The Greens and the CPRS – still!
As an example of a party failing to cooperate when it should have done so, Carolynne Fitzwarryne adduces the Greens voting with the Coalition against a Carbon Tax, which “put back climate change initiatives for years”.
Indeed, it has become part of Australian political folklore that when the Greens helped defeat the Rudd CPRS legislation in 2009, they “ruined everything”; that by rejecting the good with a futile demand for the perfect, they ushered in 15 years of climate inaction.
In fact, the CPRS was not “less than perfect”. It was a terrible policy, which would have achieved little or no emissions reduction while guaranteeing large corporate windfalls. Like our current “carbon credits” system, it would have been a fig-leaf for climate inaction.
It is risible to blame Australia’s failure to take serious climate action over the past 15 years on that single moment in 2009. The data on hefty political donations from fossil fuel interests to both Labor and Coalition make it clear where the fault lay and continues to lie!
Even Labor must be surprised at the ongoing success of their 2009 Machiavellian response to Rudd’s “greatest moral challenge of our time” in continuing to harm The Greens.
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