"Green Army" offers practical environmental solutions not bureaucratic ones
18-January-2010
Late last week Opposition leader Tony Abbott gave the most important speech of his leadership to date. During his address to the Sydney Institute Mr Abbott outlined the first – and perhaps most significant - of the Coalition’s major policies it will take to this year’s election. Mr Abbott’s speech outlined in detail the Coalition’s plans to counter our most pressing domestic environmental problems.
At the heart of this policy is a proposal to establish “a standing environmental workforce, perhaps 15,000 strong, comprised of short-term trainees plus regular workers and supervisors capable of supplying the skilled, motivated and sustained attention that large-scale environmental remediation needs”.
Australia’s environmental problems require practical solutions, not the bureaucratic ones that have so far been offered up by Kevin Rudd. As Mr Abbott pointed out during his address, the key difference between the Opposition and the Government’s environmental policies lies in “wanting to make a practical difference rather than exploiting the environment for political advantage”.
Since the Rudd Government announced its giant new tax on everything, aka the Emissions Trading Scheme, the overwhelming majority of the environmental debate has focused on what is the best way to tax people for the right to pollute. Tony Abbott has now turned the debate towards what needs to happen in our backyard to ensure that we are able to combat the predicted effects of climate change.
The establishment of a new “green army” will be “Australia’s first deployment of large numbers of people on behalf of the environment and the first time that we have approached environmental remediation with the same seriousness and level of organization that we have brought, say, to dealing with bushfires or other local and regional emergencies”.
No domestic environmental issue requires more urgent attention than the human, environmental and economic crisis facing the Murray Darling Basin. Mr Abbott’s assessment of the problems was spot on: “It’s an environmental problem, certainly, because low environmental flows are impacting on wildlife and wetlands. It’s an economic problem because the basin provides one third of Australia’s food supply and much of our agricultural exports. It’s a human problem, fundamentally, because the millions of Australians living in the catchment largely depend on its rivers for their livelihood and even for their drinking water.”
There are practical, direct actions we can take on climate change based on an incentive based approach rather than punishment and over the coming months the Coalition will be announcing a range of measures that will achieve real outcomes for the environment, without imposing the Government’s financial burden on Australian households.
If you have any thoughts on the Coalition’s environmental policies or any ideas on how to tackle our environmental problems I would love to hear from you. Please visit my website at www.markcoulton.com.au and let me know what you think.