Shorten praises PUP chief for protecting ALP climate planks

CLIVE Palmer has won praise from Bill Shorten for helping ring-fence three planks of Labor’s climate policy.

CLIVE Palmer has won praise from Bill Shorten for helping ring-fence three planks of Labor’s climate policy as the Opposition Leader said many Greens MPs would be ruing their impotent policy purity that blocked Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme.

In an address on the state of Australian politics, Mr Shorten yesterday took a veiled swipe at Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson over his comments on Monday lamenting opposition to budget reform because of “vague notions of fairness’’ as well as delivering a dig at Tony Abbott over his Pollie Pedal charity bike rides.

“I saw that someone said yesterday that vague notions of fairness didn’t do this budget credit. It is not vague if you are under 30 and have no income for six months, that’s real … this is just extreme,’’ Mr Shorten said.

He said Labor was blocking the indexation of the fuel excise because it added to cost of living pressures and other choices could have been made.

“Before we lost the election we were proposing to put in a modest tax on the interest drawdown of retired superannuants whose interest payments annually — not their principal — were $100,000 and above,” Mr Shorten said. “This was not sort of Chavez economics, this was pretty light touch.

“But the government has even resisted that. If you are getting a 5 per cent return in retirement on a $2 million account, that’s $100,000. We’re just saying you pay 15 per cent for that income above $100,000.’’

Mr Shorten told an Australian National University-Australian Financial Review conference that amid the “hoopla and showmanship’’ last week involving Mr Palmer and former US vice-president Al Gore, “significant points of climate consensus emerged’’.

Mr Palmer’s support for three pillars of Labor’s climate policy — retaining the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Climate Change Authority — was welcome and deserved bipartisan support, he said. But Labor, he said, had to live with its failure to prosecute the case for an ETS in 2009 and had underestimated the internal pressure then Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull was under.

Business leaders, he said, who argued against the ETS “now look back with more than a hint of regret at five years of lost certainty and economic opportunity’’.

“Many members of the Greens, and the broader environmental movement … lament choosing the purity of impotence over the practical benefits of reasonable compromise,’’ he said.

Mr Shorten also denied Labor rushed the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and in a dig at Mr Abbott said they were concerned that some in the Coalition were not as committed to the reform.

“Not as individuals, not as raising money, riding bikes raising money for carers. Look, I don’t doubt the … good intent. If you are going to change society and make it a more equal place you’ve got to put in place the big things. We can’t rely on a fundraising model of welfare in this country and just leave it to good-spirited people,’’ Mr Shorten said.