Bob Brown: Australian government ‘culpable’ for climate disasters like Nepal

Former Greens leader Bob Brown said Australia is “culpable” for the devastation in Nepal because it was not acting seriously on the dangers of carbon emissions changing the climate.

Australia is co-hosting the COP31 summit in November, along with Türkiye. Yet despite talking up climate action, Labor set about lowering expectations after it was first elected in 2022.

Green Left’s Alex Bainbridge spoke with former Greens leader Bob Brown about Labor’s refusal to take climate action seriously, even though it is a co-host of COP31.

What do you think of Labor’s approach to the climate emergency and does Australia deserve to be co-hosting COP31?

The symbolism of turning on Beetaloo in the wake of the Nepali avalanche disaster is very hard to ignore.

But this Labor government, much like the far-right alternatives, is captured by the corporate sector, including Woodside and BHP, selling off Australian’s rights for a secure future.

They won’t be the only culpable governments in Türkiye, however. Labor appears to be better than Pauline Hanson, but One Nation and Labor are both culpable of making climate change worse.

Federal Labor is set to debate the so-called “improved native forest management” method. Supporters claim it is going save some native forests. However, it allows state governments to earn carbon credits to then plough back into an already dodgy carbon trading system. Should saving forests be contingent on companies being able to buy carbon credits?

We’ve got more than 600 national parks in Australia, and world heritage areas, and they’ve all been set aside for the nation’s future because of their natural and cultural heritage values.

They were never set aside because of the dollars that could be made out of it.

But we’ve got a watershed moment; if Labor gets away with this, we have this new dynamic whereby future national parks will depend, to some degree or another, on whether the corporate sector can extract money as a result.

The NSW Chris Minns Labor government went to the last election in 2023 promising a great koala national park. It never put a condition on that, nor would it have, because polls showed that 80% of Labor voters wanted that park created and want koalas saved.

But, since the election, Minns has added a rider that you cannot have the koala park unless you agree to a scheme that measures the carbon absorbed by the saved forest and sells it to polluters as a cheap “offset”, so they can continue polluting. This way the polluting corporation can keep putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and make climate change worse.

We need to look at this through the lens of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who has repeatedly said the quickest and cheapest way to deal with climate change is to stop logging forests. This Minns manoeuvre destroys that advantage.

Energy minister Chris Bowen is once again criticising the Greens’ decision in 2009 to block the flawed carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), which we called the “continue polluting regardless scheme”. There’s a lot of rewriting of that history. Looking back, were the Greens right to block the CPRS?

How do you respond to Labor’s argument that the decision set the climate movement back by a decade?

Bowen and Labor have a blind spot on the Julia Gillard years, when the Greens got Labor to put through the carbon pricing scheme in 2011, which was a world leader and really did make a difference because it almost instantly lowered greenhouse gases emissions for the first time in decades and lowered electricity prices.

The CPRS, which came two years before that, was flawed. It had been negotiated by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with the Coalition. It was only when the Coalition pulled out that they said, “Well, now the Greens have got to put it through.” The Greens said we’ll amend it and they said “No”.

Large sections of the Canberra press gallery have glossed over the real action that was needed to tackle climate change and which the Greens got two years later with Gillard. Our scheme was so effective that [former Coalition Prime Minister] Tony Abbott had to try to dismantle as much of it as he could.

Let me just go back to the CPRS. The Greens said it is simply feather bedding for multinational polluters and we are not going to pass it. The media said: “The Greens have had it. There’s five Greens in the parliament. They’re going to lose at the next election.”

At the next election, our vote went up by 50% and we won four more seats because the public could see what a failure the CPRS would have been. They voted for the Greens taking a stand on climate change.

So that’s the real outcome. Our opposition to the CPRS more than doubled the number of Greens in the parliament, including Adam Bandt winning a seat in the lower house (Melbourne).

Labor might see it as a disaster, but for the Greens it was a victory.

The media, the press gallery and a lot of Labor politicians think the Greens should never block bad policy.

Labor’s mantra of “Never let the perfect get in the way of the good” is another way of saying “Let the bad prevail over the better”. It comes from Labor hating the fact that the Greens are to its left on environmental and social measures, and are doing what Labor should be doing, but won’t because it has moved so far to the right.

This northern summer has been brutal for those in the Northern Hemisphere and here we’re heading into a super El Niño summer. What kind of climate action do we need today?

Anthony Albanese, because he has the constitutional powers, could stop agreeing to more coal and gas mines, and coal mine expansions. He could stop more native forest logging. But he’s committed to policies making climate change worse and, as such, I say is culpable.

The world’s best risk assessors, who advise insurance companies and reinsurance companies, say that business-as-usual climate policies will lead, by the latter quarter of this century, to a 25% loss of global productivity and two billion people dead.

Those assessors have nothing to gain from making such predictions. We know that Albanese is even suppressing Australan intelligence agencies’ assessment of the dangers of climate change. So it’s not just a case of head in the sand; it’s an intellectual bankruptcy.