Labor Left to push for green jobs
(Via The Sydney Morning Herald)
Labor's Left faction will push the Rudd Government to develop renewable energy sources as a way of creating "green" jobs it will also press for further changes to industrial relations laws at the next Australian Labor Party national conference, to be held in Sydney at the end of July.
It will be the first national party conference in more than two years, and the first since Labor returned to government federally in 2007.
The party's National Left faction met in Canberra yesterday and today to discuss a range of policy areas, including the fall-out of the global financial crisis.
A National Left convener, NSW Senator Doug Cameron, said the meeting endorsed the Government's revamped climate change policy announced on Monday by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
The Government decided to delay by 12 months the start of its carbon pollution reduction scheme to July 1, 2011, and extended its reduction targets from 5 per cent to 25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020, depending on the outcome of the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December.
But Senator Cameron said the Left believed more should be done to develop renewable energy and carbon capture and storage as a way to create green jobs.
"There's employment available in a whole range of areas: tidal power, wind power, geothermal, solar and we believe there must be an even more focused approach," Senator Cameron said.
"We're not arguing for closing the coal industry by any stretch of the imagination."
The meeting also discussed a number of issues to do with the new Fair Work industrial relations system, most of which will begin operating on January 1, 2010.