Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Political agreement on Australia’s carbon-reduction system will be difficult to achieve, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said, as talks continue with the opposition party on proposed changes to the draft laws.

Climate legislation is a “key priority” and in the interests of all Australians, Wong said in a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. today. Opposition Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull proposed a number of changes last month, including permanently excluding farming emissions.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party government wants lawmakers to vote on the legislation by the end of November as part of a push for carbon trading to start in 2011. The majority of Liberal Party representatives don’t accept that human beings are the cause of global warming, Liberal Senate Leader Nick Minchin said on ABC television’s Four Corners program last night.

“I think it will be particularly difficult given what happened last night on the television,” Wong said of negotiating an agreement on the climate proposals. “I think the issue there demonstrates that there are too many people in the Liberal Party who are not fair dinkum on climate change, who do think it is some sort of conspiracy.”

Governments from around the world will meet in Copenhagen starting Dec. 7 for the final round of talks on a climate accord to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Early Election

The Australian government has called for a A$10 a metric ton carbon price lasting a year until July 2012, from when the market will start determining the cost. Rudd’s Labor Party wants to reduce greenhouse gases by between 5 percent and 15 percent from their 2000 levels within 10 years.

Australian upper-house lawmakers defeated the government’s proposed carbon legislation on Aug. 13. A second rejection this month would give Rudd a trigger to call an early election.

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said the scientific evidence on climate change is increasingly discredited.

“The earth is actually not warming,” he told ABC’s Four Corners. “We still have rainfall falling, we have crops still growing. We can go outside and we won’t cook.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Sharples in Melbourne at bsharples@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 9, 2009 19:47 EST