T-Rex and Bambi show highlights big flaws in our debate

ON the Sunshine Coast, a 7m fibreglass Tyrannosaurus Rex might have shed a tear; the star exhibits of the Palmersaurus dinosaur park could hardly compete with the freak show in Canberra.

Striding heavy-footed into the Great Hall of Parliament House was Clive Palmer: owner of Palmersaurus, coalmining interests, a nickel refinery and the Palmer United Party.

Alongside him was one-time US vice-president Al Gore who, but for the hanging chads of Florida, might have been president. Instead, he has sought relevance as a climate change evangelist.

Like T-Rex and Bambi, this was not a natural pairing. Palmer has railed against the very existence of climate change, complained about his carbon tax bills and promised to abolish a price on carbon.

Gore had been conned into thinking he was aiding Palmer’s conversion to climate action — Bambi helping T-Rex become herbivorous.

Palmer cultivated the impression of change, talking about “our ability to adapt to change and to keep an open mind” on issues.

“Air moves around the world,” he revealed, live on national television.

But Palmer was not for turning. He was delivering on his promise to kill the carbon tax and, for good measure, would try to block Tony Abbott’s “direct action’’ plan.

The outcome could ensure Australia has no scheme to meet its emissions-reduction target of 5 per cent less than 2000 levels by 2020. Palmer chewed Gore up and spat him out.

For all the amusement, these theatrics shone a light on serious shortcomings in our national political debate.

Climate policy has run like an active fault line through our polity for a decade, playing a crucial role in three elections and the demise of five political leaders. Because the major parties have not brokered a mainstream compromise, the balance-of-power forces have exploited the fissures.

In the new Senate, a series of bills and negotiations could put in place a climate settlement that could last beyond three years — longer than any climate arrangement in this decade of contention. Palmer’s intervention has been little more than a stunt.

The position today is what we expected it to be a week ago — Palmer helping to repeal the carbon tax but seeking to extract some ill-defined political benefits.

Much of the media, however, fell for Palmer’s spin. Given that the ABC, Fairfax press and much of the Canberra press gallery — collectively we call them the love media — are passionate about pricing carbon and visceral in their loathing for the Prime Minister, they tended to report what they wished for rather than what happened.

The love media has welcomed (in the ABC’s case, courted) Palmer as an irritant in conservative politics, so his arrival with climate guru Gore triggered a nirvana of intersecting ambitions.

On Twitter, The Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton was: “Amused that the Queensland populists always screw the Tories: Bjelke-Petersen ... Hanson ... now Palmer. Karma?”

And ABC managing director Mark Scott also missed the point, suggesting Palmer’s intervention might cause “hyperventilation” at this newspaper (even though The Weekend Australian has long argued for an emissions trading scheme in concert with our trading partners).

There was a patent lack of political comprehension at senior levels of the media.

ABC TV 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson said Palmer was “putting himself at the vanguard” of climate policy and The Age splashed across its front page: “Palmer in carbon tax blow to PM.” Even the love media’s online site of choice, Crikey, later pronounced: “Fairfax got it wrong.”

The green Left had gone with its heart rather than its head. Palmer has always opposed the carbon tax and promised to repeal it. So on the main policy issue there was no change.

The government will not haul up a “Mission Accomplished” banner until the vote occurs in the Senate in a few weeks; the new senators are not even sworn in yet, let alone herded on to the right side of a division.

But the only condition Palmer has put on repealing the tax is a no-brainer for the government.

He wants legislative guarantees that the tax cut will be passed on to consumers by the electricity retailers.

This was a promise the government had already made and was prepared to deliver through Australian Competition & Consumer Commission oversight.

It will now be reinforced in the legislation in a move that is more political sop to Palmer than policy improvement.

If this transpires, as expected, then the government will have delivered its central election promise and Abbott will be well satisfied.

The other measures to be settled are much less significant. Palmer talked about an emissions trading scheme to be triggered when our trading partners act. This has been a widely held and rational position on carbon pricing since the Shergold report was delivered to the Howard government in 2007.

Legislating a scheme and rating it at $0 would be a harmless stunt because a price signal without a price is not much of a signal. And, truth be known, if China, Japan, South Korea and the US all shifted to economy-wide an ETS there is little chance Australia would stand apart, no matter the complexion of our government.

But this is on the never-never.

It won’t happen in the foreseeable future. Palmer knows that, as does Abbott, even if the love media has convinced itself of looming global action.

Crucially, Palmer has not made this a precondition for his carbon tax repeal. His intervention has been spin, not substance.

As former Labor cabinet minister Craig Emerson says, it is part of his positioning as the anti-politician politician. “A keen and willing media played into Palmer’s hands,” says Emerson.

“Now lots of low-committed voters who don’t follow any details will conclude that Palmer is a jolly green giant, a champion of the envir­onment.”

Palmer also declared that he wants the renewable energy target retained. But it has long enjoyed bipartisan support.

For all the economic arguments against the RET and for all the upward pressure on electricity prices it entails, it remains politically popular.

For this reason, and because of massive investments already made, it is a difficult scheme to abolish or wind back. So there is no clear indication that Palmer’s stance will have changed the policy trajectory at all.

We await the findings of a government review into the RET for a fully informed debate but a key question will be whether Palmer’s commitment is to the existing 20 per cent RET or the 41,000 giga­watts by 2020 that is a manifestation of that target (diminishing demand projections suggest that capacity would push the renewable share above 25 per cent).

As public transparency about electricity pricing increases, the popularity of the RET is likely to subside and to the extent that Labor, the Greens and Palmer keep the target unnecessarily high, they will own the higher power bills it delivers.

Palmer is also insisting on the retention of the Climate Change Authority. Having scrapped the Climate Change Commission, it is no skin off the government’s teeth to keep the CCA. The Coalition can refocus its advice on to carbon farming and direct action, and it costs only about $6 million a year to run. A bigger economic headache will be Palmer’s insistence on the retention of the Clean Energy Fin­ance Corporation.

Essentially a bank financing low-carbon initiatives, it is supposed to be funded by carbon tax proceeds but if run diligently can return profits.

Its early efforts have been encouraging so, again, the government won’t be too perturbed if it can’t be dismantled.

Rather, in the absence of a dir­ect-action scheme, it may steer the CEFC towards projects, such as solar replacement, that help deliver the emissions target.

Direct action is the swing in the tail of this week’s walk with Palmer­saurus.

When the green Left applauded the Palmer-Gore intervention, they were applauding a plan that rejects direct action. Yet once the carbon tax is repealed the political pressure will flip from Abbott to the Greens and Labor.

The funding for direct action has already been passed by the Senate. Having lost a price on carbon, would Labor and the Greens really combine with Palmer to leave that money unspent and scotch Abbott’s plan to purchase domestic carbon abatement?

For the Greens, this would mean they had combined with the Coalition to kill Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, forced Julia Gillard into the self-destructing political disaster of the carbon tax, then combined with Labor and Palmer to eliminate direct action.

Voters may see that the Greens are to climate action what an asteroid strike was to the dinosaurs.

Still, Abbott then may fund carbon abatement directly through state government boondoggles.

After initially welcoming the Palmer-Gore show, the Greens started to realise late this week how it had stomped through their patch and trampled climate action.

“He wants to develop a new coalmine and coal port,” it dawned on Christine Milne. “He operates a nickel smelter.”

The Greens would realise that as the sun sets on climate action it also rises on a new era.

The next time the Senate sits, Labor and the Greens will not hold the numbers to block bills.

Along with the Palmersaurus party, senators such as John Madigan, Nick Xenophon, Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm will be crucial. The previously predictable Greens balance of power will be well and truly extinct.