It’s fair to say that Australia’s Prime Minister Toby Abbott is not terribly concerned about climate change.
In 2009, he rather infamously described the science outlining the impact of global warming as “crap.” And, as wildfires raged across the country last year, both Abbott and his environment minister curtly dismissed any connection between extreme weather patterns and global warming, despite contradictory evidence posted on its own environmental department website.
A key plank of Mr. Abbott’s successful election campaign in 2013 was centered on repealing the landmark Australian Carbon Tax, which his government eventually did in July. But it was held up for weeks by stiff opposition from a fringe political party known as the Palmer United Party (PUP).
The party’s leader, mining magnate Clive Palmer is an eccentric figure. He amassed a fortune through various coal, iron ore and nickel holdings, but has branched out into a range of other sectors in recent years. In 2013, he launched the Palmer Coolum Resort, a dinosaur theme park/golf course in 2013 (photos available here). He has outlined an elaborate plan to build and operate a replica of the Titanic as a modern cruise ship, which is currently under development. But most importantly, he founded the right-leaning political party bearing his own name in 2013.
The PUP managed to make big gains in the 2013 general election, despite a lack of popular support. How did this come to pass? Reuters looked into it last year:
The unusual Senate results are partly due to king maker Glenn Druery, who set up an alliance of micro parties and helped them work out how to capitalize on the voting system for the Senate, where six candidates are elected from each state.
Under the complicated preferential voting system, the candidates with the lowest votes are eliminated and their votes are re-distributed according to preference deals worked out among the parties.
Druery, for example, helped the Sports Party and Motoring Enthusiast Party understand that they could win a seat if they kept directing preferences away from the major parties, ensuring a slow build-up of votes funneled to them.
With no party holding a majority in the 76-seat Senate, this motley crew of small parties now holds the balance of power. The PUP won three seats, and quickly formed a loose alliance with the lone member of the Motoring Enthusiast Party. (For the record, there is also one Liberal Democrat, one Family First Party delegate and two independents representing small parties in the Senate). This scenario has placed the PUP in a remarkably prominent position, and Clive Palmer has taken full advantage: his party has cast the deciding votes on numerous key pieces of legislation, particularly when it comes to environment and energy issues.
The PUP is certainly not a natural ally of environmental groups. In 2012, Palmer claimed that Greenpeace Australia was a pawn in an elaborate CIA-led scheme to undermine Australia’s coal exports. He later walked back his comments. Questions remain about whether or not his political party exists solely to bolster his private holdings, particularly when it comes to coal.
And yet, he has forced some meaningful concessions from the Abbott government on a range of environmental legislation.
Mr. Palmer’s first shot across the bow was his sudden opposition to the carbon tax repeal. The PUP repeatedly withdrew its support for the Abbott government’s lead priority in exchange for a number of concessions, seemingly to demonstrate that it was in the driver’s seat. Opposition Labour Party leader Bill Shorten summed up the strange series of events: “[The government] can’t work out if they hate the Palmer United party or they want to do anything the Palmer United party asks.”
In June, Mr. Palmer held an impromptu press conference where he outlined an entirely new environmental agenda:
Flanked by climate change campaigner and former US vice-president Al Gore, Mr. Palmer said his Palmer United Party would vote against the Coalition's bid to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Renewable Energy Target and the Climate Change Authority.
The PUP leader said his party also wanted to see the creation of an emissions trading scheme similar to the one proposed by former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
To replace the carbon tax, Abbott’s government proposed a voluntary $2.55 billion (AUS) Emissions Reduction Fund that would essentially pay polluters to reduce carbon emissions. This bill, tabled as the Direct Action plan, has been widely criticized as an ineffective and expensive alternative to the punitive carbon tax. In exchange for supporting the Direct Action plan, successfully passed last Friday in the Senate, Palmer forced the government to hold off on eliminating the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and disbanding the Climate Change Authority (CCA), a respected government advisory body on global warming issues.
Perhaps most importantly, Palmer required the government set up a three-stage, 18-month inquiry into the possibility of establishing an emissions trading scheme (ETS), to be run by the CCA. Palmer was hailed by his PUP colleagues in the Senate has a “Jedi Knight” for having extracted these concessions from the Abbott government.
A bizarre spectacle ensued in the press conference announcing the Direct Action plan, with the Abbott government both announcing the ETS commission and then immediately pledging to ignore all of its recommendations. While this appeared to leave little room for compromise on an ETS in the future, the Sydney Morning Herald speculated that this bill still left the door open:
There is another possibility an emissions trading scheme, of a type, could be introduced through the back door.
Mr. Hunt has said any penalties must be "revenue neutral" leaving the possibility that any sanctions on businesses that don't meet their obligations will centre on the purchase of domestic credits from other firms who better meet theirs.
If this were adopted, it could realise the predictions made by members of the government's expert reference panel for the emissions reduction fund that the policy is a pathway to a baseline and credit scheme, essentially a domestic emissions trading scheme.
The next battle between Abbott and Palmer is likely to be over the fate of the CEFC. While Abbott agreed to hold off on dissolving the “green bank” immediately, his government has been sending threatening letters informing it that it should begin to wind down operations by next June. The Guardian expands on this:
CEFC chief executive Oliver Yates said he would continue to operate “as usual” until parliament changed the law setting up his organisation, but he said the clear signals from the government that it still wanted to get rid of the CEFC made his job much harder.
“The fact that we have to prepare our accounts this way makes no difference to what we do. We will continue to carry out our statutory obligations,” he told Guardian Australia. “They don’t have the numbers in the Senate to abolish us, but they are sending signals to the market that our business is under threat, and that creates uncertainty and makes it harder for us to carry out our statutory obligations.”
Australians are still struggling to figure out what to make of this enigmatic figure, but he’s likely to play an integral role in shaping Australian environmental and energy policy for years to come. Surely, Toby Abbott can’t believe his bad fortune.
