20 March 2007

Voting recommendations for the State election

VoteClimate.ORG.AU Voting Recommendations for NSW election.

Clear cut voting recommendations for the NSW 2007 Election have been added to VoteClimate.org.au, Beyond Zero Emissions' dedicated election campaign website.

The NSW Greens came out in front as Vote Climate's recommendation for the party with the best policy on climate change due to their strong goals and high level of policy detail.

Liberal and Labor were given equal last because both parties have poor policy on climate change, and weak goals and targets. Labor was also marked down because of its poor performance in implementing serious mitigation and adaptation measures during its last term of office.

Patrice Newell's Climate Change Coalition (CCC) and the Socialist Alliance were recommended as equal second. The CCC was marked down due to its lack of clearly defined policy. Whilst the Socialist Alliance had more comprehensive range of policies they lacked detail in some areas and the issue of climate change was not always at the fore of their campaign.

The NSW Democrats were rated third coming in above Liberal and Labor. For more information see the Vote Climate website

"We were impressed by the Greens candidate Dr John Kaye, second on the Greens' upper house ticket, his extensive and vocal academic experience on the issue makes us believe he would be an asset to the NSW parliament and this improved the Greens' overall rating. We at Vote Climate hope the parliament will begin to take a non party political approach to tackling the serious threat of climate and focus on solving the problem rather than trying to buy time we don't have, through meaningless political point scoring," said Adrian Whitehead, Vote Climate analyst.

"And we are encouraged by the media attention given to the Climate Change Coalition putting the issue on the tip of every voters tongue."

The NSW State Election is taking place on Saturday March 24th 2007. Voters should make this the first "climate election" to place climate squarely on the agenda for the Federal Election later this year.