Liberals stuff the environment

Abbott and Hockey have a vision for toll roads, dirty energy and environmental destruction.

Showing our political leaders’ disdain for both the environment and our health, the 2014-15 budget pulls federal funding from state public transport. Federal funds have been scrapped for urban rail projects including Melbourne Metro, the Brisbane Cross River Trail and rail networks in Perth. Instead, the $50 billion infrastructure package will go towards funding new motorways in every state.

This budget, according to Mark Wakeham of Environment Victoria, is “a freeway builder’s dream”. And in the context of global climate crisis and the highest rate of carbon emissions in human history, more freeways are the last thing we need.

In May, the OECD reported in The Cost of Air Pollution: Health Impacts of Road Transport that between 2005 and 2010, the number of Australian deaths from air pollution rose by 68 percent. 1483 people died from air pollution in 2010. This is the other road toll, and it killed more people than did traffic accidents in the same year.

“It is pretty clear where the government’s ideological bench is”, said Ben Pearson from Greenpeace after Abbott and Hockey released their destructive budget. “They’re not interested in dealing with climate change … at a time when fuel for ordinary motorists is going to go up because the indexation has been unfrozen, the mining industry continues to have a fuel tax credit which gives it billions of dollars a year in subsidies … those are big industries that we’re told are extremely profitable - they can pay for their own fuel.”

Abbott has abandoned even the pretence of investing in renewable energy. His budget cuts $1.3 billion from ARENA, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which the Coalition had previously claimed to support. The cuts leave ARENA, which issues development grants for new technologies like concentrated solar energy, with an uncertain future.

The government is also attempting to shut down the CEFC (Clean Energy Finance Corporation), and has scrapped the $500 million program to provide subsidised solar energy for low-income households. Greg Hunt’s promised $100 million for “solar towns” has become $2 million for sports clubs and scout halls to build a few solar panels in some marginal electorates.

Instead of renewable energy, if Abbott gets his way, it’s business as usual for fossil fuels. Abbott and his state counterpart Denis Napthine will unveil $50 million worth of grants for brown coal projects in the La Trobe Valley.

The Abbott budget is a step backwards for a country that already ranks 11th in the world for emissions of carbon dioxide per capita. This means we’re doing worse per head than the United States, which alone accounts for 17 percent of the world’s emissions. Even the conservative IEA (International Energy Association), of which Australia is a member, calls for transforming the world energy system to replace fossil fuels with renewables. “A radical change of course at the global level is long overdue”, says IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven.

Australia’s pre-budget renewables initiatives were heavily corporatised and market-oriented, and would not have delivered the dramatic restructuring of industry we’ll need to stop irreversible climate change. Many of the proposals ARENA received were from mining companies that sought, through using off-grid electricity, to lower their energy costs in the remote landscapes they’re digging up. But the government’s moves to scrap investment in renewable energy reflect Abbott’s aggressive anti-environmentalism.

Abbott has appointed a climate change denier, former Caltex Australia chairman Dick Warburton, to review Australia’s (already inadequate) target to generate 20 percent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020. Warburton’s sole credentials for his posting seem to be his extensive experience sitting in corporate boardrooms, and his willingness to make an idiot of himself in the service of the coal industry.

Barely two months into his prime ministership, Abbott abolished the Climate Commission, the Climate Change Authority and the Minister for Science. And in keeping with the Liberals’ approach to scientific inquiry (i.e. “stuff it”), the CSIRO also took a hit of more than $110 million in the federal budget.

The ditching of renewables, continued handouts to mining bosses and obsession with building more and more roads show that this government has as much regard for the environment as it does for the human beings who depend on it.