About the Scorecard

Climate Action Hobart’s process for ranking Tasmanian political parties’ climate policies.

In January 2010 Climate Action Hobart launched a number of benchmarks for climate policies in Tasmania. The benchmarks are called Ten steps for a safe climate: Tasmania’s contribution to avoiding dangerous climate change.

These benchmarks have enabled Climate Action Hobart to conduct an analysis of Tasmanian political party’s policies and allowed us to rank the parties accordingly.

In order to rank the political parties’ climate policies we contacted the Tasmanian Liberal, Labor, Greens and Socialist Alliance parties and requested a copy of all of their existing climate policies.

We then read and reviewed the policies and allocated them a safe climate star ranking. This ranking demonstrates how their policies compared with our a climate policy benchmarks as outlined in the Ten steps for a safe climate.

The details of safe climate star rankings are as follows:

*** Excellent. This policy matches CAH's 10 steps.

** A start. The party’s policy is a good start it still needs improvement.

* Poor. Their current policy is not adequate. Their existing policy needs to be completely revised. (This includes policies with significant gaps or an absence of specifics and timelines).

0 No policy on this crucial issue. This is a demonstration of the failure of this party to take action to secure a safe climate.

>< Dangerous climate policy. This policy is going in the wrong direction.

Climate Action Hobart members worked together to allocate a ranking to each of the party’s for each individual step in our Ten steps for a safe climate. In order to eliminate any chance of bias Climate Action Hobart members who were members of, or involved in the election campaigns of, any of the political parties were not allowed to participate in the process of allocating rankings.

The rankings allocate to each party were changed as each political party improved their climate policies. Scorecard has been updated (from the original scorecard as at 9th March 2010), based on information publicly available on March 19th 2010.