Newsflash: Tony Windsor, Member for New England announced that he will be introducing a Bill based on the Climate Protection Bill into Parliament: read more here.
Note: Climate Ride Canceled - Come to the people’s Climate Bill Rally! Same time, same place: 12.30pm Sun Sept 21st! For more info, click here.
Climate Action Groups across the country have proposed the Climate Protection Bill - a comprehensive plan to cut Australia’s spiralling greenhouse pollution. The new climate change minister has refused to discuss the Bill, however, so we’re taking the bill to her at Parliament House with a 3 day cycle from Sydney to Parliament House in Canberra.
Australian communities demand legislation not procrastination
This campaign is inspired by the success of a community driven Climate Change Bill in the UK, which has achieved laws to cut greenhouse pollution and promote a clean energy future.
In 2005, communities across the UK decided they wanted their politicians to take action on climate change. They seized on a draft Climate Change Bill put together by green groups, and 130,000 people across the country contacted their MP to support it. In response, 400 MPs voted for the Bill and when passed in Parliament, the UK will become the first country to legislate binding limits on greenhouse pollution.
Now, community climate groups across the country have written a Climate Protection Bill, and will deliver it to the new Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong at Parliament House in Canberra… by bicycle. You can join the ride, or help collect the 10,000 signatures of support we need.
This Bill comprehensively addresses the causes of Australia’s spiraling greenhouse gas emissions, and proposes workable solutions to stem these emissions, protecting the future for our children, the world’s most vulnerable communities and our fragile planet.
The Climate Protection Bill is a powerful tool for community members. It unifies the concerns of Australians across the country, and gives each of us a set of demands to take to our politicians.
Want to know more?
For more information, you can read the overview of the 19 points of the Climate Protection Bill. Or, download the complete Climate Protection Bill.
What can you do?
- Get your community behind the Bill by downloading the petition here and gathering support through stalls and meetings - we need 10,000 people in support by August!
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Support the Climate Protection Bill by adding your name below!
- Get active and make your voice heard even louder by downloading the lobbying kit which has tips on finding, contacting and meeting your local politicians. This kit also has tips on accessing your local newspaper and other media.
- Download the new postcard (ready to send to a professional printer), which can be sent to your local politician and distributed in the community
16 responses so far ↓
1 Jocelyn Howden // Jul 29, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I think the Hills Against Global Warming should send this postcard to Alex Hawke, our local Fed member. Also to Phillip Ruddock - our other Fed member.
Regards,
Joc
2 Ron Krueger, Clean Energy For Eternity // Aug 5, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Clean Energy For Eternity founded by Dr Matthew Knott is supporting the Climate Change Protection Bill. The CEFE Manly Chapter is taking a group from Sydney to Canberra to help deliver the petition. We are also hoping, in collaboration with Get Up and various climate change groups to engage the Canberra community in creating Australia’s largest non-commercial human sign on the lawns of Parliament House. This is visible action and we need everyone’s support so roll up on the day and help fight climate change!
3 Sumner Berg // Aug 20, 2008 at 12:01 pm
The first thing one needs to do to take the pressure off the world’s climate is to establish a sustainable population. If that issue is not addressed we are wasting our time. We then need to make a greater effort to individually reduce overall consumption and humanily decrease the human populaton.
I feel that we have already gone past the chance to rectify matters.
4 Ned Iceton // Aug 20, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Managing radical change is a very challenging business politically. Rudd is a conservative reformer, not radical, in a situation where the Govt senses that the electorate wants to do something but hasn’t grasped the radical nature of what is required for success. They also would like to avoid having all the crises hit society at the same time and so bring the return to government of Peter Costello or Malcolm Turnbull at the next election.
A push for a suitably radical Bill will help the electorate become more aware, but I think the measures to be implemented will need to be applied on an evolving ’suck-it-and-see’ basis, watching to make sure that economic depression and mass unemployment are not made worse, in a situation of simultaneous financial and business collapses, the end of oil, and the collapse of food production caused by that and by climate change.. The great civilisational collapses of history have featured too many challenges presenting all at the same time. So the position of Senator Wong and the Govt. is not easy! No governments in living memory have dealt with a crisis of this magnitude, and it’s a matter of finding our way within the unknowable, and without a blueprint, but where doing nothing is no solution…
5 Barbara Elkan // Aug 21, 2008 at 11:07 am
We must ACT NOW, we are running out of time. Let’s stop procrastinating and make real changes!
6 FERGIE // Aug 21, 2008 at 11:49 am
iT’S NEVER been easy being green. Reduce, reus recycle is all very well, but more is needed.
More being rainwater tanks on every house, more environmentally friendly buildings and homes, solar panels on roofs - but who can afford them?
7 Juliette Calderone // Aug 22, 2008 at 2:13 pm
This is a great start . Good work.
8 Judith Muir // Aug 23, 2008 at 1:59 pm
There is a time for change - at a time when change will be embraced. Never has the general population been more ammenable to the concept of recognising individual and government effort and the necessary constraints in dealing with climate change
9 Gail // Aug 26, 2008 at 5:42 pm
For heavens sake, why are we taking so long to do anything! The Arctic ice is melting. Earth is threatened. Let’s get going and at least try to lessen the threat of global warming.
10 chris yates // Aug 27, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Great initiative. The impetus is there to find workable solutions to lower greenhouse emissions. If the Government won’t take on the coal industry, then the community needs to act to protecting our children’s future. The science is incontrovertible.
11 Nick Towle // Aug 30, 2008 at 9:28 am
There is a climate change emergency, though the conservatism demonstrated in canceling the ride reflects the sort of conservatism that we are urging our politicians to overcome in tackling the challenges ahead. Please be careful with the message you’re sending out to Australian youth. Stepping in to a car to drive to the destination carries a proportionally similar risk of personal injury and damage to future generations.
Thanks for the inspiration and for considering a great idea and I hope you might muster a little more courage for future actions.
Yours for the future,
Nick T
The Otesha Project (Aus) -Cycling for Sustainability
http://www.otesha.org.au
12 Anne // Aug 31, 2008 at 11:38 am
The government needs to know that we support urgent action to counteract climate change. Renewable energy must be given incentives.
13 Angela Lindstad // Sep 7, 2008 at 10:32 am
There is no time to lose
14 Leonie // Sep 7, 2008 at 12:24 pm
With the evidence before all levels of government I am at a total loss and full of desperation at the inability of those to whom we have given our voice to take positive, decisive action NOW. For god’s sake, don’t listen to those who have vested interests in keeping the coal fires burning - just LOOK at the evidence all around you. Climate change is HERE NOW and the effects are increasing exponentially. At this rate, we will look back on the current government with fury and despair unless they start looking at much deeper impacts that the dollar.
15 Hanne // Sep 9, 2008 at 6:39 pm
For haevens’s sake, let’s get on with it! We are running out of time to save this beautiful world for our children and grandchildren. We have wasted the last 12 years and might never catch up. Now is the time!
16 Frederick C. Bell // Sep 20, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Climate change is just one of a number of related global problems all with the same basic causes. The other problems include resource depletion (water, oil, seafood, arable land etc), the U.S. money crisis, threats of terrorism and war, and continuing losses of lifeforms (biodiversity). The THREE MOST BASIC causes are:
1. Continuing growth of population and demand for resources (the comments by Sumner Berg and others about this issue are obviously correct).
2. Prevailing economic ideologies and practices that promote the growth in demand for resources, and stimulate wasteful consumerism , short-termism, greed, selfishness and aggression (disguised as ‘market forces’, ’standard of living’, ‘incentives’ and ‘competition’).
3.The failure of civilizing constraints (laws, ethics, religions, family discipline, government
regulations etc) to effectively modify the greed, selfishness and aggression stimulated by the
prevailing economic ideologies and practices.
We should not expect any of the problems to be satisfactorily resolved until these basic causes are widely recognised and co-operatively addressed.
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