Inconsistency rules in leaders' ETS views

IT is hard to know which of our political leaders is more inconsistent with their rhetoric on emissions trading and climate change.

Kevin Rudd and the past two opposition leaders are all over the place when talking about timing for introducing an ETS, the importance of an ETS and the cost and importance of action on climate change.

Since losing the Liberal leadership last week, Malcolm Turnbull has been on the warpath, keen to do what he can to damage Tony Abbott's first few weeks in the job. When it looked as if Turnbull would lose his leadership, he ramped up his rhetoric to explain why enacting an ETS now was so important. "It is manifestly in the national interest that the emissions trading scheme legislation currently in the Senate is passed," Turnbull told reporters on November 30. He went on to say: "We have the opportunity to settle this issue of the emissions trading scheme in a manner which achieves significant gains -- we have the opportunity to do that by passing the legislation that is currently in the Senate."

The rhetoric was a far cry from what Turnbull was saying back on May 26: "Common sense and prudence, the importance of getting this right, of pursuing a practical outcome that is effective for the environment and does not destroy jobs, demands that the decision on the scheme, and on the final design of the scheme, should be postponed until after Copenhagen." How quickly desperation can change a situation.

Not that Abbott is much better. On July 24 he wrote in The Australian that "the government's emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public's fears. It's a plausible means to limit carbon emissions that doesn't impose any obvious costs on voters".

Yet last week Abbott said of the ETS: "It is going to put tens of thousands of jobs at risk around Australia -- the last thing we want to do is jeopardise the competitiveness of Australia's export industries, on which all of us ultimately depend."

The Prime Minister's contradictions are the most brazen. He condemns Abbott for suggesting you can have a climate change policy without a cost. "Anyone who argues there is a cost-free, pain-free way for Australia to act on climate change is not being honest," he said.

Yet in an interview with The Daily Telegraph yesterday, Rudd said households would pay little or nothing for Labor's ETS. That's before you even consider his claims that climate change is the "greatest moral challenge" we face, but not so important as to go to an early election to do something about it. Is it any wonder the public hears what politicians say and at the same time lunges for a handful of salt?