Over recent days and bit by bit, Australians have been coming to understand the price that Malcolm Turnbull was willing to pay to achieve his long-held personal ambition of becoming prime minister. Australians are beginning to understand the extent to which he was willing to discard so many long-held beliefs to satisfy that ambition.



Nowhere has that price been higher than in relation to climate change and environmental protection policy. This was, after all, the signature difference between the former prime minister and the new prime minister.

Many Australians held out very high hopes that Mr Turnbull’s return to the leadership of the Liberal party would see him drag the party back to the sensible centre on climate change — that there would be the hope of Australia again regaining a bipartisan consensus that would allow us to move forward in the way that so many of our sister nations around the world are doing.

As these Australians watch what the prime minister has been saying over the last few days — going back to his press conference on Monday night — their hearts are breaking.

All those Australians who thought that Mr Turnbull’s return to the leadership of the Liberal party would actually mean something — that it would actually hold out the hope of a strong and sensible policy on climate change for Australia — have had their hearts broken, because this prime minister has swallowed Tony Abbott’s Direct Action policy, hook, line and sinker.

Those Australians were entitled to hold out those hopes. They were entirely entitled to think that a change of leadership would mean something and would lead to some change in the Liberal party’s attitude to climate change. The old Malcolm had been so crystal clear about his belief that the Direct Action policy, in his words, was “an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing”.

The old Malcolm Turnbull was clear in his advocacy of an emissions trading scheme as the cheapest and most effective means of reducing carbon pollution. We have heard him say, so many times, particularly in that critical period of debate in 2009 and 2010, that a policy like Tony Abbott’s emissions reduction fund would be “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale”.

Well, apparently it’s all different now. Tony Abbott’s Direct Action policy is apparently now a “very, very good piece of work”. In parliament, the new prime minister praised the emissions reduction fund’s first auction, which spent about $650 m of taxpayer funds. Forty seven million tonnes of carbon pollution reductions were purchased under this first auction. What the prime minister has not said is that of those 47 m tonnes, three quarters, or 34 m tonnes, were from projects that already existed and in some cases had existed for more than 10 years, including with big companies like AGL — the largest polluter in Australia. Taxpayers are paying for things that those companies were already doing.

The second element of Tony Abbott’s Direct Action policy, the safeguards mechanism, was released earlier this month, and it exceeded everyone’s worst expectations. RepuTex, the leading modelling agency in this area, has provided very clear advice that, under this safeguards policy, the biggest 20 polluters in Australia will not be touched whatsoever. And the biggest 150 polluters in this country will increase their emissions by 20% over the next 15 years. The Grattan Institute said in response to the release of the safeguards policy: “It is called a safeguard, but it is not an environmental safeguard. Greg Hunt is not actually constraining emissions; if it is going to work it is going to have to have teeth, but all we have got is gums.”

It’s not surprising then that we’ve seen emissions starting to rise again. Under Direct Action, 2020 levels of carbon pollution will be substantially higher than they are today, and substantially higher than they were in 2000 or in 2005.

The government’s own projections suggest that, in 2020, carbon pollution levels in Australia will be 655 m tonnes against 559 m tonnes in 2000 — so, not 5% below 2000 levels, 17% above 2000 levels. RepuTex was more generous to the government than the government’s own modelling. It said only last month that, in 2020, carbon emissions will be 613 m tonnes against 559 m tonnes — so 10% above 2000 levels.

Land clearing is increasing again in Queensland, thanks to Campbell Newman’s reversal of Peter Beattie’s land-clearing laws. Electricity sector emissions are up because of Tony Abbott’s attack on renewable energy. Fugitive emissions from mining are up, and they will not be capped at all because there is no discipline in the safeguard mechanism. That is why we need an emissions trading scheme. That is why we need a hard cap on carbon pollution that reduces over time and then lets business work out the cheapest and the most effective way to operate.

We also need strong support for renewable energy. It is very clear now that you will only get that strong support from a Shorten Labor government. In parliament, Malcolm Turnbull dismissed out of hand Labor’s invitation to cooperate on a 50% renewable energy goal for 2030. He called the goal “reckless” and argued instead for “clean coal” and more gas-fired generation.

Millions of Australians are now asking themselves, more in sorrow than in anger, I suspect: how did it come to this? How is Malcolm Turnbull, who apparently had such deep beliefs around climate change and environmental policy, now a convert to a policy he rightly condemned all those years ago, and which experience has shown deserved that condemnation. The answer, unfortunately, is the answer that is so often the case in these circumstances: base personal ambition.

Australians are coming to understand that there was nothing that Malcolm Turnbull was not willing to trade off, not willing to sell out, to achieve his long-held ambition to become prime minister. We probably still don’t know it all. We know it includes climate change policy, water policy, renewable energy policy, same-sex marriage policy. How can Australians possibly trust this prime minister on anything?

Mark Butler is Labor spokesperson for Environment, Climate Change and Water.