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Backflip: Labor may adopt Tony Abbott “Direct Action Plan” but keep 45% brutal target?

A week is a long time in politics. Ideas that were stupid this time last Friday are suddenly mainstream.

Scratching to pick themselves up, the Labor Party may adopt Tony Abbott’s flagship program, but still cling to the idea that we can do a 45% reduction without major sacrifices. The Liberals must be praying the ALP keeps that target. What a gift for the 2022 election.

Even the Labor Party recognises that the anti-Abbott vote in Warringah doesn’t represent broader Australia:

Climate changes: Labor push to lighten green policies

 Ben Packham, The Australian

Labor is considering rejecting Scott Morrison’s mandate to ­deliver his full $158 billion in personal income tax cuts while flagging a dramatic shift on climate change policy and adopting a Tony Abbott-style “direct action” plan to cut carbon emissions.

Dear Labor Party — it’s not just the “market based mechanism” that stinks:

The warning came as Labor ­environment spokesman Tony Burke suggested the party needed to rethink its support for market-based mechanisms to cut carbon emissions, after its plan to use of international carbon credits to cut emissions was rejected by voters amid a row over the cost of the ­policy.

Suddenly the Labor Party is the spokesman for “the environmental movement”? Seriously?

“The Right and the environmental movement have shifted to a direct action model,” Mr Burke told the ABC.

Burke — sticks to double barrel denial: 1/ Denies there is “action” (while adopting the non-existent “inaction” plan as their own?) And 2/ pretends that “it’s less efficient” when Abbots plan cost 300 times less than the their carbon tax. Define “efficient”?

“Every other theory will tell you it is less efficient, and it is less efficient. But we are heading down the path now, once we get to the end of the next term, we will have had inaction for the past 15 years and that is not counting the 12 years the Howard government did nothing.

“We now need to be at the table of working through what are the other ways of reaching targets ­beyond simply saying we’ll have a market mechanism.”

Labor became bogged down in the election campaign over its ­“uncosted” plan to lower carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, while Mr Morrison had a $3.5bn direct action plan to cut emissions by 26 per cent.

Greg Brown, The Australian

Mr Burke said Labor should keep its 45 per cent emissions target but achieve it through direct action, which his party had previously ridiculed.

In other backflips: Amazing how fast the black-throated finch could be saved.

Adani mine: work on project could start in just three weeks

Adani could start building its controversial coalmine in just three weeks, after besieged Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declared she’d had a “gutful” of delays in her own government’s approvals of the project.

Ms Palaszczuk today said there had been a “breakthrough” in the impasse over Adani, declaring in Cairns that the deadline for a decision on Adani’s management plan for the endangered black-throated finch was May 31, while the decision on the company’s groundwater strategy would occur on June 13.

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