John Bowden

Anthony Albanese has done something no Australian prime minister has ever done before. He's taken a free trade agreement — a document that is supposed to be about buying and selling — and he's stuffed it full of climate ideology until it's barely recognisable as trade at all. This isn't a free trade deal. It's a climate agreement wearing a trade deal as a disguise. Here's what his own government's documents admit. DFAT published a paper titled "Benefits for Trade, Environment and Climate," and buried in it is this line: for the first time in a free trade agreement, Australia has made a binding commitment to implement the obligations under the Paris Agreement. Not a reference. Not a nod. A binding commitment. And the same document says the agreement can be suspended over serious violations of climate obligations. So if a future Australian government — any government, Labor or Liberal — decides the Paris targets are too expensive, too punishing, too destructive to our economy, Europe can drag us before a dispute panel and suspend the deal. That's not sovereignty. That's a leash. And Albanese knows exactly what he's doing. Ursula von der Leyen stood in our own Parliament and said she was proud to have made decarbonisation a defining pillar of this agreement. A defining pillar. In a trade deal. The woman running Europe didn't hide it. She celebrated it. And our Prime Minister sat there and smiled. Now let's talk about what these targets actually mean for ordinary Australians. The 2030 target is a forty-three percent cut below two thousand and five levels. The Climate Change Authority itself admits emissions need to more than double their current rate of reduction to get there in four years. The Institute of Public Affairs ran the numbers and found that meeting the twenty thirty-five target of sixty-two to seventy percent would require the equivalent of a two hundred and ninety billion dollar tax burden over a decade. That's not a rounding error. That's a generation of wealth confiscated in the name of a theory that Europe itself is quietly walking back as its own industries collapse. And here's the kicker that should make every Australian furious. The European Union has told us point blank — once negotiations are done, they're done. Don Farrell repeated it. There is no reopening. There is no amendment. Whatever is written in that text is written in stone, and it binds not just Albanese but every prime minister who comes after him. This is a man who can't win a debate on climate policy at the ballot box, so he's outsourcing it to Brussels. He's taking the most contentious, most divisive policy in Australian politics and locking it into an international treaty so that even if the people vote him out, the ideology survives him. That's not governance. That's entrenchment. Why is any of this in a trade deal in the first place? Because the far left has learned that you can't sell climate destruction directly to voters, so you smuggle it in through the back door of agreements nobody reads. You attach it to something people want — cheaper wine, more beef exports — and hope they don't notice the poison pill. And when the Coalition objects, Albanese calls them nativist and protectionist. He turns legitimate sovereignty concerns into a culture war so he doesn't have to answer the actual question: why should a future elected Australian government be unable to change its own energy policy without asking permission from Europe? But before we get to the treaty, let's look at what the green agenda has already done to this country on its own. Because the damage isn't theoretical. It's on every power bill in Australia right now. Household electricity bills are up thirty-five percent since the start of twenty twenty-two. Gas is up forty-nine percent.