Will Labor's climate target be ambitious?

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The most comprehensive climate assessment ever undertaken in Australia has found that 1.5 million people are set to be at risk from sea level rises by 2050.

There are some pretty disturbing statistics in this report.

Heat deaths will increase more than 400% in Sydney and will nearly triple in Melbourne.

It comes as Labor prepares to unveil their 2035 targets later this week.

So are they softening us up for a more ambitious target?

Is that what's going on here?

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis.

And I'm Brett Worthington.

And Brett, tomorrow you will be the host of the show.

I will be flying out of the country and I'm so glad I get to pick your brain now.

So let me start.

I dubbed it on the podcast with Raf last week the 2035 target week.

I made it because I don't know the day, the week.

So talk to me about what I call sequencing.

The government's sequencing and its climate strategy.

Today, we're recording on a Monday.

We're getting the whole

Armageddon report.

And it is.

And I'm not saying that it's not accurate, but it is so full-on when you look at some of this stuff.

And so my big question is,

is the sequencing part of a story perhaps to try and set up a justification for maybe an ambitious target?

Like, how do you read it?

Yeah, it's a clear sign, Pika, that I've had some time off and I haven't paid a lot of attention to the news and you come back and a lot of things have not changed, except we've been finally reaching this moment, which we have been edging towards for the best part of years now in getting here.

And this really is the crunch point.

So I spent a lot of years as a rural reporter, and I think about it in a, and pardon my metaphor with where about to go here.

You can't just get the crop overnight, you've got to put in that early work in advance to prepare the soil to be able to grow the crop that you want to produce.

And so, in many ways, you've got a government here that knows where it wants to get, it knows the crop that it's trying to produce here, more ambitious action on climate change.

To get there, though, it's tilling the soil and it's preparing itself by saying, look how bad things will be if we continue on this current trajectory.

I think one of the most telling elements that we saw from Chris Bowen today is this line: the cost of inaction is outweighing any cost of action, trying to get ahead of the criticism that will inevitably come at the back end of the week when the government says what it's going to say about where its climate ambition sits by essentially saying that's all well and good to be critical of taking steps here, but if we do not take steps, people will die.

People are going to be dying from natural disasters.

We're talking about seawater levels rising.

We're talking about bushfires.

We're talking about people dying from excessive heat in their households.

And that's all doom and gloom and a terrible prospect.

But you want to get that out early.

Frame this in the way in which is on your terms.

So we know then Anthony Albanese is off to Port Moresby.

He won't be back until Thursday.

We know that Penny Wong's sitting in that acting Prime Minister chair.

And that's when we'll see the cabinet meeting take place.

And it will be one of the more important cabinet meetings we're going to see in this first year.

of the second term here where Chris Bowen will go with the figure and he'll get it try and get it past his cabinet colleagues to say this is what we need to say is our ambition, how we will cut emissions by 2035, so that then the Prime Minister can pop up and then make the big announcement and we'll get the public figure as to whether or not the public accepts that.

A lot of it will be played out in these early days before we even get anywhere near what the decision will be.

Do you think that framing is about where it will be?

Yeah, I think you've nailed it really, which is, thank God, you're taking over the podcast for the next month.

That's right.

Look, you know, in terms of the figure, we've already established, in fact, it was in an interview with me that Chris Bowen basically, I think, all but confirmed they're going for a range, and they're being very much backed in that by lots of key groups.

And so, you know, the more ambitious end and then,

you know,

a lower sort of floor price almost for ambition.

That's one thing.

You know, his whole take is whatever we do will get criticized.

Now, you know, a colleague of mine before said, well, you can say that about anything, right?

Like that's governing.

But I think on this, it is fair that he's right, because there are those who are really pushing for a more modest ambition because of the impact it has on business and transforming the economy, reliability, all of those big issues.

And then this report, though, which goes back to this report, which I really want to, you know, get stuck into.

I reckon, you know, does put sort of a lot of pressure on the government to not shirk their responsibility here because it's so alarming.

Like my view is politically, you can't go into the field as they have done today,

publish a report that is genuinely

really worrying and troubling about where we're going to be as a country.

You know, that many people, 1.5 million, affected by sea level rises, like so many people.

People live on the coast in large numbers in this country.

It's going to be difficult economically, but actually in terms of the consequences of people's lives and well-being.

These are all true things.

And so how can you do that without then being able to demonstrate that you take this all seriously?

Now, I think the sort of worst case scenarios in it are pretty worrying and they do put a lot of responsibility on the government.

But I think

they're not facing a whole lot of resistance from the opposition.

Not because the opposition's for this.

They're not actually very for this.

They're certainly not in some parts of the world.

Because they're just too busy fighting all the time to actually be effective and land any blows here.

So it's almost like the perfect time for the government.

That's how I see it politically.

Like, what do you reckon?

Yeah, and I think that there's, when we've talked a lot about climate change, there's been such a great focus on regional people, particularly farmers, being the people that will feel it the most.

But I think what this report goes to point is the fact that, regardless of where you live, this will have an impact across the country.

So we are talking about people who live in inner-city electorates.

You too will be facing the consequences of

climate change and a failure to address it and to take steps.

And it is all too easy to sit back and say, Well, it's all too hard, and we, as one small country, can do nothing in the grand schemes of where the globe is headed.

But if everyone just sat back and didn't take any level of collective action, then what is the consequence of that?

There is no action being taken.

And at the same time, it wasn't that long ago that the High Court was considering a case about Indigenous elders in the Torres Strait, where it made very clear the consequence that climate change and rising sea levels is having on members of our own community here in Australia and the risk of migration as a result of people having to move because their inability to live in areas where they have long lived in.

So this has very real clear human impacts that is so often overwhelming at times where you kind of think, oh my goodness, what on earth can we do?

But there will be signs of optimism that will exist throughout this week and ways in which adaption and change can be embraced and you can then continue to live a prosperous prosperous life.

But if you look at some of the political reaction already to this disturbing report, I mean it's the groups that have been arguing for this anyway, but they do have a lot of evidence because the report lays it all down, right?

So you've got, like one example, a group of 28 former state and territory fire and emergency chiefs saying this should, you know, get our alarm bells ringing, that this shows that we have to be really, really supercharged about the way we respond to all of this, okay?

So that's one.

Then we've got the Climate Council saying that this report is terrifying you know strong word not not a meek word that one

and calling for the government to aggressively cut emissions now if the government doesn't aggressively cut emissions and i suspect they won't aggressively cut them but but you know it'll be within that range then they will be under a lot of pressure because of this evidence to say well hang on a minute you published the report the report is paints a very stark picture of our future and you don't want to take it seriously enough.

Now, the government is kind of trying to walk that line, which it's been doing for some time.

We take climate change seriously, but equally, we need to, you know, have the country sustainably operating and do things at a pace that's achievable.

You know, it sounds okay on paper, fine.

And then you've got like from the right or the people who are more sort of saying, hang on a minute, you know, and I think this is very lowest common denominator kind of argument, but the argument of even if we did all this, you know, what the US has pulled out of Paris, like the world is,

you know, some parts of the world, I should be clear, are sort of equivocating on some of this.

Why would we accelerate the move towards renewables and, you know, try and get rid of fossil fuels at a faster rate if it smashes our economy?

That's the argument.

And so that's a difficult one, too.

And the Prime Minister, don't forget, you know, as a total pragmatist who always has a fine eye to jobs and middle Australia, you know, that's why, you know, he would never like to admit it.

But, you know, that sort of John Howard aspect of him, which very different political figure, but that idea that he's not going to go, you know, where the sort of left or the climate activists just want him to, he's got a keen eye on both.

Now, I just think that's going to be hard to land though, Brett, like politically.

And that goes to the trouble of having such a whopping caucus, like you've got in the House of Representatives, where you've suddenly got so many more figures that are there trying to shape government policy.

And you've seen Anthony Albanese really trying to rein in at times, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, ambition on the economy front.

It'll be curious to watch the ways in which the Prime Minister, too, tries to rein in Chris Bowen in terms of steps that he might want to take in this area.

Because you're right, PK, the PM is firmly attuned to that middle Australian that he likes to talk about and wanting to take not a massive bold step in any one step.

A lot of things are just small steps increasingly taken towards the direction.

Now, he thinks that the government's got a lot to point to, but he's very well aware that the government is also facing criticism within its own ranks about not doing enough on the climate front and on the environment front at the same time.

And it's why you're going to see them work towards trying to land that federal EPA in this term of parliament that it's unfinished business.

So you're going to have members of the business community that will be out there telling the government to rein it in and not go as far as they want.

But at the same time, you've got a figure like Jerome Laxall, who's sitting in an urban seat in Sydney, a seat that has long been held by the Liberal Party, that is wanting to see more.

from the government and more from the Prime Minister.

And how you balance that is the great difficulty of being a Prime Minister.

Now, the benefit that he has here is that he can be more focused potentially on his own side because of what is happening on the other side of the aisle, the absolute infighting and division that is existing there.

There will be issues for Labor in tackling this, but this will go right to the core of the problems that exist within the coalition and whether the coalition of the Liberal and National parties can continue to survive as one coalition, given the clear divide that exists between some of those urban liberals and those regional Nats who have diametrically opposed opinions about setting any target in this area.

Don't they ever?

Look, let's move to the other two big issues that are sort of joined in many ways.

The Prime Minister, of course, going to PNG

to sign off this new regional security agreement.

Now

just on the sort of other part of this,

the defence part, let's start there.

$12 billion for submarine and naval shipbuilding facility in Perth, that near Perth, basically that Henderson precinct.

It's all about

developing that to make it a very, very attractive proposition to our mates in the United States.

We want their subs.

We want AUKUS to stick.

So it's all part of that story.

But what I've found really interesting, Brett, is the government's kind of got himself into a bit of a tangle over the percentage increase in defence spending that this leads to.

Now, Richard Miles didn't want to answer that, kind of avoided that, and I think there's a reason.

It's a pretty incremental increase when it comes to defence percentage of GDP.

He wants to focus on the bigger sounding figure of $12 billion,

but is that going to cut it given the Trump administration seems rather obsessed with the percentage of GDP figure?

And does it even matter or are we going down sort of little rabbit holes here?

Yeah, Richard Miles is like, forget GDP.

I don't care about GDP.

It's record investment that's going into defence, the $70 billion.

And then all of the defence hawks are like, it's never going to be.

But if you consider it in NATO terms, then we're doing better than it would otherwise seem and the whole thing is is kind of will wash over the the typical person and you know the amazing idea that twelve billion dollars is a bit of a rounding error in terms of whether it affects the gdp rise in in in to any great extent um you get a sense with an announcement like this so the 12 billion dollars it's about half of what's going to be needed to get henderson to where they want to get it to the government will talk a lot about local manufacturing producing things like those Megami frigates that we're going to acquire from Japan within Perth.

You're also going to be able to offer maintenance to the nuclear submarines, particularly the American parts of the fleet.

You had a sense, OPK.

Two birds with one stone.

Keep Roger Cook happy, the Premier of Western Australia, and maybe give something for Donald Trump on the way through.

The government is attunely aware of anything that Roger Cook thinks about the world and is obviously closely watching Donald Trump.

And we talked a bit earlier about the sequencing of things here.

Well, what a shock that they would announce this just days before the Prime Minister is going to fly to the United States where it's not been announced, but the government is optimistic and hopes that it can have a meeting between Donald Trump and Anthony Albanese.

And you can guarantee this is the kind of thing that the Prime Minister would want to raise with Donald Trump because, yes, it supports Australia in terms of jobs that can be offered here.

But you just listen to the way in which they talk about this.

It's about helping the Americans to get more of the American nuclear subs in the water, less of them having to be in maintenance at any one moment, because that is what helps shore up the likelihood of Australia getting these these submarines.

Do you think the sequencing is a shock here, PK?

No, again let's call them the government of

sequencing plans.

Of course, this is all about that meeting and all about kind of building a story, which is why they've been avoiding them.

Don't look at the GDP just, you know, Kennesie's dealing with a president that's like big numbers and it's like, we're going to be spending all these billions, Mr.

President, on building this up and you need a foothold and China, China, China.

And isn't that good?

You can walk out of that meeting, for instance,

saying, you know,

AUKUS is a good deal.

He's, you know, if the President can walk out, if they have a joint press conference, you know, there's a readout of the meeting, however it sort of formulates.

And the President can say, you know, the Australians are doing good work on this AUKUS thing.

It sounds like a great idea.

for us or something.

That's a good win for the Prime Minister because he's not going to get much on tariffs or anything.

I think the government's almost parked its expectations there.

It gives them something, you know, what they call in the political business, my listener friends, as announceables, you know, and it's like not quite, you know, because it's already been announced, AUKUS, but it's like even before a review is finished, we've got the president on the record here, you know, and he likes this Henderson thing.

That was, that is, that's, that's future, but I see that as being what the story they're trying to maintain.

At the same time, the kind of government's role here in building

a Pacific Security Pact with PNG that's going to be signed, which allows people in PNG to sign up with our Defence Forces, get paid the same amount, help our numbers, but also it's pretty key, this pact regionally, that we are kind of in a lockstep alliance militarily.

It's a huge deal that the PM's about to sign.

That's part of the story too.

That's part of the China story.

That's the elephant in the room there too.

And that that is useful, too, when he goes to Trump, don't you think?

That's right, because whether or not Australia would ever frame it in a way of like this deal with PNG sounds a lot like there's an Article IV element that you talk about with NATO, where an attack or an issue with one is an attack or an issue with all.

And so the complete

meshing of Australia and PNG's military will go a long way towards sending clear signals, not just to the United States about the work that Australia is doing throughout the Pacific and working with near neighbours, but to send clearer signals to parts of China where there is dispute with Australia about broader expansion of China throughout parts of the Pacific.

I think what will be really interesting with this PNG deal is, and it was kind of clear with what Richard Miles was saying where

Yes, you're going to have greater ability for people, for PNG citizens to get into Australia's military, where they will earn the same money as an Australian recruit here.

That's obviously going to be very appealing for parts of the Papua New Guinea community.

And the Defence Minister really clear saying about the ways in which that program will be overseen will have to be tightly kind of regulated.

Because the last thing that PNG wants is all of would-be recruits for the military going and joining the Australian military and not looking to join the PNG side of it as well.

And I think it's clear the closeness with which Anthony Albanese holds up this relationship with Papua New Guinea.

It's not a surprise that he's going there.

Now, this is to mark the 50th anniversary of independence, but it is a way in which you can tell that broader story, as you were saying, PK, of

working with our neighbours and then going to Donald Trump and saying, we are doing more than just looking after ourselves.

We are also looking after our near neighbours and friends throughout the Pacific.

Yeah, I think that's all part of what the PM's leading up to.

And,

yeah, this,

it will be critiqued.

It's not enough.

And all of that will be at play.

But I think ultimately he's got something to go into all of, you know, all of these key meetings with unless of course and I'm just going to put that out there

they cartnail a meeting next week and that will start becoming peak awkward oh absolutely because like this is a this is a boil that needs to be financed like this is something he's sick of getting that question when are you going to meet Donald Trump if you've now gone to

should I ask

PK I think get it in there just see see how he reacts will he be agitated will he be will he just dismiss it get cranky um well I I fly out tomorrow so that's

quickly get it in before you flee the country.

Although, can I say, and I'm going to sound so corny, but I have to, we are in such a great democracy that, you know, you can ask rude questions with, you know, like, not that that's rude, it's a perfectly fine question.

You know what I'm trying to do?

You expect nothing less from you.

He's been probing and to ask him difficult questions.

I just love that about this country.

I love that we don't have a wild gun culture.

I love that people stick to rules.

It's my love forever, which leads me to saying, farewell, my friend.

I will be listening to politics now religiously.

You will tell me everything I need to know, promise?

Absolutely.

You are leaving mammoth shoes behind, PK.

No,

my shoes are pretty modest sized.

Actually, I've got big shoes for actually a short woman.

I'm just going to reveal that here.

Unusually big.

To the point where they grew so large that my family were like, maybe this child will be tall.

And as it turns out, not not so much but i have large feet uh physically i'm not saying um uh

you know necessarily intellectually in any way but i i know you've got a large brain and i'm looking forward to all the work you do on breakfast and then on this pod so i'll be listening brett the official handover till october has happened i've just taken the baton and we're going to keep it safely secured and i will very happily hand it back to you when you return with your your grecian glow uh you will

be filled up spiritually and mentally emotionally You'll be ready to charge through the end of the year.

And I feel for any politician that you're going to interview when you get back from Greece because I suspect you'll be firing up and ready to go.

That's kind of what happens to me, actually.

It's always bad when I start the start of the year, too.

Anyway, thank you very much.

That's it for Politics Now today, but I will say that the lovely Brett will be hosting tomorrow, and this pod is every

we are in your feed all the time.

He'll be joined by Raph Epstein.

So, looking forward to listening, actually.

It will drop and I will download it as I'm getting on board.

See you, Brett.

See you, PK.