Antinuclear

Posted Thu at 9:21am   As the nation continues to grapple with drought and unseasonably early bushfires, climate change remains a point of political focus.

The Morrison Government has repeatedly claimed the Coalition — through its own hard work — turned around Australia’s poor record on greenhouse gas emissions that it says was inherited from the former Labor government.

The latest Coalition MP to make such a claim is Energy Minister Angus Taylor.

On Monday he told Parliament: “When we arrived into government in 2013, we were faced with not just a financial deficit but a deficit in achieving emission reductions and abatement, because they left us with a 700 million tonne deficit versus our 2020 targets. We now know, from the hard work done by this Government and by hardworking Australian businesses and industry, that we’ll overachieve on that target by 367 million tonnes. That’s a 1.1 billion tonne turnaround. We haven’t just turned around their financial deficit; we have turned around their abatement deficit.”

Senior Coalition figures, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have made similar claims on numerous occasions.

Why this claim is misleading

Fact Check previously examined this claim and found it to be misleading.

Among other things, the so-called emissions “deficit” referred to by Mr Morrison was taken from an October 2012 report, and merely represented a forecast of the greenhouse gas reductions needed to hit Australia’s 2020 target at that time.

Soon after the Coalition came to office, it became apparent that emissions under Labor’s carbon tax had been lower than expected in a report released in September 2013, which superseded the 2012 report.

Government officials also for the first time factored in a significant “carryover” from the overachievement of Australia’s 2012 target.

Since then, emissions have been lower than anticipated as a result of soaring power prices, the states’ adoption of renewable energy and the closure of coal-fired power stations, including Victoria’s Hazelwood plant.
Coalition policies have only played a relatively minor role.

The bottom line is, when it comes to achieving Australia’s 2020 Kyoto target, the Coalition actually “inherited” a relatively strong position from Labor.

In 2013 and 2014, when Labor’s carbon tax was still in force, Australia was significantly ahead of the target for those years.

Over time, as emissions under the Coalition have steadily risen, the gap between actual emissions and the target has gradually narrowed.

As experts noted in our previous fact check, the Coalition’s “direct action” fund did achieve some abatement at a reasonable price, but a comparatively modest amount.

For these reasons, Fact Check judges the claim repeated by Mr Taylor this week once again to be misleading.