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June 01, 2007
Parliament has a break for a week or so before it returns for the June sitting. So what happened in the last fortnight? I agree with Michell Grattin in The Age when she says that although Kevin Rudd and Julie Gillard have some serious problems with their IR policy they are not counting against them with the voters.
In contrast, Howard suffers from being seen as expedient. He looks all over the place because he is. He wants to appeal to voters as the leader who won't throw away jobs and growth for the sake of climate, while also sounding fair dinkum on an issue that is resonating.
Howard is also deeply troubled that he has not been able to get Rudd's measure, and that is affecting his performance.
Rocco
The Howard Government is increasingly isolated at home and abroad in its inaction on the climate change. For 10 years it has blocked a national emissions trading scheme. However, as Peter Hartcher says in the Sydney Morning Herald it has grown harder and harder for the Howard Government to pretend that global warming is some sort of confected neo-socialist Eurocentric moral panic.
The Howard Government now faces its last chance to get it right and that the task group report that Howard received yesterday is the platform for his policy announcement. Hartcher observes that:
Unfortunately, the report seems designed to help Howard not in dealing with the environmental threat to civilisation but in beating back the political threat to the Government.The report gives the Government licence to procrastinate for another few years. While it does propose the essential policy tools for dealing with global warming - an emissions trading system and targets for cutting emissions - it suggests that Australia take four years in getting around to it.This is all designed to allow Howard to commit in principle to fixing the problem, but without committing to any specifics before the federal election. Why? To give him licence to portray Kevin Rudd, with his target of cutting emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, as an environmental fundamentalist who will wreak economic devastation.
The difficulty with this strategy is that informed people in the business world reckons that Howard need to do something about climate change to actually cut emissions.
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A sleeper epitomising what the above discusses must be yet another gormless capitulation to the Indonesions. So much for "we will decide..." etc.
The above necessitated the inconvenient unpacking of
warehoused voter "uglies" like the Foreign Minister, Downer and Howard's seeming near-ally, Iemma.
Regarless of any petty lock picking violation of Indonesion privacy, many will instead think in terms of orchestrated Djakarta demonstrations and the usual grovelling by right wing politicians to Indonesia, against the backdrop of the unresolved Balibo atrocity.