‘I don’t think others should be coming and lecturing us on climate change,’ trade minister says of US president’s comments

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Trade minister Andrew Robb has slammed US president Barack Obama’s call for Australia to do more to save the Great Barrier Reef, saying the speech was unnecessary and Obama was misinformed.



Robb is the latest high-profile minister to criticise the climate change speech, which Obama made on the sidelines of last weekend’s G20 meeting in Brisbane.

On Friday, foreign minister Julie Bishop publicly rebuked Obama for the address, saying that she had a briefing with the US secretary of the interior Sally Jewell before the G20 in which she’d outlined the action Australia was taking to protect the reef.

The trade minister took up the fight on Sunday, saying the content of the speech was wrong.

“It was misinformed, and I think it also was unnecessary,” Robb told Sky News.

“I felt that the president was not informed about Australia’s achievements, which have been bipartisan achievements. You know, we get a lot of people lecturing us from around the world about meeting targets. We – Australia – have met the Kyoto targets … Most of the countries lecturing us did not meet their targets.”

“I don’t think others should be coming and lecturing us on climate change,” he said. “[The speech] gave no sense of the first world, high-class efforts that Australia is making successfully on that issue.”

Robb said the speech unfairly highlighted the issue of climate change, which wasn’t the focus of the G20 meeting.

“There had been 12 months of work gone into shifting the focus of the G20 to greater growth, sustainable growth.”

But he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he thought Obama had shown a deliberate disregard for the Abbott government, saying that the two governments had worked well together on a number of key issues over the last year.

Australia’s attempts to keep climate change off the G20 agenda were hijacked by the announcement of a climate deal between the US and China in the lead up to the high-profile leaders’ meeting.

A final communique by the leaders included a call for all countries to contribute to the international green climate fund, a call previously rejected by Australian prime minister Tony Abbott.