PM, ignore Massachusetts warning at your peril

MASSACHUSETTS is a long way from Australia. Even so, you can count on the Rudd government paying close attention to what happened in the Bay State last week. A little known Republican, Scott Brown, won the Senate election by campaigning against the US President's radical healthcare plan. Massachusetts is sacred Democrat turf, held by the Kennedy clan for more than 40 years and by Democrats since 1952. It was the only state to vote for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972.

Barack Obama's overreach on health care has plenty in common with Kevin Rudd's dogged pursuit of an emissions trading scheme. The Morgan Poll shows support for the ETS sliding from 50 per cent in August to 46 per cent last week, with disapproval growing from 24 per cent in August to 36 per cent in the most recent survey. If that trend-line continues, Obama's healthcare disaster could well be a mirror of Rudd's ETS nightmare in the coming months.

So Rudd will be dissecting the political earthquake that struck in Massachusetts and travelled all the way to the White House. While history says it is commonplace for the party that wins the White House to lose seats in the mid-term elections, Scott's win is still startling because Obama carried the Democrat stronghold in New England in 2008 with 62 per cent of the vote. As one pundit observed, the removal of street corner phone booths in Massachusetts robbed Republicans of the perfect venue for branch meetings (voters registered as Democrats outnumber those registered as Republicans by three to one).

When even the people of Cape Cod -- the home of left-liberal lion, Ted Kennedy -- turned away from Obama (11 of the 15 Cod towns voted overwhelmingly for the Republican Brown), it echoes the drubbing delivered to John Howard in his own seat of Bennelong in 2007. There is no more powerful way to tell leaders to

"listen up". The question is whether the Rudd government will learn the right lessons from its American left-liberal cousins. Brown campaigned against Obama's radical healthcare reform, reflecting unease among voters that Obamacare is too costly and burdensome. As the Wall Street Journal reported, in April 26 per cent of Americans said the health plan was a bad idea. By January, opposition rose to 46 per cent with only 33 per cent supporting Obama's reforms. And the rebuke from voters in Massachusetts is not a case of "only in America."

It can happen anywhere. It can happen in Australia. Just as US Democrat leaders failed to explain a convoluted health policy that

raised legitimate concerns about higher taxes, neither Rudd nor his Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, have explained the real costs of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to the Australian people. In the US, as Mickey Edwards wrote in The Atlantic last week, many Democrats treated opposition to health care as the "bleating of dumb rednecks, nasty, uncaring and too stupid to even be able to read the bills." The Rudd government has done the same, treating opponents and critics as dumb nut climate change deniers. That "we know better than you" arrogance will not go down well with those working-class families who voted for Rudd and now have legitimate concerns about the CPRS. Yet just as the Obama administration pushed ahead in the face of mounting opposition, Rudd is doing the same.

His problem is the political cycle is turning against man-made global warming. Daily, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is losing credibility. Just this past week, it has been

rocked by its own unsubstantiated claims that Himalayan glaciers would very likely nearly disappear by 2035. While the barracking Sydney Morning Herald has been busy making excuses for the IPCC, its reputation is in tatters. The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, used bogus IPCC claims of Himalayan catastrophe to secure grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for his Energy and Resources Institute. And then came reports on Monday that the IPCC used more shoddy research to link the rise in natural disasters to global warming.

In November, Rudd relied on this sloppy "science" saying "we will feel the effects of climate change fastest and hardest and therefore we must act this week" to enact the CPRS. If Rudd's reliance on alarmism did not work in that week in November, it has even less chance of working now. The Copenhagen conference was a failure. No global agreement emerged. After the Senate pasting in Massachusetts, US Democrats won't be wasting much political capital on a cap and trade system. Against that background, Australian voters are entitled to be even more sceptical about alarmist predictions of global warming and the unnecessary costs of the CPRS on the Australian economy.

The Massachusetts election should teach Rudd to beware of pushing ahead with an unpopular policy. He would also do well to ignore Obama's reaction. Trying to distract voters and cheered on by the left-wing media, the US President has decided to pivot left with economic populism. Obama is

busily bashing the banks with new taxes that will drive down profits. It may be a hit with voters but it's a short-term one. When profits fall, the customer suffers.

Lurching to the Left is a curious response given that Obama's slap in the face in Massachusetts came from independents, who sit smack-bang in the centre of the American polity: the same independents (think Rudd's working families) who ushered Obama into the White House barely a year ago. Better advice came from the Democrat Senator from Indiana, Evan Bayh. Head back to the centre, he told his Democrats leaders. Don't let the far-left of the Party impose their will on the rest of the country, he said. Good advice. And not just for Obama.

It will be political poison for the Rudd government to deal with the Greens, who have suggested a two-year interim tax ($23 a tonne for carbon emitted from July, rising to $24 in 2011-2012). If Rudd pivots left, he may find himself facing the same voter backlash that has greeted Obama.

There are, of course, plenty of differences between the political landscapes in the US and Australia. The American people have been rocked by rising unemployment, soaring deficits, bank bailouts, sweetheart deals for union industries such as car manufacturing, and most recently the President's radical health proposals that scream big government to a nation of individuals who are proudly anti-establishment.

To be sure, Obama has pursued a radical agenda while Rudd has, in the main, stuck to cautiously pedestrian policies. That said, Massachusetts is a powerful lesson that political hubris will be punished by the people.

Sooner, as was the case with Obama. Or later, as may be the case with Rudd and his CPRS. The question is whether Prime Ministerial hubris will prevent him from heeding that lesson.