Antinuclear

The Australian Conservation Foundation has described the Coalition’s environmental policies as “woefully inadequate” in its traditional election scorecard.

It gave the Coalition 11 points out of a possible 100, Labor 53 and the Greens 77.

The ACF’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said: “The politicians who want to lead the country must have real plans to protect people, rivers, reefs, forests and wildlife for the future.”

“The Coalition’s 11 out of 100 on the environment is woefully inadequate. If they are not prepared to lead on climate and nature, they are not fit to lead the country.

“It’s not as if conservatives can’t be good conservationists – Liberal cabinet minister Garfield Barwick was ACF’s first president; Robert Menzies signed the first Antarctic Treaty; Malcolm Fraser made Kakadu a national park; John Howard established the national greenhouse inventory and the national water initiative,” she said.

The scores were calculated by measuring the parties’ policies on clean energy, pollution reduction, and environmental protection, and comparing them with the 40 tests set out in ACF’s national agenda for 2016.

Those tests include setting stronger pollution targets to help limit global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures; stopping uranium mining and export; delivering on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan; and shifting to 100% renewable energy by 2050.

The ACF decides how many marks to award for each party policy on the basis of how completely it fulfils the ACF’s tests. Where a policy unwinds existing environmental protection, the ACF awards negative marks.

An ACF spokesman said the organisation had been in contact with all three major parties this year to tell them how their policies would likely rate in its election scorecard with its policies as they stand…….

A recent poll showed climate change is one of the top four issues for voters at this election.  http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/31/environment-scorecard-rates-coalitions-policies-woefully-inadequate