Prime Minister John Howard is standing by his decision not to sign the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases – a position at odds with almost 80 per cent of Australians.
Mr Howard believes that a panicked reaction will push investments overseas.
A Newspoll published today found 79 per cent of Australians want the government to sign the Kyoto Protocol and commit to targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Seventy-one per cent of coalition voters believe the same thing.
A massive 91 per cent want a shift from reliance on coal-fired power to renewable energy. Ninety per cent of coalition voters agreed.
The government has refused steadfastly to sign Kyoto or to join an emissions trading scheme unless the emerging industrial giants, China and India, face the same restrictions as the developed world.
Mr Howard insisted today he was listening to voters concerns about climate change, but said it was his job to do what was right for Australia.
"I don't want a situation where our country is panicked into doing things that put a disproportionate burden on us," he said.
"And I heard a representative of the coal mining union on radio say this morning, and I agreed with him, he said we've got to be careful about panicky reactions, he said, otherwise investments will just flow to countries like China and Indonesia."
Mr Howard also dismissed criticism from a member of his own nuclear review committee, Professor Warwick McKibbin, who was reported today in The Australian Financial Review as saying the government was wrong to reject a carbon emissions trading scheme, as proposed by the Labor states and by the Kyoto agreement.
"I respect Professor McKibbin a great deal, but the difficulty as I see it with that approach, is that, in order to preserve our comparative advantage, we'd have to in some way exempt our coal exports and our other resource exports," he said.
"If we did that, we might run the risk of imposing a disproportionately heavy burden on our domestic consumers, which could result in even higher electricity prices."
Australians would have to accept that fighting climate change would cost more money in the future, Mr Howard said.
"I think that people, over time, will adjust but they will have to accept that things will become more expensive," he said in a radio interview.
Mr Howard repeated his warning to Australians not to be overwhelmed by the report into the economic impact of climate change by former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern.
The report warned the world faced the prospect of a massive depression if it did nothing to combat man-made global warming.
Government parliamentary secretary for the environment Greg Hunt also attracted criticism with his claim Labor was pandering to the latte set with its climate change concern.
"Beazley gets up and he saunters in and wonders how he can please the latte set," Mr Hunt said of Opposition Leader Kim Beazley.
Opposition environment spokesman Anthony Albanese encouraged Mr Hunt to have a look at the Newspoll results.
"There are a lot of Australians drinking cafe latte around Australia today, because 92 per cent of them say that his government, the government that he is a part of, however junior his position, is not doing enough on climate change," he said.
The Anglican bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, George Browning, made a surprise contribution to the debate, saying climate change was the biggest issue facing the world, warning Mr Howard and Mr Beazley they must deliver comprehensive climate policies or suffer at next year's poll.
"I will be using whatever influence I have to encourage voters, from moral persuasion, that a vote should not be cast for a party that lacks such a policy," he said in a letter to the leaders.
Feeds