So, welcome back to the politics of climate change, Australian style, which wrecks leaderships, sunders parties and, like a kind of green haze, induces fury, ill-judgement and bizarre alliances as a matter of course.
Quite what the Government announced yesterday is hard to describe. It’s an agreement, though only with the Greens – Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott only “agreed” to its release – and then with only the vaguest of principles, with such minor issues as the level of the fixed price and household and industry compensation left TBA. Also To Be Advised was Labor Caucus, which was not asked to consider the proposal.
This provided new vigour for the Opposition’s long-running campaign on electricity price impacts. One has to say, however, that, it would have more credibility on the issue of electricity prices if it had been able to maintain a consistent line on the matter over the last two years. Having long campaigned on the electricity price impacts of carbon pricing, back in August 2009, the Opposition unveiled modelling by Frontier Economics, commissioned by Andrew Robb and Nick Xenophon, demonstrating that the Government’s CPRS would force electricity prices up by $260-280 a year.
After tearing itself apart over the issue and installing Tony Abbott as leader, the Frontier findings were abandoned and the Opposition adopted a new tack, claiming Labor’s CPRS would lead to a total increase in costs for households of $1100. A NSW electricity pricing regulator ruling was also used to claim the CPRS would increase electricity prices by 62% alone, although later in Parliament Greg Hunt cited another figure, “19% over two years”.
But at some point, perhaps as an example of rhetoric inflation, Hunt started claiming that the $1100 figure was for electricity prices alone, not all household costs, as a consequence of a $30 a tonne carbon price. That line of attack took him up until the start of this week. Unable to stand Hunt’s constant repetition of the $1100 figure, and the innumerate journalists who reported it, John Quiggin methodically shredded Hunt’s claims, showing that his $1100 line was out by a factor of 5.
Perhaps it was a coincidence that after this takedown, Hunt and his colleagues abandoned the $1100 line. This week, their electricity price claim was lowered back to $300 from $1100. Why? The Australian Industry Group had produced a report with modelling claiming a carbon price of $26 would increase electricity prices by $300 a year.
How Hunt got from a carbon price of $30 a tonne causing electricity price rises of $1100 to a carbon price of $26 a tonne causing electricity price rises of $300 a year is anyone’s guess.
What the Opposition never mentioned is that under the CPRS, low and middle income earners were all fully compensated for the price rises. In fact, many were overcompensated, just to make sure. The Opposition knows this perfectly well. Why? Well, cast your mind back to November 2009, when Ian Macfarlane and Penny Wong were negotiating an agreed position on the CPRS (passage of which, you’ll recall, Tony Abbott had been strongly in favour).
One of the issues was, naturally, electricity price rises. Eventually the Government and the Turnbull-led Opposition agreed to reduce electricity price rises by massively increasing handouts to the electricity generation sector. This meant they slashed compensation to households for electricity price rises – in effect transferring compensation from households to the foreign multinationals and incompetent state governments that run our electricity generation sector.
All that’s now superfluous detail, of course, in the race to claim that householders will somehow be out of pocket from electricity prices, by $260, or $300, or $1100, or whatever other number will spring to mind. No one remembers in the perpetual present of the media cycle.
The Opposition’s other line of attack has far more credibility – the gulf between what Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan said about carbon taxes before the election and what they say now. The contumely directed toward Labor is richly deserved, given the extraordinary cynicism and political stupidity that informed its election commitment. Perhaps Karl and Mark can cough up for some focus groups on how to square that particular circle?
The Right will hammer this endlessly — Alan Jones left even more froth on the microphone than usual this morning — although if Tony Abbott wants to talk about “people’s revolts” he might watch some Al Jazeera and examine some pictures of murdered Arab protesters first in order to understand why that might be a tad inappropriate at the moment.
Whether the “broken promise” line has any legs will be the first question of interest as we plunge back into the green haze. Are voters more likely to see the Government’s move as a breach of faith or a reversal of an extraordinarily dumb decision? And have we all got the emotional energy to reach the same heights of hysteria as in 2009?
Although there’s one minor problem with it all. It’s funny, but I don’t recall any such fury when the promise by both Labor and the Liberal Party to introduce an ETS after the 2007 election was deliberately broken, first by the Liberals in 2009 and then by Labor in 2010.
There’s very little consistency in either the Government or the Opposition when it comes to climate action.
Thanks Bernard, please keep the commentary coming on this, the single most important story of 2011.
You criticise that the Opposition, “… would have more credibility on the issue of electricity prices if it had been able to maintain a consistent line on the matter over the last two years.”
Why should they bother? When you can hoodwink huge swathes of ignorant, selfish and reactionary voters with reasoning as specious as “Great Big New Tax on Everything” it is hardly worth the effort to present a consistent argument, just make sure that your soundbites line up with one another this week, appeal to the lowest common denominators of fear of change and self interest, and watch the punters line up to back you.
Abbott and the Coalitions gradual fall in popularity, according to latest opinion polling, gives me hope that a significant proportion of the electorate may be less easily fooled, after all.
The lack of detail in the release yesterday strikes me as evidence that the Government is going about this process with an attention to detail (ironically) and planning which has been lacking from its policymaking of late. It is part of a coordinated and considered campaign to keep the public informed at all stages of what is going to be a long and (hopefully) careful process to thrash out the details. I think the delicate balance of power ensures that careful negotiation will be necessary to ensure this works. Rather than being condemned for providing little detail at this point, the government is to be lauded for its transparency. This is no accident – Gillard, it seems, has learnt from Rudd’s mistakes of autocratic, zero consultation policy making on the run. Let’s hope so anyway.
The “broken promise” line is indeed the one which will get the Coalition furthest, and it is in keeping with the present Coalition rabble’s moral standard. It will appeal to the sexist conservatives to depict JG as a liar – the fact that John Howard was the ultimate master and overlord of the broken promise in recent political history, will be glossed over as gloating sexists whine to themselves about how JG “can’t be trusted”.
There is a very good argument that JG’s statement about ruling out a Carbon Tax under a Labor government, is null and void. We don’t have a Labor government, we have coaltion of labour, greens and independants. This doesn’t excuse JG from culpability for political naivety – One should not make promises or rule things out, unless one is absolutely certain that no conceivable situation can arise in future, where one can be depicted as having “broken a promise”. This is really quite difficult, but therein lies the difficult path politicians must learn to tread, if they are to be viewed as having integrity. JG should have been a bit more circumspect in how specific she was with her commitments – the approach with the Carbon Tax release yesterday suggests that she, and the government, have learnt this lesson.
Julia Gillard has the ability to explain the economics of this carbon tax much better than Kevin Rudd ever could. The electorate will forgive her for her broken election promise just so we can move forward, progress sensibly, mitigate our economic losses and not lose any more PM’s, governments and opposition leaders.
The electorate was and still is supportive of action on climate change. They executed John Howard for failing on climate change policy and they were prepared to execute Kevin Rudd for lacking the ticker to crash through a DD election for his CPRS.
Alan Jones did his cause a great disservice by branding Julia a liar. The Australian electorate doesn’t like that degree of vulgar and personal attack on our PM.
Nice article and balanced
I love the comments and polls on several of the newspaper web sites.
Its as if there was a rallying call to haters to comment and vote until you collapse from exhaustion.
How can polls that opened late at night get near ten thousand votes by 7 a.m.?
Let alone hundreds of negative comments in the same time period.
Me thinks a small handful of folk who think the world has been cruelly unfair to them just went for it.
And then without any embarrassment the radio hacks use this stuff as “evidence”
Pity they don’t travel frequently to many countries and they would be embarrassed by the nonsense they are encouraging – oh sorry forgot that solidifies there audience share and the advertising spend.
She is a liar? WTF!
Agree more with the comments than the article, although you are right about Abbott’ s antics. When you have Mitchell and Jones offside you must being doing something right, as there are few more odious players in the shock-jock pantheon. These radio goons are no better than the hacks that litter the air-waves in the US, preaching their brand of down-home nastiness, whipping the tea-party set up into a lynch mob. Here its the crypto-Hansonite set, the permanently credulous pygmy intellects that tune into these fools for their daily fare of fear and loathing. It won’t be long before they establish a link between a price on carbon and the downfall of Western civilisation…