Scenes Of Passion And Delight

Peter Garrett will be bounding out of bed when he wakes up this morning as Labor's new spokesman on climate change and the environment.

"I have had 25 years of strong commitment to the environment," he told the Herald last night. "And I will be absolutely waking up [today] to roll my sleeves up to continue that work."
The former Midnight Oil frontman has been criticised for his lack of pronouncements since his election two years ago.

But no longer. In his first utterances as Labor's top man on the environment, Mr Garrett called the Prime Minister, John Howard, "laggardly", saying his Government was "slipping in and out of denial" and was "addicted to process rather than action".

The former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and one-time board member of Greenpeace International said his priority was to take "urgent and immediate action on CO 2 reductions". This included "setting targets, increasing investment in renewables and moving immediately to a CO 2 trading system, including ratification of [the] Kyoto [Protocol] and medium-term planning for those likely impacts" that climate change would have on rural infrastructure.

"Mr Howard's laggardly approach defies logic given that eight years ago former minister for environment [Robert] Hill was suggesting the necessity for a national CO 2 trading scheme to be established," he said.

"Mr Howard seems only to be able to initiate taskforces, reviews and reports but fails to ever act resolutely."

But the Greens leader, Bob Brown, said: "Frankly, I doubt Peter Garrett will be let off the leash to take on the coal and uranium industries."

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