Speaker 1: Anthony Alberanzi was first elected on a pledge to fix
Speaker 1: the climate oars. The most recent test of that promise
Speaker 1: was the emissions targets he announced and broadcast on the
Speaker 1: world stage. But if the targets themselves don't meet the
Speaker 1: standard set by scientists, and the policy underpinning them hasn't
Speaker 1: dramatically altered, then what's really going to change. I'm Ruby
Speaker 1: Jones and you're listening to seven AM Today journalist Nick
Speaker 1: fake on the inadequacies in the government's climate policy and
Speaker 1: how the media has allowed a political narrative to overshadow
Speaker 1: the reality of the climate crisis. It's Thursday, October nine,
Speaker 1: So Nick, the Prime Minister, Anthony Alberanzi, he made the
Speaker 1: most significant climate announcement of his second term, which was
Speaker 1: these new emissions targets recently.
Speaker 2: He then went on to present them at the United Nations.
Speaker 1: So to begin with, just tell me a bit about
Speaker 1: how alban Easy has described what it is that Australia
Speaker 1: is doing to the rest of the world.
Speaker 3: So when the Prime Minister spoke to the UN summit
Speaker 3: recently in New York, he told world leaders this is
Speaker 3: the decisive decade for acting on the environmental challenge of
Speaker 3: climate change.
Speaker 4: Australia is acting to meet the environmental challenge of climate
Speaker 4: change while working to seize and share the economic opportunities
Speaker 4: of renewable energy. Our target is ambitious, but importantly it
Speaker 4: is achievable, and if.
Speaker 3: You read most Australian media over the past fortnite, you'd
Speaker 3: think Australia's charting a path towards climate action, A pragmatic,
Speaker 3: realistic middle path was the way that most of the
Speaker 3: media covered the emission's target announced When he spoke to
Speaker 3: The Australian last week, Albanese he cited his government's new
Speaker 3: emissions target rangers too high for business groups and the
Speaker 3: opposition not high enough for the Greens, as if this
Speaker 3: sort of proved that it struck the right balance. So
Speaker 3: you'd think, in general reading the coverage that his plan
Speaker 3: was sensible and responsible, a plan for serious climate action.
Speaker 2: Okay, So what is actually in the plant?
Speaker 3: So the plan is for a sixty two to seventy
Speaker 3: percent So it's a range of emissions reduction over the
Speaker 3: next ten.
Speaker 4: Years, cutting emissions by sixty two to seventy percent. We
Speaker 4: are honoring our commitment to the Paris Agreement and each
Speaker 4: goal of keeping global temperatures below dangerous levels.
Speaker 3: So the low end sixty two percent, which you'd have
Speaker 3: to say, is surely more likely than them reaching the
Speaker 3: higher end, it wouldn't meet our international obligations. Even the
Speaker 3: high end is actually behind other Western nations like the UK.
Speaker 3: So bear in mind that Australia is already the second
Speaker 3: highest per capita emitter in the world. Currently, Australia's emissions
Speaker 3: aren't really falling. Even its domestic emissions. They haven't fallen
Speaker 3: significantly since about two thousand and five. I think we
Speaker 3: might have fallen but within a percentage point under the
Speaker 3: Labor government, so we haven't begun major emissions cuts yet.
Speaker 3: But even then the target doesn't even count exports. So
Speaker 3: put another way, the emission's targets that were announced last week,
Speaker 3: they don't apply to around eighty percent of the emissions
Speaker 3: for which Australia is responsible.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll talk to me a bit more about that
Speaker 1: if you focused in on domestic emissions, to what extent is.
Speaker 2: Our target undercut by our policy?
Speaker 3: So despite announcing a new emissions target, the Albanesi government
Speaker 3: has no legislative policies to enforce actual emissions cuts across
Speaker 3: any part of the domestic economy. So after they won
Speaker 3: the twenty twenty two election and came to power, even
Speaker 3: as they hailed at the climate wars were over, they
Speaker 3: talked about the defeat of Scott Morrison as a win
Speaker 3: for the climate. They didn't pass a whole new emission scheme,
Speaker 3: so that they didn't pass like an ETS or a
Speaker 3: carbon price. The only legislation they passed was to tweak
Speaker 3: what was essentially a coalition policy, the Safeguard mechanism, and
Speaker 3: this applies only to Australia's top two hundred biggest polluters,
Speaker 3: and in fact it's so badly designed that it allows
Speaker 3: even these companies to buy unlimited, cheap bogus offsets instead
Speaker 3: of cutting emission. So there's nothing that makes these polluters
Speaker 3: have to cut their real emissions. So even the inadequate
Speaker 3: target that we do have, we've got no way of
Speaker 3: stopping big polluters even from putting the same amount of
Speaker 3: emissions into the air to fulfill their legal obligations. Pointing
Speaker 3: at bogus sort of offsets, it doesn't reduce emissions. And
Speaker 3: these are the kind of a canning tricks. They just
Speaker 3: don't have any scientific validity. They don't address climate change. So,
Speaker 3: you know, while the government talks a lot about renewable energy,
Speaker 3: and renewable energy is going up in Australia, it kind
Speaker 3: of doesn't matter if you're not reducing your fossil fuel emissions,
Speaker 3: which we're not doing. So we're exploring huge amounts of emissions.
Speaker 3: We're not actually cutting our local domestic emissions. So the
Speaker 3: idea that we have this strong climate plan, where were
Speaker 3: the policies that were associated with this target? There were
Speaker 3: no new policies. It's a number. It means nothing.
Speaker 2: Coming up.
Speaker 1: How the media covers climate change through the game of politics.
Speaker 1: Can we talk a bit more nick about how we
Speaker 1: got into this position, because, as you say, when Albanzi
Speaker 1: first came to power, it was the you know, the
Speaker 1: quote unquote climate election, and the people who voted in
Speaker 1: the Labor government then and more recently clearly care about
Speaker 1: climate action taking place. However, it seems to have become
Speaker 1: neutral as a political issue. So tell me about how
Speaker 1: you think Albanezi has managed to do that.
Speaker 3: Well, I think a lot of there was a lot
Speaker 3: of rhetoric and people will relieved to hear that the
Speaker 3: government was acting on climate change. You know, the rhetoric
Speaker 3: was about boosting renewables. It was about having this new
Speaker 3: safeguard mechanism that would stop the biggest ballooters, et cetera.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people assumed that things were happening,
Speaker 3: and I still have a lot of conversations with people
Speaker 3: who say, oh, well, there, it might not be perfect,
Speaker 3: but then much better than the opposition was. Well, the
Speaker 3: rhetoric's a lot better, but the actions on the ground
Speaker 3: are not dissimilar. So essentially people stopped wanting to read
Speaker 3: about it because the policy these were too complex. No
Speaker 3: one could understand what the safeguard mechanism was. The media
Speaker 3: couldn't be bothered doing long explainers. It was too complex.
Speaker 3: You know, arguably this is deliberate. It's a deliberate way
Speaker 3: of pushing people out of the policy conversation. Instead, the
Speaker 3: media just basically now report on the politics of it
Speaker 3: as if it's a game of strategy. Who's up, who's down?
Speaker 3: Who looked good while making their announcement? What does it
Speaker 3: say about Susan Lee's leadership. To me, this was the
Speaker 3: most noticeable thing about the past two weeks of the
Speaker 3: conversations that we were supposedly having about climate change in
Speaker 3: climate politics, you know. For example, so in the Guardian,
Speaker 3: under the headline from New York to London, Anthony Albanezi
Speaker 3: plots of statesmanlike course through global turmoil. Their chief political correspondent,
Speaker 3: Tom McElroy kind of waxed on that Albanzi had shown
Speaker 3: that he can hold his own on the global stage
Speaker 3: while promoting Australian ideas on climate and that Australia is
Speaker 3: viewed as moving in the right direction. This is a
Speaker 3: perception that he's creating in this piece. Jacob Grieber, the
Speaker 3: political editor for the ABC seven point thirty, praise the
Speaker 3: government's handling of its climate announcement in terms of its
Speaker 3: political craftsmanship. He said, it's been a stunning display. The
Speaker 3: whole package was a masterclass in media management by the government.
Speaker 3: So you've got a political journalist congratulating a government for
Speaker 3: dodging the inconsistencies and fallacies of its most important climate policy,
Speaker 3: not to mention the inconvenient fact that Labour hasn't significantly
Speaker 3: reduced emissions and doesn't have the policies.
Speaker 1: To do so, And so what effect does it have
Speaker 1: Viewing climate policy through the prism of politics like this.
Speaker 3: Well, I think essentially you just never canvass the real issues.
Speaker 3: Editors and political journalists have begun to shape the national
Speaker 3: conversations that we have. So while you have great environmental
Speaker 3: journalists in the country and they're working hard and they
Speaker 3: do cover these issues, I'm not saying that the papers
Speaker 3: and the media generally don't give us information about climate change,
Speaker 3: but they're not the ones that are framing our national debates.
Speaker 3: They're not framing our thinking about these issues. So you
Speaker 3: don't have a political journalist talking about the very real
Speaker 3: implications of sea level rises on insurance costs, the costs
Speaker 3: of droughts or algal blooms on endangered ecosystems. You don't
Speaker 3: talk about the rising cost of natural disasters. Instead, they
Speaker 3: allow the policy debates to be framed by, on the
Speaker 3: one hand, large polluters and a denialist opposition on the
Speaker 3: other hand, increasingly right wing national news outlets. So the
Speaker 3: middle path is in the middle of people that essentially
Speaker 3: don't really want to do anything and talk about the issue.
Speaker 1: And can we talk a bit more about the Tills
Speaker 1: and the Greens. I mean, they were even more than
Speaker 1: labor elected on a climate platform.
Speaker 2: They voted for the safeguard mechanism.
Speaker 1: So to what extent do you think that they've has
Speaker 1: some responsibility for the position that we're in.
Speaker 3: I know that the Greens were really pushing for a
Speaker 3: better safeguard mechanism, and they thought that they'd had a
Speaker 3: win in imposing a hard cap on emissions in that legislation.
Speaker 3: I think they fought and got the best that they
Speaker 3: possibly could, and they thought that it would allow them
Speaker 3: to run very hard against labor on no New minds
Speaker 3: for example, and fixing the EPBC Act, putting a climate
Speaker 3: trigger in environmental legislation. I think the Greens thought that
Speaker 3: they weren't getting a perfect mechanism, but it would allow
Speaker 3: them the space to fight on another substantive issues, the tials.
Speaker 3: I just think they didn't really understand the complexity of
Speaker 3: the legislation, and that's a shame. I don't think they
Speaker 3: would have passed it even the NGOs see Environmental NGOs.
Speaker 3: At the end, we're backing the safeguard mechanism on the
Speaker 3: grounds that it was better than nothing. Well, arguably it
Speaker 3: wasn't better than nothing, because it ended up we ended
Speaker 3: up with nothing, as in, it hasn't really brought emissions reductions,
Speaker 3: so I think the blame can be spread pretty widely.
Speaker 1: Actually, it hasn't brought emissions reductions, but it has allowed
Speaker 1: people to think that a solution has been delivered, which
Speaker 1: is the danger right exactly.
Speaker 3: We're living in this world where people think we're acting
Speaker 3: on climate change. In Australia, we are not acting on climate.
Speaker 1: Change, and there's a huge amount of declining trust a
Speaker 1: lot of citizensm both in the media and in politics
Speaker 1: more generally. So, as the impact of climate change grows,
Speaker 1: as we see more disasters, as we start to feel it.
Speaker 2: More and more in our everyday lives.
Speaker 1: What do you think these big institutions are risking by
Speaker 1: not taking.
Speaker 2: This as seriously as they could.
Speaker 3: I think essentially the major media institutions are risking their
Speaker 3: own future audience by not treating this issue with the
Speaker 3: due seriousness. If you google temperature records this month, you're
Speaker 3: going to get a lot of results. If people are
Speaker 3: looking at their insurance policies that are coming through this month,
Speaker 3: they're seeing the effects of these things already starting to
Speaker 3: come through. Now, when we have a media that is
Speaker 3: simply not willing to take these issues seriously, it really
Speaker 3: risks their relationship with their audience, as in who's telling
Speaker 3: the truth? How can we possibly be having an argument
Speaker 3: about climate action where you say the government is acting responsibly,
Speaker 3: they're very sensible, at the same time as they're expand
Speaker 3: our fossil fuel extraction, at the same time as they're
Speaker 3: subsidizing fossil fuels by ten billion dollars a year, at
Speaker 3: the same time as they're ignoring recommendations from their own
Speaker 3: climate risk assessments. All of these things point to a
Speaker 3: government that's completely in denial and they're being applauded for
Speaker 3: it by the media. Essentially, I think it's no wonder
Speaker 3: that people are losing trust in the major parties and
Speaker 3: the major media.
Speaker 1: Wennick, thank you so much for your type.
Speaker 3: Thanks very much. Ruby.
Speaker 1: Also in the news today, a senior government official says
Speaker 1: I've just emailed the wrong address when it notified the
Speaker 1: Department of Communications about a major triple zero outage on
Speaker 1: September the eighteenth. Communications Minister Anika Wells has said she
Speaker 1: was not notified of the outage until more than twenty
Speaker 1: four hours after.
Speaker 2: It first began.
Speaker 1: The department's Deputy secret treat James Chisholm, made the disclosure
Speaker 1: during Senate estimates, adding that the Optus email also didn't
Speaker 1: outline the breadth of the outage, which affected six hundred
Speaker 1: calls and one of the seven Australians detained in Israel
Speaker 1: for attempting to deliver aid to Gaza says the group
Speaker 1: has received what she calls a shameful lack of support
Speaker 1: from the federal government. Juliet Lamont, who was deported to
Speaker 1: Jordan with the other Australians, has told the ABC their
Speaker 1: flight out was not facilitated by the Australian government. The
Speaker 1: Australians claimed they were violently physically abused by Israeli authorities.
Speaker 1: Israel has denied any mistreatment, and an Australian government spokesperson
Speaker 1: says DEFAT is continuing to provide consular.
Speaker 2: Assistance to the group. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.