The Albanese-led government will face its first major test with the introduction of its Climate Change Bill when Federal Parliament resumes on Tuesday.
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The Bill has a 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels, and will put Australia on track to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
In his victory speech in May, the Prime Minister pledged to "end the climate wars" but Labor faces a potentially difficult battle ahead with the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt is looking to make amendments in the Senate to reduce major coal and gas projects already in the pipeline. Robust backroom negotiations will be required to get this Bill over the line, even though the government maintains it can still take significant action on clean energy and emissions reductions without the legislation being passed.
Promised action on climate change was a big vote winner for Labor and it needs to post some major gains early in the piece on big-ticket items such as this to build public confidence. Across Europe, the nasty effects of a red hot summer are revealing themselves with major bushfires in areas that have never seen such catastrophic fire behaviour. All of the UK's 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2002, in a country where such data has been kept since 1659. The UK recorded its hottest temperature on record last Tuesday.
While the new mark of 40.3 degrees C is hardly going to trouble the data keepers here in Australia, the UK's ability to cope has been sorely tested. A level four red warning was issued, in which it was declared "very likely that there will be a risk to life, with substantial disruption to travel, energy supplies and possibly widespread damage to property and infrastructure".
Australia has already felt this blowtorch effect. The Black Summer of 2019-20 across the south-eastern seaboard is indelibly imprinted on the national psyche.
It pays to remember that it was the Greens that torpedoed the Rudd Labor government's proposed carbon pollution reduction measures and associated emissions trading scheme way back in 2009, 10 years before the Black Summer bushfires. The Greens claimed it was "bad policy" and would have given billions of dollars in handouts to coal companies and big polluters.
Within the Labor ranks, the narrow defeat of that policy still rankles and, as a result, a mistrust in the Greens to back a "best option" deal on climate change lingers on. It was one of the key issues which Liberal-National Coalition leader Tony Abbott used to work over the government in the following federal election, which Labor lost.
The PM has signalled he wants to forge a fresh path on climate change. We can only hope that history doesn't repeat itself.
