How appropriate that federal parliament is to resume on February 2, Groundhog Day, as the Australian public will be facing their 4th election in a row based on climate change policies.
In 2006 southern Australia was in the grip of a prolonged drought, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released and the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was published. Public concern and media interest in climate change was on the rise and Kim Beazley’s Labor Party saw the chance to expose the inadequacy of the government’s greenhouse policy by announcing plans to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, introduce an ETS and set a target of reducing Australia’s emissions by 60 per cent on 2000 levels by 2050.
When Rudd took over as leader in December 2006 he painted Labor as the pro-climate alternative to the Howard government describing climate change as the ‘great moral challenge of our generation’ and going on to win the 2007 election convincingly.
In February 2008, the Prime Minister told Parliament that ‘the costs of inaction on climate change are much greater than the costs of action’ and that ‘Australia must…seize the opportunity now to become a leader globally’.
The May 2008 budget was supposed to set the platform for the Rudd government’s climate agenda. The three pillars of its climate policy would be: reducing Australia’s emissions; promoting adaptation to unavoidable climate change; and ‘helping to shape a global solution’. The centrepiece of its emissions reduction strategy would be the ETS, which would be introduced by 2010. This would be complemented by a number of renewable energy, energy efficiency and research, development and demonstration programs.
We got very close to agreement in 2009 until the dinosaurs in the Liberal Party decided to offer Abbott a bag of silver coins to become a climate change denier – an offer he grabbed immediately even though he had, until that day, been a supporter of carbon pricing.
High expectations quickly dissipated as proposals were watered down under intense industry lobbying, heightened by the global financial crisis, culminating in the government’s decision in April 2010 to shelve its plans to introduce an emissions trading scheme. Mismanagement of other climate programs – particularly the home insulation and Green Loans programs – left the Labor Party open to criticism.
Progressives felt abandoned, conservatives felt duped, and Rudd’s popularity plummeted. Gillard steps up and goes to the 2010 election saying that, despite edited clips implying otherwise, she would take victory as a mandate to introduce carbon pricing.
A hung parliament then dictated what form that carbon pricing would take but that one edited clip, “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”, and the government’s inability to explain the meaning of a fixed price ETS, meant Gillard was doomed. (It is worth noting that Turnbull, in exchange for the leadership, has put the same promise in writing.)
Murdoch had his boy in place and Credlin had her attack strategy planned. Truth went out the window. That one word, tax, was honed in on and increases in electricity prices that happened long before the introduction of the carbon price were incorrectly attributed to it.
Shock jocks and conservative commentators went into overdrive, rejecting scientific evidence to quote fools like Christopher Monckton. The fossil fuel industry went on a huge cash splash donating to conservative parties and paying anyone to write contrary papers. The fact that these people were never climate scientists, and that their theories and cherry-picking were easily debunked, did not seem to get through to a public who were barraged with an advertising campaign that had unlimited resources.
Instead of prosecuting a case that had all the evidence on its side, Labor were focused on internal squabbling and handed government to the worst PM this country has ever seen.
Abbott was one step too far in the misinformation campaign. He can’t even tell when he is lying anymore it has become so natural to this most political of animals. He ‘axed the tax’ but prices didn’t go down. The people drew the line.
So now we have a new Prime Minister with the same Environment Minister telling the same bullshit lies when trying to sell the line that increasing emissions by 6% over today’s level by 2020 is something to be proud of. He seems to get away with it domestically but on the world stage the questions are getting more strident. You can’t con the experts and you can’t expect others to take action without sanction against those who are not pulling their weight.
For the fourth time, the Australian public will be going to an election where action on climate change will be a clear difference between the two parties. So fickle are the voters that the result could very well depend on how hot the summer is.
Must we get to the brink of cataclysm before politicians are capable of standing up to short term profiteers? Must we watch our homes burn and our livestock die before we are ready to tackle the challenge?
We will never get the runs on the board when the batsman making the call is going yes, no, maybe. We need a decisive YES and some hard running if we are to give ourselves a chance of surviving let alone winning.
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