Labor fudges the issue

By Susan Laszlo

Kim Beazley and Gareth Evans have cynically tried to take advantage of the government's unpopularity over greenhouse. But they not only support the Coalition government's “differentiation” position (individual targets for nations based on energy, emission and trade factors); Labor was its architect.

Evans was foreign minister for the four years following Rio, during which Australia led the charge against legally binding targets. Despite worldwide criticism for its stand, at conference after conference the Labor government refused to budge, using similar, if not identical, economic nationalist arguments to those Howard is using today.

At Berlin in 1995, Australia blocked the push for binding targets. Later that year in Montreal, Labor used Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics statistics to argue its reactionary position and joined in the push to shift responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases onto the Third World.

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