Craig Kelly, who chairs backbench committee on environment and energy, says he thinks Paris agreement is ‘cactus’

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Australia will need to review its participation in the Paris agreement on climate change if Donald Trump follows through with his threat to withdraw from the treaty, according to the chair of the Turnbull government’s backbench committee on environment and energy.



Craig Kelly told Guardian Australia on Wednesday he’d predicted immediately after Trump’s election that the Paris climate deal was “cactus” and he stood by that assessment.

Craig Kelly, Facebook

Trump on Tuesday night Australian time signed a new executive order to unravel a number of Barack Obama’s regulatory measures to combat climate change, including eliminating the clean power plan, which sets limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that power plants emit.

The latest executive order is seen as a prelude to the US following through with the campaign commitment to withdraw from the Paris deal.

Australian conservatives are watching events in the US closely.

Kelly said he was aware of the new executive order, and if Trump went the extra step and withdrew from the Paris agreement: “I think we have to review it.”

The former Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who now sits on the crossbench, holds the same view.

“It is clear America intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement and it would be folly for Australia to be part of it,” Bernardi said. “I don’t think we should subsume our national interest to international bodies.”

Bernardi this week sparked a rebellion inside the government by proposing to disallow an extradition treaty with China on the basis the country’s legal system was deficient.

The disallowance motion prompted a number of Liberals to express opposition to the extradition treaty.

If Trump withdraws from the Paris deal, Bernardi will likely use the development as a recruitment drive for his new Australian Conservatives movement, which will put pressure on conservative MPs in the government.

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Kelly, who chairs the government’s backbench committee on climate and energy, has been campaigning internally for months, arguing that the federal renewable energy target should be frozen at its current level.

The Sydney Liberal backbencher said regardless of what the US ultimately did, he had concerns about what the Paris deal could achieve.

Kelly said even if you accepted that fiddling with “the CO2 knob” could influence climate change, he had doubts that countries could meet their Paris commitments “without a technological breakthrough”.

Asked whether a majority of his Coalition colleagues would be in favour of quitting the Paris deal in the event Trump pulled out, Kelly argued “it would be a close run thing”.

He said government MPs were under pressure from voters who believed renewable energy targets were responsible for higher power prices.

The prime minister has signalled Australia will stay the course if the Trump administration follows through with its threats to quit the Paris deal.

Turnbull told reporters last November it would take four years to withdraw from the agreement after ratification.