Palmer United party difficult to score on environment

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/21/palmer-united-party-difficult-to-score-on-environment

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The Australian Conservation Foundation and The Australian Solar Council are each putting out “scorecards” on party policies ahead of the 5 April Western Australian Senate election, but they have both faced a problem – they couldn’t find the policies of the Palmer United party.

In its scorecard to help explain where parties contesting the election stand on major environmental issues, the ACF has been forced to put a question mark beside PUP on every question but one. On that one policy issue, “keeping the renewable energy target”, PUP scored a negative assessment, after a week of contradictions.

On Tuesday, PUP’s lead WA candidate, Dio Wang, issued a press statement saying the renewable energy target “must be maintained”.

“I believe the RET scheme should remain as it is. It worries me when the government says everything is on the table in reviewing the RET,” he said.

The existing RET was “the right scheme for maintaining and improving Australia’s environment”, he said, and the government’s recently announced review by veteran businessman Dick Warburton, a self-professed climate sceptic, was a “waste of taxpayers’ money”.

At that point, PUP looked like getting a positive assessment. But then Clive Palmer did a radio interview in which he said he didn’t believe the RET should be mandatory. The RET policy requires electricity retailers to buy a certain number of renewable energy certificates each year, and could not exist if it were not mandatory.

After fruitless attempts to get an explanation of this contradiction from PUP, the ACF changed its assessment from positive to negative in the scorecard, which will be sent to about 200,000 WA voters who are members of the ACF or partner organisations.

The Australian Solar Council, which has taken out a large advertisement in the Saturday edition of WA’s only major newspaper, the West Australian, faced a similar dilemma because of the contradictions between Wang and Palmer.

It delayed submitting the ad while desperately seeking clarification, but could get none, and put a question mark beside PUP’s view on renewable energy and the future of the solar industry, which directly employs 2,000 people in the west.

The Liberal and National parties also get a question mark from the Solar Council – having failed to respond to queries. The Coalition has commissioned Dick Warburton to review the RET. Labor and the Greens won a positive assessment.

When contacted by Guardian Australia, Wang said his party’s RET policy would be clarified “next week”.

The Liberal and National parties scored 0/8 on the ACF scorecard, which asked whether parties wanted to: keep the RET; keep the Clean Energy Finance Corporation; keep the Climate Change Authority; reduce greenhouse gases by 19% by 2020; retain a carbon price; retain national environmental powers; reject arrangements with states that do not maintain environmental standards; and expand national environmental laws to protect water resources from pollution caused by the extraction of unconventional gas.

PUP also scored 0/8 – with one negative assessment and seven question marks. On each of the policies given a question mark, the ACF explains “The Palmer United party has no position on this issue and declined to respond to our survey.”

Labor scored 6/8 – with negative assessments on the tougher greenhouse target and the expansion of laws protecting water.

The Greens scored 8/8.

Palmer is boasting in television advertisements that, because of its crossbench votes in the Senate, only the PUP can actually repeal the carbon tax. But he has also insisted the repeal be retrospective, which would waive the outstanding $8.4m carbon tax debt owed by his wholly-owned Queensland Nickel. The government has said the repeal cannot be retrospective. Labor and the Greens voted against the carbon tax repeal in the Senate this week.