Climate Wars: How brutal politics derailed climate policy in Australia | Four Corners

[Music] it was right here above look it's that high bearing down on me it was like the apocalypse mate it was like hell on earth 2020 is proving to be a very challenging year it began with a scorching roar the summer burnt its place into history and seared the national psyche this summer has changed australia it's changed some of our landscapes perhaps permanently it's changed our people black summer as it's now known was one of the longest and most widespread fire seasons in our history the conditions for it were fueled by a changing climate and no one can say we weren't warned climate change and the impact of climate change is no longer a future event it's now a present event nobody no politician any side of politics has any grounds for saying oh we didn't see it coming it's been coming they've been told and yet somehow for some reason our political class is incapable of grappling with this for some time now experts have been warning that 2020 will be a tipping point for the climate when we do get through this covert 19 crisis the world will meet again at a climate conference in glasgow for yet another attempt to find consensus on climate action for decades climate policy has been a battleground here in australia tonight on four corners some of the key players in this drama the bureaucrats the scientific advisors and the politicians speak out about what has been perhaps the greatest policy failure of our generation what climate policy i mean it's basically it's a mess it's incoherent and has been for uh for a decade the response felt disdainful it was almost the sense of you know who are you to come and talk to us about these things and in my naivete i didn't realize that climate change was a no-go zone the level of intellectual input into that argument has been close to zero it's about having the strength to lead and it's about staring down some people who you know are basically wrong whatever their motivation might be for more than 30 years politics has been grappling with this issue and failing to deliver this is a story of power and ambition triumphing over the national interest i think the history of this has more to do with personal ambition than anything else it has a bit to do with ideology that's true but i think more to do with personal ambition and some of the individuals involved taking the opportunity of an ideological chasm to advance their own personal interests what is really clear is that the electorate see something like climate change as a test of a leader and all of these leaders have failed to understand australia's failure to deal with the climate policy challenge you have to go back to 1997 when global discussions on tackling climate change began in earnest at the kyoto climate summit at the time ken henry was a senior treasury official he was at the cutting edge of policy formulation in australia for decades for australia it was seen as a risk not as an opportunity and the australian negotiators going into the negotiation of the kyoto protocol it was not their intention to secure a strong commitment to reducing global emissions rather it was their intention to ensure that the burden on australia was as small as possible under the kyoto protocol australia would eventually be required to reduce domestic emissions in the second five-year period below 2000 levels senior bureaucrats believed the best way to do it was an emissions trading scheme so what were you telling john howard then or the howard cabinet well the advice from the treasury was right through that period consistent consistently was the best policy approach would be an emissions trading scheme of some form ken henry first presented a plan for an ets to prime minister john howard in 2004. an ets puts a cap on emissions and requires emitters who exceed the cap to pay to do so usually by buying and selling permits on an open market howard wasn't convinced [Music] oh i don't think the mood was there at that stage but i think the risks to the australian economy concerns about coal and energy industries concern about industries like aluminium were concerned that didn't want to put australia's at a disadvantage relative to the rest of the world if you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured they've all occurred in the last 14 years and the hottest of all was 2005. the groundbreaking documentary inconvenient truth added to growing international pressure for action on climate change and with the millennium drought hitting hard ken henry and the bureaucrats tried again to convince howard of the need for an ets our ability to live is what is at stake through 2006 it was clear that the wave of public opinion was leaving the government behind and it was increasingly clear to policymakers in canberra myself included that the government was going to have to do something additional and it was going to have to be something pretty big um not just more of the same and so i i did see an opportunity late in 2006 to go once more to prime minister howard and say look i really think now is the time to have a serious look at an emissions trading scheme and what was his response this time yes he bought it peter shergold was the secretary of the department of prime minister and cabinet this is one of the most eagerly awaited reports that's been presented to the government the first time i got seriously involved i suppose was in 2006 it became obvious that there was at least a window of opportunity not necessarily a very wide window but where i was given the opportunity to head up a task group on emissions trading a group of secretaries and rather more business leaders to examine what was going to happen within a global emissions trading scheme and how australia should be best prepared if one wants to be introduced i get a phone call that says um from ken henry saying um peter shergolden and a group of us have convinced john howard that we need to look at this um are you prepared to lead the secretariat and my reaction was what do i know about climate change and the response was that's exactly why we want you to read to lead the secretariat you know we want somebody who's going to come at this with a clean slate by now john howard knew business was also keen for a policy solution increasingly i think he was hearing from business leaders for whom he had significant respect that there was a great degree of investment uncertainty because of the risk associated with climate change that investment particularly in energy was being deterred and it would be helpful if the framework could be clear for business going forward that the uncertainty for them at that stage was becoming increasingly troubling by the beginning of 2007 political pressure was building too the new labour leader kevin rudd pledged to forge a national response to climate change climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation the sentence in question from our climate change summit which i launched in opposition in march of 2007 was climate change is for us the greatest economic environmental and moral challenge of our generation and guess what it was then guess what it is now and my position hasn't changed one bit thank you sensing the political threat john howard recognised the need to shift thank you very much that moment was incredibly exciting and the fact was that john howard took this proposal into the cabinet and this cabinet had people like tony abbott malcolm turnbull sitting in there and peter shergold and i were in the cabinet room we presented the findings and the cabinet endorsed where john howard was and prime minister howard then sent me off to go and actually design up in full detail what would be his emissions trading scheme i announced specifically that australia will move towards a domestic emissions trading system that's a cap and trade system beginning no later than 2012. you look at the polls it was probably an election which he looked relatively unlikely to win and often in those situations you can get a prime minister and a government deciding well to do things which they wouldn't in normal circumstances but that to me is why you have in a sense those magic moments when you have that conjunction which allows you to achieve things to be fair to him he'd gone on a journey you know he he had believed early on that we we should act then from his perspective things changed and then the opportunity came again and and he took convincing but i have to say you know giving absolute credit he never pushed back on ideological grounds it was always wanting to understand can this practically work what will be the practical implications of it how can we ameliorate some of these consequences what what's it likely to cost and that that's exactly what he should have been doing so by the end of 2007 reform seemed almost unstoppable the coalition labor the treasury business and environmental groups all supported an emissions trading scheme it would prove to be the last time a broad consensus on the issue was ever reached it was in a sense i always use that you know you're my greatest achievement it was of course almost my abject also my most abject failure in that you know nothing then happened and i don't think i anticipated then that even with the change of government um it would all come to nothing when you look back on it that was a rare moment of consensus given what happened afterwards wasn't it well the bottom line is uh had howard won that election we would have expected him to have acted uh and certainly given that i won that election i proceeded to act as the newly elected prime minister kevin rudd gave the task of constructing an emissions trading scheme to the climate change minister penny wong and her assistant greg combe they gave it a new name the carbon pollution reduction scheme or cprs i was appointed minister for climate change and water when we won government in 2007 and i had a couple of task one was to develop a whole of economy emissions trading scheme which was the cprs we had a very detailed process of engagement with stakeholders a lot of policy work a lot of design work but the world was about to change and political and economic priorities were about to take a dramatic turn [Music] for wall street the hits just keep on coming a day after investment bank lehman brothers filed for bankruptcy another corporate titan is teetering on the brink blair comley had just taken up his job at the new department of climate change when the gfc struck i would characterize that we had some businesses in particular who had been saying to us through the year look we understand that the community wants to act on climate change we understand we'll have to make some sort of contribution to that let's work together to try and work out what a good design is once the gfc hit some of those businesses particularly the ones who were internationally exposed they were saying oh actually i'm really concerned about my business and i can't really bear any you know imposition that might come with a scheme at this point climate change is one of the greatest business wasn't happy neither were the greens they argued the cprs wasn't going far enough and declared they were never going to support it we will not walk away from climate change not good for the nation or the planet i think they wanted to grandstand um you know you you always i mean they're the counterpart of the the the deniers they are not prepared to compromise in any way um they've got this purest view of the world and they are totally and utterly naive about what's required to get us from where we are today to what is needed madam acting deputy president isn't it significant when the cprs was first put to a vote in the senate in august 2009 the greens joined with the coalition to defeat the bill at that point in time in particular they were so purist nothing was ever good enough you know you had to stop coal-fired electricity tomorrow 100 renewables today it was just absurd and unrealistic and the consequence of their position would have been the loss of tens possibly hundreds of thousands of jobs hit to the economy like a ridiculous position it was a dog of a screen cpr s c r a p and it would not and could not have brought about the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that this nation and the rest rest of the world wanted because it had built into it the acquiescence of the coal industry the fossil fuel industry the logging industry and uh the big end of town i still had some hope i mean i was very disappointed but i still had some hope that that was a temporary state that maybe that was the response of one or two particular politicians that had decided to make that um you know their charge but that um by and large everybody would come to their senses sooner or later um that didn't happen i've got no idea where we're going the labor negotiators focus their efforts on malcolm turnbull as the best chance to secure a bipartisan agreement turnbull had been one of the most prominent supporters of an ets as environment minister under howard as opposition leader in 2008 he was advocating a consensus position i did negotiate an agreement with malcolm because i believed it was in the best interest of the country to have bipartisanship it's such a big policy has such long-lasting effects i believed it was in our best interest as a nation for there to be bipartisanship i saw there was a window but a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity through which we could get a bipartisan agreement on an emissions trading scheme and if the the ets or as rudd called it the cprs had been passed at the end of 2009 it would now be about as controversial as the gst in other words not at all but malcolm turnbull didn't have the grip on his party that john howard had he faced powerful opposition from the conservatives you failed to get consensus within your party to do that why do you think that was well again it was a there was a and a discontinued it's become a fault line within the liberal party uh it's become a galvanizing issue among the right wing of the party uh it's it's extraordinary really that something that should be as i used to say all the time as pm a matter of engineering and economics has become one of ideology and idiocy john howard's authority allowed the party to function and suppress that civil war but as soon as john howard wasn't there then those forces which had been you know kept under under control by by howard uh suddenly broke free his sort of determination that we should support the rudd bill carried big risks internally one of them was fracturing the coalition itself there's probably only one malcolm 2 in our lives um and um you know leadership is a very sophisticated complex art and uh i i think malcolm for all his strengths isn't a remarkable human being but i think he demonstrated that he's not cut out for leadership of a broad-based party like the liberal party in the charmless back rooms of parliament house the government was still trying to strike a deal with turnbull but in public rudd was taking great pleasure in hammering home the political advantage it's time for the real malcolm turnbull to stand up is it the malcolm turnbull who was supposed to be gung-ho about this 12 months ago or is it the malcolm turnbull of today seeking some short-term political advantage i think kevin kevin used the uh climate issue as a means of he did everything he could to wedge me against the right wing of my own party so kevin's goal was to disrupt blow up you know my leadership of the liberal party i think he tried to use the one instrument the cprs to achieve two objectives one was to address what he describes great's moral challenge of our time the second was to destroy the possibility of malcolm turnbull becoming prime minister so we're supposed to be mahatma gandhi winston churchill as well as technical climate change negotiators all at once and maintain an even temperament throughout for god's sake this is australian politics we have a mandate to bring this thing in turnbull tried to stare down the opponents in his own side i could see the tide was moving against action on climate change within the coalition and i wanted to make sure that we got this law passed when we could i will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as i am yeah that was the most unwise thing to say um and everybody was shocked by him in a sense making it he was the one who then by saying that made it a leadership issue that was most unwise and i told him so turnbull persuaded a majority of his shadow cabinet to support the bill but the leadership team had misread the mood on the back bench senator do you still plan to cross the floor on the ets legislation and i won't be supporting an ets under any [Music] the circumstances members gathered for a joint party room boat mr turnbull will your leadership be safe what happened in that room would change the course of australian politics and kill any future hope of a bipartisan agreement on climate policy yeah well as it was quite a dramatic party room meeting one i won't forget for a while because unusually just about everybody in the room had something to say on the subject it was clearly pretty clear the party room was completely divided on this and there was a lot of angst and a lot of concern about the shadow cabinet proposal one of turnbull's closest allies andrew robb turned against him it was yeah one of those pin dropping moments because you know andrew and malcolm had been seen to be close you might recall andrew had been malcolm's running mate back at uh when we lost you know seven when you know he ran malcolm ran for the leadership then and so for andrew to get up in quite strong terms and with a lot of internal authority in the party and say this is a crock of whatever and we shouldn't support it was a very dramatic moment and you could see malcolm getting increasingly angry and upset with what andrew was saying but it had a very big effect in the room well i was shocked by rob's intervention uh it was a very uh treacherous act uh and was described i think ian mcfarlane described it at the time as the the worst most treacherous thing he'd ever seen in his parliamentary career he basically laid in weight and then ambushed us in the room seven days later the liberal party room removed him do you consider that to be a failure of leadership well as i it was i failed as leader to persuade the party to go along with it and then i was removed as leader so i suppose so tony abbott won the leadership contest by one vote congratulations thanks very much i am feeling a bit overwhelmed and there'll be a press conference shortly okay thank you the vote was also a crushing blow for those working behind the scenes to design a carbon pricing mechanism yeah it's terrible yeah just terrible and um and also you know was the circumstances of the rejection that it was just so obvious that this this was a um a result of personal political ambition more than anything else of course they would argue tony abbott nick mentioned andrew rob those people argue that they were trying to save the liberal party because this was an issue that was going to tear the party and the coalition apart i was frankly more interested in the national interest than the future of the liberal party of australia the next day the cprs was put to the senate once again the greens were now the only hope the rud government had but once again they voted against the bill why would the greens go into a faustian bargain which the government set by deliberation under the pressure of the big polluters for a party that is avowedly committed to acting on climate change to actually tear down what was put in front of them i think is unconscionable did we expect the green party to come unfort on board with us in that vote yes we did because we believed they of all people would put the long term national transition of this country to a decarbonized economy as number one priority instead they played rancid short-term politics instead and should be forever held accountable for that the greens political party voted with the people who supported tony abbott they voted with cory bernardi they voted with nick minchin who said climate change was a conspiracy to de-industrialize the western world to sink action it was an example of the extremes of the political spectrum working together to prevent change and we have paid a price as a country for it we voted against it because kevin rudd and penny wong wouldn't negotiate with us they negotiated with the liberals isn't something better than nothing the bureaucrats all say what we needed was a mechanism we could have argued about where it was where it was pitched after that and continue to argue well it's not just the bureaucrats it's the coal industry that wanted that scheme and had we been locked into it we'd have been locked out of the innovation uh and the carbon the real carbon a flexible carbon trading scheme that's essential now for us to get out of this appalling situation which humanity's in not just in this country but right around the planet tony abbott's political attack was relentless he continued to define any attempt at pricing carbon as a big new tax on everything the coalition will not be going to the election with a new tax it was incredibly effective it was what opposition leaders do they're negative they punch holes in the government's policy i mean it's an easy attack to make right at the time people were very worried about cost of living they could see the cost of living in terms of a range of things moving up and they could also see what they saw as a kind of a downward pressure on wages as well it had become an extremely divisive external environment so very different from 2008 2009 and then in 2011 the conversation went well outside the beltway and it essentially became a highly you know divisive discussion in the public realising public support was drifting and under pressure from some of his cabinet colleagues including julia gillard kevin rudd dumped his policy response to the generation's greatest moral challenge i decided reluctantly that the deferral was the best way to preserve the internal stability and unity of the government people saw that as you basically walking away from what you declared as being the biggest moral challenge of our generation you might describe that as walking away from it and i know most of the green left commentariat uh find it convenient to describe it in those terms a deferral from 2010 to 2012 is not walking away from it and what did you think at that time well you know i was i thought well you know we've been working for two and a half years it would have been nice to happen i was i was disappointed it was never really seen as a deferment it was really seen as defeat and so there was a general collapse in trust in him mr rudd has a challenge on his hands why has he run away from what he said was the greatest moral challenge of our time but certainly as you can see diminished his political capital very significantly in the community he'd taken a stand then seemed to back away probably a lot of people thought just another politician you know not really full of conviction about the reform that he wants to make today is all about one thing rod's authority was ruined he had the trigger for a double dissolution election on the issue but never used it his leadership never recovered the new leader of the federal parliamentary labour party elected unopposed julia gillard gillard seized the leadership and called an election under pressure in the campaign she made a definitive statement that would dog her for years to come prime minister no mention today or tonight as a matter of fact about the carbon tax have you decided that's going to cost your votes is that why it's on the shelf uh there will be no carbon tax under the government i leave yeah i mean it's a pity she said that as well right those sorts of commitments so you know you kind of understand why politicians make those commitments but it's nevertheless a pity that under pressure they feel it necessary to make commitments of that sort which which they must know are going to come back to haunt them in some way or another i julia eileen gillard gillard was elected in a minority government and with the support of the greens and key independents pushed ahead with a new version of an emissions trading scheme [Music] it's now a situation where we went on to show that green's imbalance of power when we do get the power will deliver the goods and that's what happened after 2010 the new ets required big emitters to purchase carbon permits the starting price was fixed at 23 a ton it looked like a tax it was an emissions trading scheme and a carbon pricing scheme and it had a fixed price for three years that you can characterize as a tax a carbon tax but it was actually then transferring to a floating price emissions trading scheme the leader of the opposition mr speaker let there be no doubt about the intentions of the authors of this carbon tax legislation they want to kill manufacturing industry in this country we want to say first [Music] [Applause] as abbott's chief of staff peter credlin let slip some years later climate policy had presented a potent political opportunity it wasn't a carbon tax as you know we made it a carbon tax we made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment that was brutal retail politics and it took abbott about six months before it cut through and when he cut through gillard was gone how effective were those attacks yeah they garnered and and agitated you know a part of the community without any doubt and and we're supported by the allen joneses and shock jocks of the world around the place too and news corporation jumping on board and running campaigns you know you've just got to look at the way the murdoch media and other right-wing voices you know tgb people like alan jones and ray hadley and others have been relentless in their criticism of anyone or any policy that seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or address climate change i mean people who take climate change seriously are described by some of the news corporation columnists as warmists warmests it's that absurd in defiance of abbot and some sections of the media and industry the gillard ets bill was passed in november 2011. for the first and only time australia would have a working emissions trading scheme when you look back at what we did put in place it was legislated in operation for two years greenhouse gas emissions started to decline they declined in that two-year period power stations didn't close steel mills didn't close why ella was still there jobs were still there the economy continued to grow and jobs continued to grow i really thought it was a workable solution it may not have been everything that all the scientists wanted but it was a start and then and that is what's needed is the start to see the emissions turnover and go down absolutely emissions were falling in the history records that you can see it now australian emissions are very few periods in australia's history where emissions have in fact fallen but they did fall through that period very clearly [Music] [Applause] gillard was punished by some in the media and slumped badly in the polls the prime minister has the call rod was reinstated as prime minister and promised to move to a floating and much lower carbon price but the public had had enough of the labor government i can inform you that the government of australia has changed all those in favor please say aye the new abbott government delivered on its promise to dismantle the ets it's a single voice i think the eyes have it for those who'd spent years working behind the scenes the celebration on the floor of the parliament that day was hard to digest honestly i thought it was great test i thought it was great test um you know it didn't even look like a high school school yard it looked like a primary school school yet terrible [Music] you know that was pretty grim day for australia um i thought it was one of those situations where don't um don't get too happy guys because we're going to be back you know tackling this issue pretty shortly um you know we might not be tackling it in the same way um which means that we'll be doing it in a manner that's going to be more costly to the australian people i do feel that my time [Music] was a failure for the greatest thing that could have come out of that time and did not which was which was serious action on climate change we took on the responsibility for fixing labor's budget mess as prime minister abbott's policy response was called direct action we've also passed our direct action plan which will make a practical difference to the environment without slugging you with a carbon tax now you described that at one point as i think um do you still hold that view i mean the sort of the premise of it is it's it's no regrets investment you know if you're paying people to plant trees it's it's uh not the most economic way to reduce emissions probably but it's you know there are worse things you could do but it was essentially a short-term fig leaf you can adjust your policy but the idea that you should do nothing or pretend that woefully inadequate targets for example are an appropriate response because it might shave a fraction of somebody's electricity bill somewhere is in my view um uh dangerous and is totally not unsupportable malcolm turnbull was successful on 54 tony abbott 44. in 2015 the revolving door of leadership struck again i call the prime minister thank you mr speaker as prime minister malcolm turnbull had a chance to remake the coalition's climate policy his cabinet endorsed what they called the national energy guarantee but the divisions within were as deep as ever and once again climate policy would prove to be his undoing there was a group that was determined to use it to to to you know threaten the whole existence of the government abbott from the time he ceased to be prime minister he was uh using all his efforts to uh bring down my government so that was but he was not the only one i mean there are others but and you know they're the the fact is that they had a very strong uh backing and they were amplified uh in the media tonight malcolm turnbull's big switch the prime minister backs down on his emissions target to shore up his leadership [Music] that crazy frantic week here in august 2018 saw the climate wars bring politics to the boiling point once again the great fracture point of australian policy spelled the end of another leader malcolm turnbull was removed as prime minister and the latest attempt at formulating a policy response however weak was cut dead we have allowed something which should be a question of physics and economics and engineering and you know how do we do it and when do we do it and where do we do it to become this whole crazy political you know punching back there'll be people watching this also who'll be frustrated that they're hearing this from someone who was the prime minister who had this who was steering the country and couldn't deliver well ultimately you can't it's not a dictatorship some people will say you know oh you know malcolm should have stood up to the right well i think i did that on several occasions the treasurer has the call thank you mr speaker this is cole don't be afraid don't be scared the treasurer knows the rule on props it's coal it was dug up by men and women who work and live in the electorates of those who sit opposite the prime minister scott morrison has also been a front-line figure in the climate wars the core of the morrison government's climate policy is the climate solutions fund a continuation of tony abbott's direct action plan it's incentives the climate solutions fund as did the emissions reduction fund provides incentives to reduce emissions uh but it's carrot not stick uh it's technology not taxes uh it's choice not coercion that is the approach we're taking all these things that the liberals come up with to sidestep actually doing something comprehensive they cost taxpayers more the silly emissions reduction fund things they come up with cost taxpayers more for every tonne of greenhouse gas emissions reduced than an efficient economy-wide scheme energy minister angus taylor says the answer to reducing emissions is new technology ultimately reductions in emissions will happen when technologies that work that are at parity where they're higher emitting alternatives where rational people choose them because they're good choices that's how we'll bring down emissions globally and australia is absolutely committed not just to using those technologies within australia but playing a role in areas like hydrogen integration of household solar land management to help other countries to reduce their emissions in that longer term time frame as well [Music] the big policy thinkers say technology alone isn't enough to save us from a climate crisis they still believe the best solution is to put a price on carbon [Music] the carbon price isn't about taxing people carbon price is actually about creating the right sort of incentives to develop the technology and then use it the question you should be asking yourself is what is the least economically damaging way of achieving that cap on national emissions and the answer that question and everybody will tell you this is an emissions trading scheme the roller coaster of australian politics has left us in 2020 with no structure for pricing carbon in the future and if the history of climate policy is anything to go by reaching climate consensus at the next global climate summit in glasgow is far from certain the climate crisis has exposed a systemic failure that many of those who worked for so long in the system find hard to accept we have failed no doubt about that we've all failed i think i mean i look back on it now and i i still feel gutted you know all these years later i still feel oh no it's more than that i feel angry i know that's not a good thing and and i probably should get therapy but uh but i've asked myself this question many many times why do i still feel angry about and the reason i feel angry about it is that i feel angry about what australia has lost it's like watching a train wreck in slow motion to almost be able to visualize this and to see this happening and year after year after year go by without any strong action and no apparent commitment and determination on the part of governments and i say plural because we've had several since then it's it's beyond disheartening it's it's it's um it's depressing if you were secretary of the department now what would you say to the prime minister you much more than me prime minister can create the narrative that's what a leader does to create the narrative of why we need to do this but my sense prime minister is that there is a mood to follow such leadership if it exists and tell it honestly and tell it truthfully and don't try and pretend there are not going to be costs imposed on industry and costs imposed on individuals but it is worth that for the sake of your children and your grandchildren [Music] you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 51,601

Keywords: climate change, global warming, four corners, Australia, failure, inaction, greenhouse gases, politicians, politics, self-interest, John Howard, Scott Morrison, prime minister, PM, Malcolm Turnbull, Bob Brown, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, leader, ALP, Liberal, Nationals, science, chief scientist, policy, national interest, climate, environment, documentary, drought, fire, emissions trading scheme, ETS, election, climate policy, Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Emissions Reduction Fund, emissions, AU

Id: iTkRFK46UT0

Length: 43min 53sec (2633 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020