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