The Labor-driven media coverage recognising this week as the 10th anniversary of the dramatic defeat of Kevin Rudd’s climate change policy is a bizarre mixture of truth and mythology revealing, a decade later, the extent of Australia’s deadlock on global warming action.
What you haven’t read was the headline story. The prime responsibility for this failure lay with Rudd as prime minister, who had control of the policy, timing and politics. Rudd enjoyed a huge polling advantage, often running at 57-43 per cent in two-party-preferred terms and, incredibly, an opposition leader in Malcolm Turnbull who wanted to pass the legislation. Such assets were torched in one of the most abject political failures for decades.
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The Labor Party’s bashing of the Greens over the past week for their shameful vote on December 2, 2009, is completely justified but misses the bigger point. For a decade Labor has embraced climate change action as a core element of its identity, yet has singularly failed to carry the Australian public when it counted. It has paid a fearful price.
Labor’s past three leaders — Rudd, Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten — have been destroyed with climate change policy critical in the demise of each. The paradox of Labor’s position is its entrenched belief that the people want decisive climate change action, yet its repeated failure to translate this belief into a policy endorsed at the ballot box.
This has been a failure of strategy and tactics. The Labor mantra, displayed again this week, is to blame the Greens, then the Tony Abbott-led Coalition, then the Scott Morrison-led Coalition, for defeating what is Labor’s non-negotiable commitment to climate change action. This raises the question: if the public is so enthusiastic, why does Labor keep losing?
Over the decade it has lost in the parliament and lost in the country. The reason is because this issue is unique: environmental mythology obscures political reality. Public support for climate change action fluctuates according to cycle and circumstance. Labor has struggled to find and hold the middle ground on this issue. The moral superiority of the climate change lobby and its compulsion to brand as “deniers” anybody who merely backs moderate emissions reduction targets alienates many Australians.
The serial ALP failures almost defy belief — in 2009 the Senate voted 41-33 against Rudd’s policy; in 2010 Rudd refused to confront Abbott with an election on climate change policy; a few months later he retreated from that climate policy; in 2010 Gillard, in a political reversal to save her government, entered an alliance with the Greens to legislate an emissions trading scheme; in 2013 Labor lost an election off the back of Gillard’s so-called carbon tax, leading to Abbott’s repeal of the ETS; and in 2019 Shorten lost an election after running hard on radical climate change action, rejecting any need to document the cost of his policy.
The fatal political structures established in 2009 have endured for a decade. Rudd failed in 2009 because he failed to hold the middle ground against both the Greens and Coalition on opposite sides. The same fate befell Shorten 10 years later.
The dilemma for Labor is that Rudd’s fate shows it fails when the Greens are the enemy but Gillard’s fate shows it fails when the Greens are the allies.
In 2009 Rudd and his climate change minister, Penny Wong, took their pivotal decision early in the debate — Turnbull, not the Greens, would be their legislative partner. “I had come to the view pretty early on the Greens were going to oppose whatever we did,” Wong said. “They wanted a fundamental differentiation.”
Rudd and Wong were correct. The tactic from the Greens was to punish Labor on climate change and oppose Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme. This is their DNA; it goes to their existence. They pitch as the only party of true climate change. The typical destructive business model of the Greens was seen a few weeks ago in their false claim that the Morrison government and its climate change policy was responsible for bushfires.
Turnbull made clear his game plan: he wanted to vote for Rudd’s scheme, neutralise climate change via bipartisanship and run against Labor on economic policy at the 2010 election. Julie Bishop and Joe Hockey agreed. Turnbull needed to win concessions from Rudd on the scheme to appease his own side and Labor did offer hefty concessions.
But Rudd never treated Turnbull as his legislative partner. He did the opposite: he attacked Turnbull, depicted the Coalition as sceptics “holding the world to ransom”, accused Turnbull of “political cowardice” and branded him a risk to “our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reef, our economy and our future”.
Rudd declined to negotiate directly with Turnbull. He was greedy. He wanted Turnbull’s support for his policy but he wanted to destroy the Turnbull Coalition as immoral and weak on climate change. These were contradictory goals. For passing Labor’s policy, Rudd offered Turnbull nothing but truckloads of humiliation.
Gillard saw this was nonsense. “We should have thrown our arms around Turnbull,” she said. Mark Arbib made the same point: clever Kevin wedged Brendan Nelson and Turnbull on a carbon price, but lost his own policy. Rudd’s former press secretary, Sean Kelly said: “We missed the main game — the passage of our scheme, not further discrediting Turnbull.” Bishop sampled party opinion and reported back: resistance to “caving into Rudd” was mounting. Rudd needed Turnbull but was undermining Turnbull. It made no sense.
The revolt in the Coalition against Turnbull was a “bottom-up” process. The key figure was Senate leader Nick Minchin, who nailed the politics: he said Rudd’s emissions trading scheme would have zero impact on the global climate (given our emissions were only 1.5 per cent of the world) but would damage our competitive position and boost power bills. These were powerful arguments, pretty similar to Morrison’s arguments a decade later.
After the revolt against Turnbull in the partyroom on November 24, 2009 — when Andrew Robb’s speech against Turnbull was decisive but Turnbull declared a majority for his position — Minchin defied Turnbull, decided to vote against Rudd’s scheme and quit as Senate leader. Abbott followed Minchin.
Abbott was elected leader 42-41 over Turnbull and the partyroom voted in a secret ballot 54-29 to reject convincingly an ETS policy. Abbott’s ascension was driven by policy — it was to turn the Liberals into an anti-carbon pricing party and convert the climate question into a price, not a moral, issue. This was a bridge too far. But it worked brilliantly for several years, culminating in Abbott’s 2013 election victory and the repeal of Labor’s policy.
The reality, however, is that the 2009 schism within the Liberals was never really resolved. It remained, often concealed, only to reappear with lethal import after Turnbull returned as leader in late 2015. A series of Turnbull government-proposed climate change policy mechanisms was vetoed by the Abbott-led conservatives staying loyal to their 2009 spirit and their 2013 election success.
In the end Turnbull’s effort to promote the national energy guarantee was present at his demise in a way that invited disturbing parallels with the 2009 crisis that terminated his initial leadership. The upshot is that Morrison, in office, has had to improvise in spinning a new policy and avoid igniting the still burning embers of the 2009 political divide.
In summary, the Labor-Green split still exists. Labor lacks the electoral base to prevail on climate policy whenever the Greens and Coalition both resist it — hence Wong’s recent remark on Labor’s need to build more common ground. And the Coalition side remains fractured on climate policy because of the competing interests and values of its diverse constituency, the spark that ignited the 2009 political fire.
Policy has been sacrificed because of these complex political forces. The underlying story is that finding a settled polity is hard in Australia because it must reconcile the progressive high-income climate-change city voters with the nation’s profile as a coal and gas superpower reinforced by this cultural ethos in the regions and outer suburbs.