Bill Shorten has vowed to re-fight the case for effective action against global warming, as he conceded Labor had underestimated the impact of the “anti-climate change brigade”.



The opposition leader reflected on the breakdown in Australia’s political and public consensus on climate change in a speech which laid out some markers on leadership and the way to win over voters for contentious reforms.

Shorten traced the current fault line on climate policy to Tony Abbott’s rolling of Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader in 2009, but said Labor had “to live with our failure to prosecute the case, to take the public with us on the need for action on climate change”.

Facing the likelihood of the new Senate voting soon to repeal the carbon scheme introduced by the former Gillard government and which began in 2012 with a three-year fixed price, Shorten reaffirmed his commitment to a market-based system for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

And in a swipe at the budget sales pitch, he accused Abbott of trying to divide the public and adopting a “Downton Abbey style of consensus where he sits in the dining room and he summons Australians like a servant class to agree with his consensus”.

Shorten’s speech to the Australian National Union’s Crawford Australian Leadership Forum on Tuesday coincided with the Senate changeover, in which a combination of minor and micro parties and independents now holding the balance of power.

Emboldened by the Palmer United party’s (PUP) support for scrapping the legislated carbon pricing scheme, Abbott told his Coalition colleagues on Tuesday he was confident of the government’s ability to work with the crossbench to axe “the world’s biggest carbon tax” – a dominant election pledge.

“I am reasonably optimistic that we can do good things together for our country and for the benefit of our people,” the prime minister said.

Shorten said an emissions trading scheme previously enjoyed bipartisan support, with both John Howard and Kevin Rudd promising one at the 2007 election. This consensus ended with Abbott’s successful challenge to Turnbull as Liberal leader in 2009, which Shorten described as “the victory of the denialists over science”.

“If you look at one of the key fault lines in Australia, it started in 2009 when Tony Abbott and the sceptics and the denialists and the internet trolls rolled Malcolm Turnbull, and ever since that day we have seen a breakdown in consensus,” Shorten said at a media conference before his speech.

“I have got no doubt that Labor underestimated the impact that the anti-climate change brigade had. I have got no doubt that our scientific community, if they had their time again, would wish that they could have explained things differently as well.”

Shorten, who has campaigned against the government’s “cruel” first budget and maintains a lead in opinion polls, has been accused by the Coalition of irresponsibly blocking measures to repair the nation’s finances.

Shorten said leaders who wanted voters to support major reforms must convince them of the merits of change.

“That lesson also is for Labor when it comes to climate: we have got to re-litigate the case and I don’t think Labor was expecting that we’d have to go back to first principles,” Shorten said.

“We thought the science was in and we thought that most people out in the community were on board with that process. They were, but what we didn't recognise was getting mud from the far right in Australian politics and we have to re-fight the case for climate change and we will.”

Labor has rarely asked about climate change in parliamentary question time since last year's election.

Labor also muddied the debate by vowing to “terminate” the carbon tax if it won the September election, adopting some of the language of the Coalition. The pledge was to keep the scheme but to amend it to move to a floating price a year earlier than planned.



In his speech, Shorten said Abbott had “played the politics of division hard, and he prevailed”. While there was no shrinking from Labor’s failure to prosecute the case, he said he knew of many business leaders who regretted speaking against an emissions trading scheme because the nation had experienced “five years of lost certainty and economic opportunity”.

Many members of the Greens, and the broader environmental movement, lamented “choosing the purity of impotence over the practical benefits of reasonable compromise” in opposing Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme as not ambitious enough, he said. Many Liberals also rued passing up the chance to move together “on an issue that will define this century”.

The lack of progress at the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen also played a role.

Shorten noted “hoopla and showmanship” in the joint announcement by the PUP leader, Clive Palmer, and the climate crusader Al Gore on carbon policy last week, but emphasised “significant points of climate consensus” including the retention of the renewable energy target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and the Climate Change Authority.

Palmer has vowed to abolish the carbon tax as long as power price reductions were guaranteed, and expressed in-principle support for an emissions trading scheme once trading partners took similar action. Shorten sought to remind Palmer that Labor had already legislated such a scheme and it was “ready for implementation”.

Setting our future principles for climate action, Shorten said Labor’s support for an emissions trading scheme had not changed, as global warming required a serious, global, considered response. The party’s response would include “a market-based framework capable of interacting with, and benefiting from, similar schemes in the US, Europe and Asia”.

Shorten said he believed good policy, clearly articulated and explained and argued, would win the support of the electorate.

He cited the national disability insurance scheme (NDIS), which he championed when Labor was in government, as an example of serious, nation-changing reform, well argued, in “the Hawke-Keating tradition”. The argument became so compelling that Labor was “even able to pass a tax to fund it, through an increase in the Medicare levy”.

Abbott has previously criticised Shorten’s performance and unwillingness to embrace reform, saying the opposition leader was “no Bob Hawke”.

In broader observations about the state of national debate, Shorten pointed out that claims about a lack of political consensus were nothing new, but warned that “debilitating cynicism” and apathy were “more difficult opponents for us than even Tony Abbott”.

He said it should be a “wake-up call” for all politicians that about 2.8 million Australians who were eligible to participate in last year’s federal election missed out on having their votes counted, either through not enrolling, not attending, or casting informal ballots.

Shorten said the solution was to empower people, fostering the belief that politics was still capable of changing the world and local lives.

