Despite the climate crisis, the budget does more for gas than emissions

As Treasurer Josh Frydenberg rose to give his budget speech on Tuesday night, the residents of Lismore were preparing their homes, again, for floods and United Nations climate scientists had just finished their inspection of the Great Barrier Reef, which has, again, succumbed to mass bleaching.

The speech was given days after the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf which disappeared into the Southern Ocean after an unprecedented heat wave struck the continent, alarming scientists not only for the temperature that was reached – about 40 degrees above average – but because it coincided with another heatwave on the other side of the world in the Arctic.

Lismore was again hit by flooding on Wednesday.Credit: Getty

Given that context then, many of those engaged in climate science and activism were disappointed by how little Mr Frydenberg had to say about climate in his speech, a section that constituted around 100 words of his 3500-word address.

“Australia is on the pathway to net zero emissions by 2050 and playing its part in responding to the critical global challenge of climate change. Technology, not taxes, will get us there,” the Treasurer said, reiterating the government’s longstanding position that decarbonisation was not a project for the public purse.

Mr Frydenberg boasted that the nation has the highest uptake of rooftop solar in the world and emphasised spending on “clean hydrogen”, carbon capture and storage, batteries and large-scale solar.

Amanda McKenzie, chief executive of the Climate Council, was unimpressed.

“I don’t buy it,” she said of the Treasurer’s claims. She notes that hydrogen investments are not necessarily carbon free and that carbon capture and storage has not yet worked to effectively capture or store carbon at commercial scale.

Protester Kate Stroud dumped her flood-ruined belongings on the Prime Minister’s door earlier this month.Credit: Edwina Pickles

But her chief concerns were that none of the spending proposals are directly targeted at rapidly reducing greenhouse emissions this decade, which scientists agree Australia must do if it is to keep pace with the rest of the world as it tackles climate change.

There was, for example, no significant funding for renewables, no major support for expanding the transmission network to bolster the efforts by the state governments in this field. There was no funding for action to rapidly expand the electric vehicle fleet.

The budget comes as the Climate Council releases a pre-election report titled The Lost Years: Counting the Cost of Climate Inaction in Australia, which criticises the government for funding cuts to the CSIRO’s climate science division and the abolition of the Climate Commission, as well as for its failure to ratchet up its 2030 emission reduction targets and its support for a gas-fired economic recovery.

We still don’t know how Labor will respond, but it also appears reluctant to make climate central to the upcoming election. As Ms McKenzie notes, Labor released its climate policy just before Christmas, an indication it was not eager for exhaustive media coverage.

In some parts of Australia over the coming weeks both parties will have little choice but to engage, as independent candidates backed by advocacy movement Climate 200 are running in 18 seats.

One of those is the seat of Page where the people of Lismore are fighting floods.

“People are standing in the mud and wreckage of their homes now, and they are saying they want to talk about climate change,” Independent candidate Dr Hanabeth Luke told the Herald and The Age. “The budget was an insult.”

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