bushfires currently ravaging the country to climate change by calling the party the “biggest betrayers of the climate”.
“Their decision to team up with Tony Abbott to vote down the CPRS was the biggest error in the Australian climate policy debate,” he said.
2021
In March 2021, environment spokesperson Chris Bowen told the Labor conference that Labor was the only party that could “seize the opportunities” of a low-emissions future:
Not the Coalition to our right, which doesn’t even accept the science of climate change. And not the Greens party to our left, which started the climate wars when it sunk the CPRS, and doesn’t care at all about the workers and communities whose livelihoods are at stake.
2023
Now in power, Labor took the initiative, stopped making excuses and… brought up 2009 more regularly than ever.
In February, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said that “making demands that can’t be met simply is not going to help anybody who is committed to reducing carbon emissions in this country”.
In case anyone didn’t know what he was referring to, he added, “What we don’t want to see is a return to 2009 when the Greens ganged up with the then Coalition parties to scuttle the carbon reduction pollution scheme and put climate policy back a decade.”
Chris Bowen repeated the line of attack several times on Sky News.
So, point made, right? Except, by November, Labor decided it hadn’t been sufficiently clear, with Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek warning the Greens, “Whatever you do, don’t relive the carbon pollution reduction scheme disaster, because we know how that story ended. When you teamed up with Tony Abbott to kill Labor’s climate policy, because it ‘wasn’t enough’.”
Oh, no way, the Greens voted with the Coalition on the CPRS in 2009? I’d forgotten about that.
Is Labor justified in reminding the Greens about the CPRS? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
