What the heck, Andrew Robb?

Up on Business Insider:

Australia’s chief trade-deals negotiator has labeled the bid by President Barack Obama to cut U.S. power-plant emissions as lacking substance.

“There’s no action associated with it,” Trade Minister Andrew Robb said in a Sky News interview from Houston, Texas, where he was accompanying Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Abbott, who is seeking to dismantle Australia’s carbon- price mechanism before it hosts Group of 20 leaders in November, isn’t supporting Obama’s bid to pressure India, China and other nations to help form a world-wide agreement to combat climate change. The president is seeking state-by-state limitations on carbon-dioxide emissions to limit the effects of man-made global warming, and earlier this month proposed cutting power-plant discharges, the nation’s largest source of the gas, by 30 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels.

“Despite the rhetoric you get over here and all the targets for 30 percent reductions and all this, it’s just rhetoric,” Robb said.

I'm sure that Obama appreciates the two faced aspect of the Ministry of the government he just hosted.

Or is there some misreporting, because that sounds an extraordinarily ill considered thing for Robb to say.