Victorian Andrew Robb has been given the elevated portfolio of infrastructure, federal-state relations and emissions trading. The former foreign affairs spokesman said the Opposition would develop policies that would challenge Labor’s approach on many issues. Mr Robb said today that he was well-placed to develop bold ideas in the area because Labor was failing to develop environmental policies with the economy front and centre.

The Republican presidential candidate says he will work with the Rudd Government to establish a global framework that would encourage China and India to become part of the solution to man-made climate change. Senator McCain says he is committed to a market-based cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing carbon emissions. And he wants a closer bilateral partnership on other key issues such as nuclear proliferation, trade liberalisation and combating terrorism.

The new Opposition Leader named sustainable development, in all areas including cities, as his key personal policy interest, signalling a dramatic departure from the direction of the Howard government, which saw no role for the commonwealth in urban affairs. But as Mr Turnbull trumpeted his forward-looking approach, Labor’s Julia Gillard said his team was stacked with climate-change sceptics and cheerleaders for Mr. Howard’s Work Choices industrial relations laws.

Unlike his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull has a real prospect of leading the party back into office. The decision to call a party meeting at short notice for a leadership vote, which backfired spectacularly for Brendan Nelson, typified the misjudgements that characterised his brief tenure in the top job.

Research by Catholic Health Australia estimates the greenhouse footprint of each of the nation’s 83,000 hospital beds is about 28 tonnes a year - double the emissions from an average household. When combined with the emissions from aged care services, the health sector accounts for about five million tonnes of CO2 a year.

Ross Garnaut’s critics think we should aim high on climate change and let others beat us down from there rather than aim low and end up lower. I agree. Our goal can’t be to cut our emissions hard for its own sake. Without an effective agreement by all major emitters, what we do makes no difference. So all our effort must go into helping to achieve such an agreement, and that means being willing to put an offer of big cuts on the table.

Speaking separately, Bill Hare, David Karoly and Amanda Lynch - all authors with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - criticised Professor Ross Garnaut’s emissions trading scheme recommendations to the Federal Government, describing them as inconsistent, disappointing and wrong.

Ross Garnaut made it clear in his interim report that his climate change review takes as a starting point that the claims made in the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct. Had he made even a cursory examination of the integrity of those IPCC claims he would have found a very troubling picture.

88 per cent of those surveyed said Australia should introduce an emissions trading scheme, with 61 per cent saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did. A clear majority, 58 per cent, said they would be prepared to pay more for energy, although only 50 per cent of Coalition voters were prepared to accept price rises.

The Rudd Government has also been careful not to tie itself too closely to its climate advisor, Ross Garnaut. However, Garnaut’s proposed targets should be attractive to the Government, and would allow it to say to the voters that it was doing something but to argue to business that it was not imposing excessive burdens.