A “great leap backwards” for climate policy? (Image: Marianna Massey/Getty Images)

Australia’s landslide election result seems to be bad news for the climate. Following the election of a new government, Australia is to abolish its emissions trading scheme, disband a climate advisory body and institute a carbon reduction policy that experts say will fail to meet its meagre target.

It will also scale back the country’s embryonic National Broadband Network and direct funding away from research projects it deems “ridiculous”.

The conservative Liberal-National coalition, headed by incoming prime minister Tony Abbott, triumphed at the polls this weekend. It ran for election with a core idea of “scrapping the carbon tax”. In the last term of the Labor government, a price on carbon was introduced, under pressure from the Australian Greens party, with whom they shared power in a minority government. The carbon price – widely called a “carbon tax” – was set to increase gradually until 2015 when carbon credits would be opened for trading, allowing the market to set the price.


Abbott’s coalition also signalled that it would disband Australia’s Climate Commission – an independent scientific body that provides reliable information on climate change to the public. In response to a report the commission released, warning that extreme weather was made more likely by climate change, Abbott said: “When the carbon tax goes, all of those bureaucracies will go and I suspect we might find that the particular position you refer to goes with them.”

Contentious views

In 2009, Abbott said, when talking about climate change, that the “science is highly contentious, to say the least” and “the climate change argument is absolute crap”, but accepted that precautionary action against it was a good idea.

Australia’s carbon reduction policy currently has three key pillars: the emissions trading scheme, a renewable energy target of 20 per cent and government financing for clean energy projects. The renewable energy target is the only part of the policy that won’t be removed immediately, but Abbott has said that the government will conduct a “serious review” of it.

Replacing the current system, the coalition says it will institute a “direct action” plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels. This relies mostly on farmers voluntarily storing carbon in soils and planting trees, but will also finance lowering the emissions of power stations and create incentives for the uptake of renewable energy.

The plan includes A$300 million (US$280 million) for the establishment of a “Green Army” of 15,000 troops, the functions of which have not been outlined.

It is a “great leap backwards”, says Ian Lowe from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He says that no experts think the targets will be met and that the stance is ideological, because senior members of the government don’t think climate change is man-made He worries that the outgoing government will also see the election result as a reason to abandon serious effort on climate policy.

Despite one analysis suggesting that the direct action plan’s funding of A$3.2 billion represents less than half of what is needed to meet the 5 per cent target, Abbott indicated the government will not up this figure.

Research under fire

During its campaign, the Liberal-National coalition also said it would direct research funding away from projects it said were “ridiculous”. The first example it gave was a philosophy project entitled “The quest for the ‘I'” – a A$595,000 grant aimed at “reaching a better understanding of the self”.

The researcher behind the project, Diego Bubbio, from the University of Western Sydney, tells New Scientist that the project is examining how conceptions of the self have changed throughout history, and how they can be affected by those around us.

He thinks the attack is unfair and says politicians are in no place to judge the value of research. “If we accept that a field has something to contribute to our understanding of the world, then the best thing to do is for scholars and scientists in each field to make their judgement about the quality of each project being assessed,” he says.

The politicisation of research funding angered Science & Technology Australia, a representative body for scientists. Its CEO, Catriona Jackson, said that the government should set research priorities but should not have a role in “picking and choosing” projects.

The new government will also scale back plans for a national broadband network. Australia is connecting almost every home to a fibre-optic network. Part of the new government’s plan is to lay cables to street corners, from where the old copper telephone wires would carry the signal to people’s homes, reducing maximum speeds, but also reducing infrastructure costs. Meanwhile, there are also plans to cut A$42 million from NICTA, Australia’s Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence.