ANALYSIS: Australia fights shy of pricing carbon

By Sid Astbury Jul 28, 2010, 3:55 GMT

Sydney - That Australians tell opinion pollsters they are less worried about climate change than they used to be is a reality reflected in campaigning for the August 21 parliamentary election.

Three years ago, voters were offered a choice of carbon trading schemes. This time round the ruling Labor Party has pushed pricing carbon way into the future and the Liberal challenger flatly denies that a cap-and-trade scheme is the way to go.

The switch in public opinion showed up in a poll by Sydney's Lowy Institute think tank, with 46 per cent of respondents saying they were really worried about climate change against 68 per cent in the same annual survey conducted in the year before the 2007 election that Labor won.

Climate change policy has exacted a terrible toll on both parties since Labor's victory installed Kevin Rudd as prime minister.

Rudd was unseated by his deputy last month and it is Julia Gillard who is leading Labor's bid for a second three-year term.

The captain of the conservatives is Tony Abbott, the Liberals' third leader since the Rudd landslide.

All those changes at the top were largely a result of conflicting climate change policies.

Rudd came to office declaring global warming the 'greatest moral challenge of our time' and his very first act was to sign the UN's Kyoto Protocol committing Australia to emissions reduction targets.

Rudd was a prime mover at December's climate conference in Copenhagen, promising that an emissions trading scheme to begin this year would ensure Australia could deliver on its promise of a 5-per-cent reduction on 2000 pollution levels by 2020.

In April, Rudd ditched carbon trading, a monumental backdown that turned the electorate against him and was the backdrop to Gillard grabbing his job in June.

On the conservative side of politics, the infighting over climate policy was even more costly. Abbott, who once declared 'climate change is crap,' won the party leadership by just one vote on a platform of opposing setting a price for carbon.

With a month to run before the polling booths open, electioneering on climate change has been more to do with what won't happen than what will.

Gillard, who less than a year ago said 'delay is the same as denial and the costs of inaction are far greater than the costs of action,' is not promising any immediate action or that Labor would ever deliver a carbon trading scheme.

If elected, she would set up a 150-member 'citizen's assembly' that would hold a year-long debate about global warming and ways of tackling it. Even if the gargantuan focus group came up with ideas, Labor would not be bound to endorse them.

'The role of the citizen's assembly won't be to become the final arbiter or judge of consensus but to provide and indicate back to the nation the progress of community consensus,' Gillard said.

Even fellow Laborites like former minister Graham Richardson have ridiculed the citizen's assembly as a delaying tactic.

'Gillard's climate change dialogue is the policy you have when you don't have a policy,' Richardson said. 'But Gillard doesn't have to win this issue; all she has to do is neutralize it.'

Because there is no weight of public opinion demanding a price on carbon, the parties offer interim measures they claim will enable Australia to meet its 2020 commitment.

Politics is the art of the possible and Rudd is an ex-premier because he got way ahead of the electorate.

Gillard and Abbott have adopted easy-on-the-pocket policies that they hope will placate those really concerned about climate change but not scare off the majority who don't worry about it a lot.

'This is a debate,' said Monash University politics lecturer Nick Economou, 'that's polarized between the cosmopolitan intellectuals who are absolutely convinced of the need for climate change policies and have been demanding a complex response ... and a big group of voters who're concerned about climate change but are worried they'll one day financially have to pay for climate change policy.'