Antinuclear

AUDIO: Environmentalists launch direct action education campaign, ABC Radio  Friday, October 31, 2014 ELIZABETH JACKSON: The recently appointed head of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) says the organisation will embark on a public education campaign in response to the Government’s direct action legislation passing through Parliament.

Businessman, environmental activist and former Howard government advisor, Geoff Cousins says the legislation is shameful because it pays big polluters to keep polluting.

Mr Cousins has lashed out at the Business Council of Australia (BCA) for supporting the legislation which he says individual companies would have rejected…….

GEOFF COUSINS The plan that they called direct action actually gives money to the big polluters; taxpayers’ money is given out. They say of course that the aim of that is that it will be used then by these companies to reduce pollution but there’s no guarantee that that will be the case and of course, there’s no compulsion on the companies to do anything at all.

It is really quite a shameful situation and to have the Prime Minister of Australia running around the world as he did a couple of weeks ago saying coal is our future. Goodness me. It’s really just ridiculous. Not even the coal companies actually believe that……

business is actually a long way ahead of the Government on this issue and a very good example of that would be that all the major insurance companies in Australia quite some years ago now changed all their ratings for policies for homeowners policies based on climate change science so that they re-rated all the major areas in Australia for wind velocity and storm damage and that kind of thing based on climate change science.

But the Prime Minister and the Government are still trying to figure out whether there’s, in quotes, “any truth in it”……

GEOFF COUSINS: It leaves Australia so far behind the rest of the western world that it is shameful and that’s why as the president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, a job I’ve only very recently taken on, we’ve decided that the ACF has got to be the leading voice in these issues because the politicians are failing us……http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2014/s4118751.htm