Dutton takes on Albanese over climate targets

Already and this is the Daily Off. This is the Daily OS. Oh now it makes sense.

Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It is Wednesday, the twelfth of June.

I'm Billy, I'm Sam.

Australia's two major political parties are arguing over climate change again. They're arguing about what needs to be done and by when and by who.

Now.

Over the weekend you may have seen some headlines that Opposition leader Peter Dunnan was planning to pull out of the Paris Agreement if the coalition is voted in at the next election.

This caused a big political callout.

And a whole lot of name calling, before Dudden clarified that it is not his intention to pull out of the Paris Agreement if a coalition he is elected. Well, explain what you need to know in today's podcast. But before we get there, Sam, what is making headlines today?

More than three hundred bonds of workers have had their employment contracts terminated more than a month after the Budget Airline went into administration. External accounting firm Hall Chadwick was appointed to wind up the domestic Budget Airlines operations or facilitate its sale to an investor. Haul Chadwick said it had not received any offers to purchase the airline, leaving it quote no option but to terminate all employees and cancel all future flights.

Australia's property market reached a total value of ten point seven trillion dollars during the first three months of the year. Thus, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the property market increased by more than two hundred million dollars between January and March compared to the previous quarter. The national average house price is now just over nine

Singapore Airlines has announced compensation for passengers on a flight hit by severe turbulence last month. One man died of a suspected heart attack and some passengers suffered brain and spinal injuries. The airline said travelers who sustained minor injuries will receive around fifteen thousand dollars in compensation, while those medically assessed as seriously injured have been offered thirty eight

In today's good news, this is a great one. New research has found that African elephants have names for each other. According to findings published in the journal Nature, researchers recorded elephant vocalizations and found the animals were addressing each other through unique calls. When the audio was played back to individual elephants, some flapped their ears and lifted their trunk

You know how they talk to each other, right, no through the elephant. How long have we worked together? For? Three years?

Four years, nearly three years.

Nearly three years, And that means I spend a lot of time with you, and I know when you're actually really excited about the story, and for some reason this story has got you pumped up.

I did not know where that was going.

But yes, I am excited, and I'm considering it my mission to make the listeners who perhaps clicked on this and you didn't know whether they would be interested, to be really interested in it, because I just think it's so fascinating what has happened over the weekend.

I remember seeing so much news.

About dudden pulling out of this Paris agreement, which is massive.

News if you did do so. That was Saturday, right.

Exactly, But then Dunnan clarified that they wouldn't pull out of Paris, and I was just so confused, and I imagined that I'm not the only one who was in that case.

I know you were Sam as well. We were talking about it yesterday.

And I think it's these kinds of stories where the Daily Oz really has an opportunity to cut through all of the noise and just explain what actually has happened and.

What you need to know, but also why it matters. And I'm really keen to get to that bit as well. But why don't we just take this a little slower. That was quite a chaotic little introduction from you. Where does this story actually start?

I won't take offense to that Sam. So on Friday night, the Australian newspaper publish an interview with opposition leader Peter Dunden where he said that a coalition government would scrap Labour's twenty thirty emissions target if he's elected at the next election. Now side note, you might be wondering when the next Australian election is. It's sometime before May next year.

We don't know the latest point.

That's the latest point it can be. We don't know exactly where it will be, but we know it soon. And that is why the coalition, who is currently in opposition, is starting to tell us more about what their policies would be if they do get elected. So back to this news, So, Duddan said that a coalition government would scrap Labour's twenty thirty targets because he claims there is quote no sense in signing up to targets you don't

We legislated there.

So he didn't directly say we're pulling out of Paris.

No, and that's the important point.

I think that Duddin didn't actually explicitly say the Coalition would pull out of Paris. Those words did not come out of his mouth, but just the suggestion that he would scrap these targets which have been legislated under the Paris Agreement led to a lot of speculation that a coalition government would pull Australia out of the Paris Agreement, and that is where these headlines came from. But that is not the case, and I'll explain more in a bit.

Because that really is going to get to the heart of what the coalition's policy actually is rather than what it's not. So there's a lot of moving parts in this story. The key part, though, seems to me to be the Paris Agreement itself that was in twenty fifteen. Take us back there and tell me about that agreement.

So back in twenty fifteen, Australia was one of one hundred and ninety six parties who signed up to this Paris Agreement, which was a promise to limit global temperatures to one point five degrees celsius above pre industrial levels.

Now, it was actually.

Under a coalition government that Australia did this, which I think is interesting in the context of this conversation. I think it adds a little bit of nuance because that would make it even a bigger deal if the Coalition did then get back into government and pull us out of it now to achieve this limit of one point five degrees celsius, the United Nations states that the world must reach net zero by twenty fifty.

And just in case we haven't thought about net zero on this Wednesday morning, give me a quick sense of what that is.

So net zero means balancing how many greenhouse gas emissions enter the atmosphere against how many are taken out.

So the metaphor that people use when explaining net zero is this idea of a bath tub, and you need the water to be coming out of the plug at the bottom at the same rate as new water is coming in at the top, and you need that level of water to be the same in the bath that's net zero exactly.

Doesn't mean absolutely no emissions, It just means taking out the same amount as you're putting in now. Under the Paris Agreement, the general goal, like I said, is to reach net zero by twenty to fifty. So what are we in now twenty twenty four? We have twenty six years to get there now. Importantly, signatories to the Paris Agreement must have progressive targets to cut emissions. So you can't just say we're going to get there in twenty fifty.

Then we need to kind of show the roadmap, show the working out exactly.

And it works in five year cycles, so signatories are expected to have a plan every five years to progressively cut their emissions. And that's where our twenty thirty target comes from.

And I think part of the way that countries and parties keep themselves accountable is they kind of come back together every so often and say, well, how are you going to achieve this and how are you held accountable? So what's Australia's plan right now?

So right now, Australia's twenty thirty target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forty three percent below what they were at in two thousand and five. And that target was set by the Labor government after they got in at the twenty twenty two election.

It was a big issue in that election.

Massive issue. I think it was widely seen as a climate change election.

I remember we did polling at the time of what issue mattered to younger voters, especially in climate change was just miles out in front even then at that point, well ahead of cost of living.

Yeah, and I think now, you know, cost of living and climate change are still equally just as important in young voters' minds. Now Here, it's important to acknowledge that it is a fact that Australia is not right now on track to reach our target. Last month the government's Climate Change Department revealed that Australia will achieve a reduction of forty two percent by twenty thirty at the current rate. So just to remind, Australia's target is forty three percent,

And I'm sure whenever this next election will be, it will continue to be a really important part of who gets elected. But one thing that's different this time around is that those targets are now set in Australian law.

Right, Yeah, this is an important difference because, like you said, the targets are now legislated and they were done so by the Labor government, and that just means that there's more accountability if it fails to meet the target, and it also means that it can't be scrapped unless a new LA law is passed. So if the coalition government comes in, they can't just say we're not going to do that. They actually have to pass legislation.

Which wouldn't be a problem for a future potential coalition government if they controlled both the House and the Senate. We know that that's not necessarily the status quoit, or often.

The case that you control the lower House and the upper house.

Right to be harder, and you could envision then another round of fighting about climate policy to happen even with a change of government.

Definitely.

So what is the coalition saying. I mean, we've talked a lot about what they're not saying. They're not saying they're going to pull out of Paris. What are they saying?

So the Coalition has now clarified that what they're saying is that they believe Labour's targets are not achievable and so their argument is what is the point of having these unachievable targets If, again these are their words, you don't have a plan to actually get there. Obviously Labor disputes that, but that's what the coalition is saying, and the coalition climate change spokesperson, who is Ted O'Brien, he confirmed that it would not maintain the twenty thirty target

That's really interesting, right, So both major parties are saying we are going to be at net zero by twenty fifty.

Yes, but the key difference is twenty thirty and that's

So basically we are going to get painted with a longer term vision without necessarily understanding the steps to get there exactly. So Peter Dutton and the Coalition have laid out they've kind of taken the first moves in this climate fight or this round of the climate fight. What has the reaction been.

I'll go through a few different perspectives quickly, so Prime Minister Anthony Albanizi he actually held a press conference on Monday, which was a public holiday, and that's quite rare for the Prime minister to do, but kind of just shows what big news this was.

But he showed he was in holiday mode by not wearing a suit. You're kind of a casual jacket.

Yes, And unsurprisingly he just completely slammed Duddin's initial comments. He said, quote Peter Dutton is worse than Scott Morrison on climate change. That quote stood out to me. And then the Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said that the twenty thirty reduction is achievable, so he is disputing the coalition's line that it's not achievable, and he added quote Dudden is giving up on it, but we are saying

When you put it like that, it's a bit of a sorry state of affairs in our politics. Have there been other responses, perhaps not from politicians, Yeah, I.

Think one worth mentioning is from business perspectives. I was reading in the Australian Financial Review yesterday morning that this discussion just creates so much uncertainty for the industry, which I think is a really interesting point when we think about the facts that Australia has elections every three years. That potentially means that we have a new government every three years, which you know, if one government is introducing laws, the next government is scrapping it, and then you just

Especially for something as major as an energy transition and all the different various ways that that's being proposed to happen. I mean, this is really serious policy that we're talking about, and it's perhaps one of those points where the regularity of our elections actually can make things a little difficult.

Yeah, it's really interesting when you put it in that context, because you know, obviously having long term goals is really important, but it's just about how do we do that when there is such constant change in government.

It's also important to say that the alternative to that model of government is somebody who's there as the prime

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