Politics trumps a moral challenge

KEVIN Rudd has revealed himself to be an administrator, not a leader.

Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong put a brave face on the lack of any real progress towards a global agreement on climate change at Copenhagen last year. Picture: Brett Costello

KEVIN Rudd's credibility-sapping decision on Tuesday to delay the introduction of his carbon pollution reduction scheme until 2013 at the earliest, means that he goes into this year's election with a less crystallised climate change policy than John Howard took to the 2007 election.

At that time Rudd mocked Howard as a climate change sceptic, someone unwilling to even ratify the Kyoto Protocol; someone who didn't take the profound effects of global warming seriously.

Now, when it comes to action on climate change, Rudd is Howard lite. The Prime Minister couldn't even bring himself to use the word delayed when announcing his backflip, instead referring to the point of implementation as being extended to 2013 or beyond.

Rudd may have ratified Kyoto, to much symbolic applause, but his CPRS, if it starts at all, will only do so at a date later than Howard had committed to commencing his emissions trading scheme.

While Howard was always known to be sceptical about the role humans play in global warming, or indeed the threat it poses to the global community, Rudd is on record with strident rhetoric about both the threat of climate change and the importance of immediate action by governments.

This makes Rudd's change of policy all the more embarrassing.

This time last year, Rudd was ushering Australia into being a global leader on climate change; setting an example with our CPRS. Since then climate change talks at Copenhagen have broken down, with no formal agreement. And the US appears set to jettison its gridlocked scheme.

Even in Europe, which has an ETS but can't seem to meet its international targets, the focus of attention has switched to financial insecurity in the wake of revelations about ballooning government debt in countries such as Greece and Portugal after what was also the coldest European winter in more than 30 years.

In the lead-up to the 2007 election Rudd began his tough talk on urgently addressing climate change. He did so with the confidence of Al Gore's polemic documentary An Inconvenient Truth stirring up public emotions and on the back of the release of the Stern report in Britain that detailed the economic costs of inaction.

In the domestic setting, climate change was on people's minds as a result of a record drought and severe water shortages. Since then, however, much of the drought has eased and the UN Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change has been engulfed in scandals attached to its data analysis. The difficulties of achieving global agreement on binding emissions targets, much less a worldwide cap and trade system, have also become much clearer.

But the changing climate around climate change hasn't absolved Rudd from what he has previously said on the matter. His words will haunt him between now and the election.

Before the 2007 election, Rudd said climate change was "the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation". In an interview he gave to a newspaper last week, Rudd reaffirmed those remarks (although instead of the greatest challenge it morphed into a fundamental challenge), as he has done repeatedly during his 2 1/2 years in office.

In December 2009 Rudd said: "The argument that we must not act until others do is an argument that has been used by political cowards since time immemorial." Responding to calls from opposition MPs to delay implementation of the CPRS pending the outcome of the Copenhagen conference, lest Australia implement a cap and trade system without others doing the same, Rudd added: "What absolute political cowardice, what absolute failure of leadership, what absolute failure of logic. The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so then no nation will ever act."

On Rudd's own test, he has become a political coward in an election year, choosing not to act on his scheduled timetable of implementing a CPRS by 2011, because of two factors: Senate obstructionism and uncertainty about global action (exactly what he previously railed against).

On Tuesday Rudd said: "The opposition decided to backflip on its historical commitment to bringing in a carbon pollution reduction scheme; there's been slow progress in the realisation of global action on climate change. These two factors together inevitably mean the implementation of a carbon pollution reduction scheme in Australia will be delayed."

By delaying action, he added "that will provide therefore the Australian government at that time at the end of 2012 [when the Kyoto Protocol expires] with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change prior to the implementation of a CPRS in Australia".

That position sounds awfully similar to the position laid out by one-time Liberal leader Brendan Nelson in an opinion piece in The Australian in July 2008. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong ridiculed Nelson, and continued to ridicule others for wanting to delay and ultimately defeat the introduction of the CPRS.

"The fact is the longer we delay our response to climate change the harder our job will become and the more it will cost; we cannot run and we cannot hide," Wong said.

It now seems the government is both running and hiding from its previous strong commitment to climate change action, certainly in terms of implementing a CPRS to the timetable it once argued was so important for addressing global warming.

The Prime Minister has put himself at serious risk of being seen by voters as a leader who doesn't have the courage of his convictions, or alternatively someone whose convictions of the past were little more that rhetoric designed to win votes on an issue that was popular but no longer carries the same popular cache.

While Rudd once said: "To delay [implementing the CPRS] any longer would be reckless and irresponsible for our economy and our environment", he is now saying doing so is unavoidable because of the opposition's obstructionism, and delay is prudent because we need to see what the rest of the world intends to do.

But this avoids two important points: governments have clear-cut parliamentary mechanisms to achieve policy ends when stifled by oppositions, if they have the courage to test their policy goals with the electorate.

And while Rudd has given other reasons for his decision to delay the CPRS, the real reason he has done so is surly a political calculation that action on climate change is becoming increasingly unpopular and Tony Abbott would gain traction at the election with a scare campaign describing Labor's CPRS as "a great big new tax on everything".

First-year politics students at university learn that if a government wants to achieve its legislative agenda, but can't get it through both houses of parliament, it has the option once the legislation has been twice defeated by the Senate to call a double dissolution election, after which if it is successful it can hold a joint sitting of the parliament to secure the passage of its bills.

Rudd already has that trigger for his initial CPRS legislation. While there have been a number of double dissolution elections in Australia's history, there has only been one joint sitting, in 1974 when Gough Whitlam's Labor government pushed through its stymied agenda from its first term.

The opposition likes to compare Rudd with Whitlam for his large spending using public debt. But the difference is that Whitlam took ideological stands on issues he felt passionate about, and risked his own re-election to achieve them.

Rudd appears to have shirked his chance to do the same on something he has described as the greatest moral challenge of our generation.

The Lowy Institute has conducted a survey on community attitudes towards action on climate change for the past five years, and it shows that support has dipped sharply, down from 68 per cent in 2006 to just 46 per cent this year. The question it asks is: "Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should be taking steps now even if this involves significant costs?" It is the financial cost of action that is increasingly capturing people's attention.

Rudd is banking on any disillusionment with his weakened position among environmentalists not amounting to a loss of support at the ballot box.

While the Greens vote will inevitably rise as part of a protest vote against the government, and Labor's primary vote might therefore suffer, under the compulsory preferential voting system used federally primary votes that flow the way of the Greens in protest will likely return to Labor rather than the Coalition, which has pledged to avoid an emissions trading scheme altogether as part of its direct action package for climate change action.

But that will be cold comfort for those Labor ministers whose electorates are in inner-city areas.

Lindsay Tanner, Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek are all at risk of losing their seats following a surge in the Green vote.

On the back of Liberal Party preferences Green candidates in the seats of Melbourne, Grayndler and Sydney will have a real chance at victory now that Labor has abandoned its commitment to climate change action.

Rudd wants the next election to be about health reform not environmental action, and across most of the country he is likely to get his wish. To that extent delaying the CPRS has returned to the budget forecasts more than $2.7 billion of spending on compensation that would otherwise have been paid to business and individuals for the planned CPRS introduction.

That will go some way towards offsetting the cost of doing a deal with the premiers on health at the Council of Australian Governments meeting, as well as countering opposition criticisms of over-spending.

Rudd has made the calculation that the greatest moral challenge of our generation (his words) is not as important as guaranteeing his own re-election.

Despite being well ahead in the opinion polls for the entirety of his first term, as well as enjoying record personal approval ratings, Rudd isn't prepared to risk his popularity over something he claimed was so important.

That cowardice sits in stark contrast to Howard's preparedness to risk his near-record majority from 1996 in 1998 when he took an unpopular goods and services tax to an election even though the GST had cost the Liberals the unloseable 1993 election.

Perhaps it is the difference between the actions of a conviction politician and an administrator dressed up as a leader?

It would appear Rudd is more concerned about being in power than implementing policies he believes are important but could jeopardise his hold on power. Increasingly Rudd's prime ministership seems torn from the pages of a Yes, Prime Minister script.