Federal election 2016: Cousins to take on Turnbull

Corporate titan turned environmental warrior Geoff Cousins is set to reprise his 2007 tilt against Malcolm Turnbull.

Geoff Cousins, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. ‘The Abbott/Turnbull government has failed to curb Australia’s pollution.’ Picture: Britta Campion

Corporate titan turned environmental warrior Geoff Cousins is set to reprise his 2007 campaign against Malcolm Turnbull in his inner-eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth.

Mr Cousins, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, has signed an open letter that will appear in the local Wentworth Courier this week and rates the Prime Minister’s environmental policies 11 out of 100.

By comparison, an environmental scorecard to be released by the ACF awards Labor 53 and the Greens 77.

Mr Cousins’s letter calls on voters to do “a favour for nature’’ and ask Mr Turnbull to sign a pledge to “support clean energy, cut pollution, protect our reefs, rivers, forests and wildlife’’.

In 2007, at the height of the furore of the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania, Mr Cousins launched a campaign against Mr Turnbull, then the environment minister who had approved the project. He ran an advertisement, also in the Wentworth Courier, asking if Mr Turnbull was “the Minister for the Environment or the Minister Against the Environment”.

This year’s ad says: “It’s a given that conservative members of parliament should be good conservationists. History gives us many examples. Sir Robert Menzies signed the first Antarctic Treaty in 1960. Malcolm Fraser first dec­lared Kakadu a national park and signed an agreement with Japan to protect migratory bird species.

“And John Howard’s government (for whom I was an adviser for nearly a decade) established the National Greenhouse Inventory and National Carbon Accounting System and committed $10 billion to improve national water security.

“Sadly, the Abbott/Turnbull government has failed to curb Australia’s pollution or adequately support our nation’s transition to renewable energy. The Liberal Party should be leading the effort to find ways of cutting pollution, supporting clean energy and protecting the environment we all share. Instead, the Liberal Party has been racing to the bottom.’’

Mr Cousins told The Australian yesterday he was publishing the open letter because under Mr Turnbull, not a single policy had changed since he took the leadership from Tony Abbott.

The ACF would be running ads in marginal seats on the Liberals environmental efforts as the campaign went on, he said

ACF chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said the Liberal-­Nationals 11 out of 100 on the ­environment was “woefully ­inade­quate … if they’re not prepared to lead on climate and nature, they are not fit to lead the country.”