Category: Australia

“The targets set a floor on Australia’s emissions reduction ambition, not a ceiling,” said the explanatory memorandum for the bill introduced into the lower house last week.

“There is nothing in this bill that would prevent these targets being surpassed or achieved early.”

The bill also requires the federal government’s Climate Change Authority to advise on the targets and publish its findings.

“Finally, there will be periodic independent reviews of how this bill is operating, with the first
such review to take place within five years, and thereafter every 10 years,” the memorandum said.

Bandt said last week the Australian people wanted the Greens and Labor to work together and the Greens were “up for that” in the talks on the climate bill.

“We will continue these negotiations in good faith to see if we can reach a position where we can pass legislation that allows us to start taking climate action because that’s what people want,” he said.

Greens NSW senator Mehreen Faruqi criticized the Labor target ahead of the party room meeting to decide the Greens’ position.

“We know that 43 per cent, obviously, is not enough to deal with the crisis we are facing,” Faruqi told the ABC on Tuesday afternoon.

“We have been able to get the Labor government to move and to rewrite parts of that bill.”

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Faruqi said the negotiations were “ongoing” and Labor had already agreed the target could be increased over time but flagged the Greens would also put amendments to phase out coal and gas, a call Labor has rejected.

A key point of contention is the demand from the Greens for changes to environmental approvals to insert a “climate trigger” into federal law so authorities including the federal environment minister would have to consider the impact of a project on carbon emissions before deciding whether to mine or major infrastructure should proceed.

“The government has not said no to a climate trigger,” she said.

“It is really important that we enshrine this in law so that it forces corporations and big mine developers to be honest about the pollution they are causing, and it forces the minister to consider the assessment of climate emissions in terms of assessing developments.

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“I mean, it does not make sense to not do that in such a climate-constrained world.”

Dutton gained support in the Coalition party room on Tuesday to vote against the government bill and launch a process to decide on a new climate policy to update the 2030 target of a 26 to 28 per cent emissions cut, set when Tony Abbott was prime minister.

Liberals including Bridget Archer, Andrew Bragg and Warren Entsch have signaled support for deeper cuts but did not tell the party room meeting they reserved their right to cross the floor.

Several Liberals said it was more important to focus on a more ambitious Coalition policy rather than the government bill, given Bowen had said he could go ahead with his policies even if the bill were defeated.

“Chris Bowen made it clear Labor don’t need the legislation to implement their emission reduction policies,” said Liberal MP James Stevens, the member for Sturt in South Australia, after the meeting.

“I’m focused on working with the Coalition team on the emission reduction targets we take to the next election for 2030 and 2035.”

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.

The ICAC did not make findings about individual grant schemes or politicians, and there is no suggestion that Berejiklian or Morrison were sanctioning corrupt conduct by making those comments. But the watchdog clarified that “pork-barrelling can indeed amount to a breach of the law, including the criminal law.”

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Pressuring a public servant to skew a grant assessment, dishonestly favoring political and private advantage over merit and deliberately breaching the guidelines of a grant program could amount to corrupt conduct, the ICAC said. It acknowledged that a politician may obtain a political benefit from exercising their public powers, but said this must be in the nature of a “side wind” and not their “dominating motivation”.

Griffith University Professor AJ Brown, leader of the Center for Governance and Public Policy’s public integrity and anti-corruption research program, participated in an expert forum as part of the ICAC’s investigation into pork-barrelling. He welcomed the report and said he hoped the NSW government adopted all 21 recommendations.

The report served a “dual function”, Brown said, in helping to change the political culture, but also “strengthening the hand of the public service, and recognizing and enforcing and upholding the expectation that the independent public service will play this crucial role in making decisions based on merit”. Both functions were equally important, he said.

Brown said governments had been allowed to function on the basis that an election commitment was itself a formal decision to allocate money, and that it had the authority of law and satisfied all criteria for a funding allocation to be made.

“That’s not a decision,” he said. “That’s an indication of the policy intent of the government. You can’t outsource the decision-making of government to a political candidate who hasn’t even been elected yet.”

The ICAC’s centrepiece recommendation was for guidelines about grants funding to be set out in statutory regulations, not policy documents, so that a contravention would amount to a breach of the law.

The watchdog also recommended NSW follow the lead of the Commonwealth and enshrine in law a requirement that a minister “must not approve expenditure of money unless that the expenditure would be an efficient, effective, economical and ethical use of the money and that the expenditure represents value for money”.

Anthony Whealy, QC, chair of the Center for Public Integrity and a former Court of Appeal judge and ICAC assistant commissioner, said the report “draws the demarcation line between merely promising money with an eye to political gain” and making a grant “primarily or solely for political gain, or where the public interest is ignored”.

He said the former “may be distasteful [but] is not corrupt conduct or criminal behaviour”. The latter “could amount to misconduct in public office, a criminal offence, or, at a lesser level, it could be a substantial breach of the ministerial code of conduct if a minister is involved”.

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But Whealy was less optimistic that the report would be heeded. “Putting it bluntly, we probably need to see a successful prosecution before this bites effectively. It’s easy for politicians to fool themselves into thinking that they’re acting in the public interest,” he said.

He said the law needed to be changed to ensure that grants guidelines “are published by parliament and that the selection process is reported on to parliament … and we need a parliamentary oversight body to whom a report is made”.

“All those things are cumbersome, but until we get that we’re not going to improve the system,” Whealy said.

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