Gillard's long game scores a few own goals

WHAT a remarkable situation we have. Julia Gillard has announced a carbon tax right in the middle of a state election in which her ideological compatriot, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally, is campaigning on the cost of living.

If the job of the NSW Labor Party weren't already tough enough, it faces a conflating of state and federal issues and an angry electorate wanting to vent its frustration at the Prime Minister having broken her election commitment that "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead".

It says a lot about how unwinnable the NSW election is that no one, in particular the powerful NSW right faction, stopped Gillard from damaging the NSW campaign. It speaks to the loss of contact between Gillard and the faction that played such an important role in installing her as Prime Minister.

Labor was never going to win the NSW election but it is important that it holds as many seats as possible, to rebuild during the next four years at a state level and to give federal Labor MPs state support in their electorates.

Gillard's poor timing on the carbon tax has put several state seats in jeopardy that otherwise might not have been, which through time could make holding federal marginal seats in NSW that much harder. No wonder a delegation of NSW powerbrokers visited Gillard during the week to express their concerns at the way the government was managing the agenda.

A carbon tax, by any definition, imposes a greater strain on the cost of living. That is its purpose, as the Coalition enjoys pointing out. It puts up prices to wean consumers and businesses off products with an environmentally unsustainable carbon footprint. After all, if a carbon tax doesn't curtail carbon-intensive industry, what environmental good does it do?

In the long term the federal government's argument, of course, is that consumers and businesses will be better off if they make the transition to a low-carbon economy sooner rather than later. Technology and lifestyles will be better placed to handle the new climate change order, so the argument goes. And Labor knows it can't be seen to do nothing in its second term on climate change despite what the PM said about a carbon tax before the election. Gillard is jammed no matter what she does on this issue.

But even if the world overwhelmingly begins to put a price on carbon, any advantages in having done so early in this country won't be felt in the short term. And it is in the short term that Keneally is arguing Labor does more to lower cost of living pressures. She is trying to mount the argument at state level at the same time as federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his cheer squad in the media savage brand Labor for raising the cost of living nationally.

In years gone by the NSW Right of the Labor Party never would have allowed a federal leader to damage a state leader's campaign so badly. It would have quarantined the carbon tax debate until after the state campaign was over. Little would have been lost if Gillard had delayed the timing of the carbon tax announcement by just a few weeks. Apart from any state assistance doing so might have had, it would have given Gillard and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet time to fashion some details around the announcement. (Their failure to do so is one of the reasons Labor is losing the debate.)

Gillard is wedged between the deal she has done with the Greens and the need to appeal to Labor's traditional working-class base. The latter is the sole focus of the Keneally campaign. The former appears to be the sole focus of the federal Labor government as it looks to survive full term (with a nod and a wink to the rural independents along the way).

"I hope she knows what she is doing" was all one of Labor's shrewdest political strategists could say about the carbon tax when I asked him what he thought. He wasn't consulted about it. Some backbenchers previously told me that the caucus never received a briefing on the plans, either.

Even a cabinet minister confessed that cabinet had "only sort of" considered the idea. Whether his observation is accurate or an attempt to distance him and others from the approach being taken matters only by degrees. It suggests Gillard is not consulting adequately (shades of Kevin Rudd) or senior colleagues are starting to distance themselves from her decision-making (not a good sign so early in a second term).

If the mammoth task of Labor trying to convince its working-class base that action on climate change weren't already difficult enough, especially in the context of introducing a carbon tax the PM ruled out five days before polling day, this week a distracting debate about the legislative rights of the territories emerged. The rights of territories was being championed by the Greens as a possible way of breaking past the federal roadblocks to gay marriage and legalising euthanasia: twin issues Bob Brown has long championed.

Because the territories have quite different demographics to wider Australia, the political will may be present in these skewed microcosms of society to bypass mainstream conservatism, especially in the white-collar ACT.

On the detail, Brown's proposal isn't all that radical. All he is calling for is a removal of the prime ministerial right to overturn territory legislation, replacing it with the need for federal parliament to do so.

But the policy implications of the move are what made Gillard's week worse and gave Abbott the opportunity to paint her as pandering to a radical Greens agenda. In politics, perceptions matter.

Again, these unhelpful debates are happening publicly, a matter of weeks before NSW goes to the polls.

Like perceptions, timing matters in politics. At the moment Labor just isn't getting its timing right.

Consider the previous fortnight the Coalition had: Andrew Robb's interest in Julie Bishop's job (and Joe Hockey's) reported across the media; Scott Morrison's poorly timed commentary on funeral costs for asylum-seekers; Cory Bernardi's anti-Islam remarks; and Abbott's worsening Newspoll results wherein his net satisfaction rating fell sharply.

What did Gillard do? She made her broken election promise on a carbon tax the issue instead of the Liberal Party's woes and distracted Labor from its campaign in NSW, in all likelihood giving away her polling advantage next week, when Newspoll re-evaluates the standing of the parties and leaders federally.

Gillard has decided to adopt the John Howard outlook rather than the Rudd outlook, meaning she wants to be popular only in the poll that counts, on election day. But she still needs political capital from month to month and in the past fortnight she has lost what little she has accumulated in the year to date.