You won’t find out from the mainstream media’s coverage of opinion polls, but the Greens appear to be the primary beneficiaries of the CPRS confrontation between the Government and the Opposition.

It wasn’t a confrontation, of course, until Tuesday. Until then, there had been a growing policy love-in between the moderate Liberals and Labor over how generously to reward some of Australia’s biggest polluters.

Government Ministers this week pointedly noted that John Howard took an ETS to the last election, and Malcolm Turnbull repeatedly said that the CPRS was very similar to the scheme John Howard would have gone with.

As it turns out, that’s exactly the message that might drive some voters to switch to the Greens in search of politicians who actually want to do something about climate change.

The increase in the Greens vote is small enough to be mere statistical chatter – a perennial problem with making any sense of small party votes – but last weekend’s Newspoll had the Greens’ primary vote rising to 12%, after hovering at 10% for the last two months.  Last weekend’s Nielsen poll had the Greens up to 13%, after garnering 8s and 10s for most of this year.

Essential Research, though, hasn’t picked up any movement, with the Greens remaining at around 8%.  Morgan Poll has the Greens up slightly to 9%, although they’ve been higher at various points in the last year, including a brief increase to over 11% in July.

The bigger shock, though, is from Galaxy, which in its two most recent Queensland state polls, has the Greens at 15%, which as a Crikey reader pointed out, the Courier-Mail oddly failed to mention.  That’s up from 12% back in September.

This week’s McNair Gallup online poll had the Greens on 11%, but there’s no time series data for comparative purposes.

The McNair Gallup data undercut the theory that Green voters are disillusioned with Labor, however, because more Green voters than ALP voters (40% to 37%) supported the Government’s ETS. They also understood the ETS better than other voters.  That suggests the new Greens may be former Liberal voters.

Some of the polling data suggests increases in the Green vote come at the expense of the Labor primary vote, which would not concern the ALP too much because preferences would tend to flow back to Labor.  What will concern the Liberal Party more immediately is not whether Labor votes will switch to the Greens but whether their own base support will switch.  That could be disaster scenario that plays out in Higgins tomorrow. Labor is undoubtedly ruing not running a candidate now, but the silver lining for Labor is that a strong showing by Clive Hamilton would inflict substantial damage on Tony Abbott’s leadership, suggesting that even relatively safe Liberal seats might be endangered by the new climate denialist leadership of the party.

Malcolm Mackerras has tipped Hamilton to knock off Kelly O’Dwyer.  It’s a brave person to bet against Mackerras, but a boilover of that magnitude would be astonishing. Even so, Labor hardheads might watch with concern given Lindsay Tanner’s vulnerability in Melbourne, where he will be up against high-profile Green Adam Bandt again next year.  Exactly where the apparent lift in Green votes is coming from – disgruntled environmental-minded Labor voters or disillusioned and disgusted Liberals – will be a topic of considerable interest to both parties for the next 12 months.