A colorful climate-change skeptic seized control of Australia’s opposition yesterday, vowing to kill carbon trading legislation ahead of UN talks, in a step that could trigger snap polls.
Right-wing maverick Tony Abbott ousted Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull by just one vote, 42-41, in a shock back-room result likely to doom marathon attempts to pass emissions laws.
A second defeat of the government bill, which aims to cut carbon pollution by between 5 percent and 25 percent of 2000 levels by 2020, would give the government powers to call an early election.
“We will oppose the legislation in the Senate — that is the right thing to do,” Abbott told reporters, adding that he was “not frightened of an election on this issue.”
Abbott’s victory comes after Turnbull sparked a party revolt by supporting the government’s emissions trading legislation, which is strongly opposed by the industry and agriculture lobbies.
The 52-year-old Abbott, a super-fit ex-trainee priest who recently posed for the cameras in his swimming trunks, sought to play down his earlier comments that climate-change science was “crap” as “a bit of hyperbole.”
“I think climate change is real,” Abbot said, prompting laughter at his press conference.
“I think man does make a contribution. There’s an argument as to how great that contribution is, and second, what should be done about it,” he said.
“The last thing we should be doing is rushing through a great big new tax just so [Australian Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd can take a trophy to Copenhagen,” he said.
Failure to pass the cuts ahead of the UN summit would be deeply embarrassing for Labor leader Rudd, who discussed climate change with US President Barack Obama on Monday.
“A failure to vote, or shall I say a vote to delay the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, is a vote to deny the climate-change science,” he told reporters in Washington.
Abbott said the opposition would seek to stall the legislation by deferring it to a Senate committee, or otherwise he vowed to defeat it this week in the upper house, where neither side holds a majority.
“Many millions of Australians are concerned that the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme looks like a great big tax, to create a great big slush fund,” he said.
The bill’s defeat would give Rudd the power to call Australia’s first “double dissolution” election since 1987, although the prime minister has played down the prospect.
Snap polls must be held between 33 and 68 days after parliament is dissolved, meaning any election would be held early next year. Rudd started a three-year term in February last year.
Rudd has sought to place Australia, the developed world’s worst per capita polluter, at the center of the international climate debate despite its accounting for just 1.5 percent of global emissions.
The center-left leader campaigned on a strong environmental platform during 2007 polls and ratified the Kyoto Protocol shortly after taking office.
He has been asked to be a “friend of the chair,” a deal-broker role, at the Copenhagen talks, which aim to craft a new pact for curbing the gases that drive global warming.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
RSS