PM's people power

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This was published 13 years ago

PM's people power

By Shaun Carney

Gillard wants to take climate policy beyond the political arena and use the weight of public opinion to get it through.

THE federal government's performance on climate change since it won office in 2007 is one of political failure and, as a consequence of that, policy failure, too. Only three years ago, the Labor Party and the Coalition both went to the people promising to introduce an emissions trading scheme.

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That political consensus is now in ruins. At this election, Labor says it retains an inclination to implement an ETS, after an interval, and the Coalition has dropped the idea altogether, going so far as to rule out putting a price on carbon.

What appeared to be settled policy in 2007 is contentious and challenging for Labor. Why? Because, more than any other issue, it was mishandled by the Rudd government. Just about every call by the government on climate change turned out to be the wrong one.

Kevin Rudd did not just overcook his rhetoric on climate change, he left the pan on the stove and the kitchen caught fire. It will long be a matter for discussion in political strategy meetings on all sides of politics that a prime minister could think he could nominate an issue as the greatest moral and economic challenge of his time and then go on to treat it as a middle-order priority - a bit of business to be negotiated privately.

It was, quite simply, astonishing to see the government treat the issue in such a perfunctory way after Rudd had, without prompting, elevated it to such lofty heights. When a prime minister declares a policy as the most important one of all, he would be expected to tend to it constantly and with enormous care. Little wonder that when, in April, Rudd acknowledged - inexplicably, he did not take the trouble to announce it - that the government was putting an ETS on ice, a substantial segment of the voting public saw it as a deal-breaker.

The impact was so huge because Labor was seen to have had a substantial political advantage over the Liberals when it came to climate change. The ALP had long ago accepted the view of scientists who argued that carbon emissions led to the dangerous phenomenon of climate change, an assessment that seemed to chime with public opinion.

The Liberals were more sceptical. The Howard government was a late convert to the cause, adopting the idea of an ETS only months out from the 2007 election. In the election that year, Labor argued its commitment to action on climate change more convincingly.

This was what made the government's progressive failure on advancing the issue during its first term such a phenomenon in itself. Essentially, in the space of three years, it has squandered its political advantage on the issue.

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Yesterday, Julia Gillard admitted as much. In announcing her climate change policy, she has hit the reset button and gone back to the very start. She had nowhere else to go.

Gillard had little choice but to admit to Labor's screw-up. She said the government had learnt some important lessons from the way it had fumbled the process so far.

''The first lesson is that, if you want to make a big change for our nation, the political process must be connected with the community. The extent to which this was not the case can be measured by the speed with which the near consensus collapsed. In my view, the consensus we build must be stronger and must go beyond a notional political consensus,'' she said.

''We need community consensus and, above all else, this requires a reasonable explanation … not a strategy that relies only on political consensus, the very type of consensus Tony Abbott destroyed to support his own narrow political ambition.''

The reference to Abbott as being the destroyer of the climate change consensus was disingenuous, to say the least. It had been the government's job to keep prosecuting the argument for a policy solution, something it failed to do as it came under attack from the Greens on the left and climate change non-believers on the right. Abbott's rise to the Liberal leadership came about largely because he represented the non-believer views of the bulk of his party's membership.

However, Gillard's judgment that it will be necessary to persuade people rather than press-gang them on the issue is correct. The question is: Is it too late to get to where she wants to go?

Climate change is now a highly divisive issue. The intellectual and political networks on both sides of the issue are powerful, dedicated and stretch across the globe. Gillard's goal is to take the issue beyond the political arena so that public opinion is harder to break down.

Clearly, she expects that if Labor is re-elected, whatever policy it produces down the track will be rejected by the Greens and the Coalition in the Senate, just as its previous carbon pollution reduction scheme was last year. Her hope is that a commitment within the voting public to take action would withstand that political setback.

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She cites Medicare, a favourite policy institution of Abbott's, as the historical example: controversial at first, but eventually part of a wider political settlement. It is a tall order. Medicare provided an instant benefit whereas action on climate change yields no immediate, tangible return, only costs.

Shaun Carney is associate editor.

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