Green Movement In Australia

The green movement in Australia has suffered a blow this week, as the parliamentary vote on tackling global warming saw the opposition win out with 42 votes to the government’s 30. This is seen as a major setback for the movement in Australia but not a final blow, as Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said after the vote in the country’s senate that the government would seek to re-introduce the bill after the mandatory three month waiting period. This brings into the situation a possibility of some very interesting developments not just on the environmental issue but some potential constitutional developments.

One of the notable eventualities which could arise from this reverse in the Senate is that, if the government pushed forward the same legislation and was then defeated, it could potentially trigger a general election. This makes the potential legislation quite a powerful issue, and could well lead to some political horse-trading as the ruling Labour party looks to win over some of the current skeptics. As things stand, t he votes against the bill outnumber the votes for it by twelve. In order to gain a majority, seven senators would be required to change their vote.

As things stand, opposition to the legislation makes, as politics often does, for strange bedfellows. The government was essentially leveraged by opposition on both sides – from Green members who did not feel that the measures proposed went far enough towards tackling climate change, to members of the Conservative opposition who viewed it as being excessive. The measures proposed certainly go further than any yet proposed by a government, in offering a system of carbon trading which would require the more polluting companies to pay for their carbon emissions and rewarding companies who went some way to being carbon neutral.

One of the issues raised by conservative opposition legislators was that to adopt the propositions of the bill would be to put Australia in a disadvantageous position ahead of the conference on climate change to be held in Copenhagen in December. The government has argued that their position would only be weakened by going to Copenhagen without having adopted a coherent and radical plan for the reduction of carbon emissions. This gives the government a dilemma. Trying to win over enough senators means either adopting tougher measures to win over the Greens and alienating the conservative bloc, or vice versa.

Prime Minister Rudd may not be overly inconvenienced by an early election. Australia is due to go to the polls in late 2010 anyway, so bringing the election forward by a year while his approval ratings are high (and they far exceed those of the leader of the official Opposition) may not be the worst thing that could happen. It would also give the government a clear mandate. Australian voters are believed to favour strong action to cut down on pollution, and if they backed an incumbent Premier on a platform of environmental reform it would make it significantly harder to oppose the legislation in Parliament.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Global Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.