Although he tried to put the best face on it, Malcolm Turnbull could barely paper over the cracks in the Liberal Party’s stance on an emissions trading scheme on Lateline tonight. Turnbull states that the Liberals are maintaining their policy position prior to the 2007 election - the introduction of an ETS by 2012 at the latest, and no intention of tying its introduction to any commitments by developing countries. His former leader, John Howard, appeared to be happily trashing what he avowed last year, gleefully reliving the days of non-core promises, and the current leader, Brendan Nelson, has tied himself up in complete gobbledygook but left the strong impression that he opposes an ETS until after international agreement is reached.
In Crikey today, Bernard Keane characterises the Liberal shenanigans as a tussle between Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull on one hand and denialist-in-chief and hard rightist Nick Minchin on the other.
Hunt, while resisting the opportunity to comment on what other shadow ministers have been saying, also stressed that he and Malcolm Turnbull are running the Coalition’s ETS policy. Yes, he admitted, Nick Minchin — who appears to have licence to comment on any issue that takes his fancy – has a different view on climate change and an ETS. But it’s his and Malcolm’s show, and they’re both absolutely committed to addressing the historical challenge of climate change, through an ETS and supporting measures such as energy efficiency and alternative energy technologies.
Turnbull demonstrated tonight that it would be possible to gain some political traction on the issue, while not dissing the aims of the policy itself. It’s important to recognise that Nelson is not only trashing bi-partisanship on this most important issue, but also demonstrating the choice the Liberal Party faces - responsibility and a contemporary posture, or blatant irresponsibility and doing enormous damage in the interests only of short-term poll movements and the cheers of the denialist punditariat. Much more hangs on that choice than the identity of the next Liberal leader.
Sure they’re sitting on the fence - that’s one of the very, very, few luxuries of opposition.
But they’d better watch out for splinters like the G8 announcement, which leaves them stranded along with Andrew Bolt on a rapidly melting iceberg.
Hmm. Nick Minchin for leader!
Merc, I think they’d be much better off off the fence. Turnbull had a reasonable line of attack on Rudd, not one I agree with, but one that was politically plausible and well articulated. Nelson, by contrast, speaks completely unintelligible babble which pushes Andrew Bolt’s buttons, but probably alienates the large number of coalition supporters and potential supporters who are convinced of the reality of AGW and the need to deal with it.
I guess none of the Lib’s platform will be resolved while Turnbull’s and Minchin’s forces are facing off against each other - all smiles on top, with guns drawn under the table. Which I guess was the point of your post.
Didn’t they learn anything from the pain of 1983-1996?
Mark, I think Julie Bishop was first out of the blocks with this one.
If Turnbull has now come out and supported her it becomes more than interesting!
Merc, the point of my post is also that I think Turnbull has a much greater ability to articulate a convincing political position than Nelson. And that - although this is an inference - if he prevails in all this, there might be some scope for bipartisanship on an ETS.
Brian, Turnbull mentioned that he, Nelson, Bishop and Hunt had discussed this. But Brendan might be saying whatever the last person in his ear said to him.
One possible scenario is that Nelson went one out on this, or in consultation with the likes of Minchin, but not Hunt and Turnbull. Possibly Nelson has been rounded up. Even if Nelson survives it does augur well for Rudd to get something through. The Libs might abstain in the Senate. Brown has been saying that he’s going to look for deeper cuts - 40% off 1990 by 2020, from memory.
I suspect there’s some weight being put on the Libs by business to negotiate with Rudd and cut the Greens out of the Senate equation.
This is the second Turnbull interview on Lateline, where I’ve thought - FFS - can we please just jump ahead and give Mal the guernsey and get on with it.
The last time he was on he admitted the coalition’s petrol excise cut was a just a political stunt and had no real merit. And tonight he was running away from Nelson’s pre-Howard AWG conversion position.
As much as Mal spins like a top when required, he doesn’t talk in soundbites, he has his own opinions that he argues in some depth and while I/we might disagree with him, at least his positions have some internal logic.
I’m willing to convince myself that Malcolm is smart enough to see the benefits of working with the Govt. in the national interest while still arguing the Liberal’s case.
Neither Rudd nor Turnbull are ‘natural’ politicians in the Howard mould, one’s a diplomat/technocrat and the other’s a businessman/lawyer.
And this isn’t a bad skill set when you want to put together a top-notch emissions trading scheme without it being fought over like five year old’s in the frigging school yard. He took my ball. He took it first. No I didn’t. Yes, you did. I did not. You did so.
The ballot was 45 to 42. Surely 2 coalition MP’s have changed their minds since November last.
Click fingers and jump ahead to this upcoming November when Malcolm is Opp. Leader and Barry Obama is the Prez. We’re just treading water in some weird transition period until then.
I don’t know enough about the party-room dynamics, but Turnbull might wait until Nelson has been demolished at an election to front up as the saviour for the Libs, which would giving him a lot more leeway to deal with a divided party.
This is speculative, but If he lost by two votes, it would be interesting to know who the marginal seat members voted for in the ballot, I know in NSW state politics despite the absymal performance in state elections most the moderates have survived as they are in the safer Liberal seats and have a buffer from the ensuing poor performance of Debnam(although a couple were rolled in the NorthWest and in the upper house), if this is true in Feds it might actually be in Turnbull’s interest for his party to lose more seats (10-20) at the next election, and for him to step forward as the uniter capable of winning those seats back at the next election, and then attempt to win government in the election after that. Only Christopher Pearson believes there will be a one-term government, and thats probably only a message produced to rally the discouraged troops. If Turnbull did this after an election defeat, the likes of Minchin and co would be firmly discredited.
Michelle Grattan this morning said the danger in the Lib’s confusion is that they become the focus of media attention, rather than the Government.
Turnbull was the only politician of either side who said before the election, and he said it multiple times, that we needed to decarbonise the grid completely by 2050. He appears to understand that the planet is in peril better than most.
I suspect the same thing myself. However it’s also worth remembering that there isn’t a united business position on climate change policy. The agenda and the interests of the fossil fuel lobby and the aluminium producers is not the same as that of the insurance companies, tourism, the renewable energy sector, etc.
It’s more likely to do with the fact that Pearson is a deluded fanatic and one-man echo chamber who believes his own bullshyte and can’t imagine that most other people don’t.
Almost three years ago (29 July 2005), the former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer was trumpeting the virtues of the agreement signed by the US, China, India, Australia, South Korea and Japan to “halve greenhouse gas emissions” by the end of the century through increased use of new technologies to reduce global warming. While it is true that there has been little action on this agreement sicne then, the Liberal-Nationals cannot claim that the world’s biggest emitters – China, the United States and India – have not recognised the problem without also saying that the 2005 agreement was a sham. If they maintain the agreement was not a sham, then there is no reason for Australia to delay starting an emissions trading scheme.
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Having missed Nelson’s bit and watching Turnbull on Lateline, you could be forgiven for thinking that Nelson had a back-of-the-envelope hallelujah moment fronting the cameras. That slow monotone drawl (is he suffering depression?) does not indicate he’s on top of internal leadership, and could easily be swayed - or worse, he might be letting internal fractures work themselves out while he waits for consensus or inspiration to strike. We knew Nelson was not fit to govern but this episode indicates something else going on in the Party which is troublesome indeed.
Against that background it was good to hear Turnbull. He seems to have done the hissyfitting over ‘Nelson’ and back at what he’s good at: getting on top of an issue to establish an agenda of his own. I agree that Turnbull appears to have what it takes to form a bipartisan approach on CC (and have added ideas for the electoral advantage of that somewhere here). Indeed, Turnbull brought up McCain and Obama with that hint of bipartisan light.
I guess one question here too is how did Turnbull get on Lateline? Was he doing a Rudd and putting himself up? The sole force of questioning was to determine the Coalition’s position on CC - not anything else about CC as has developed in recent days - so it does appear that Turnbull’s presence on the show was entirely political: for what (from Lateline’s point of view? to see if the cat will set loose into the pigeons?
In the recent activity on CC, to take a purely political line of questioning about internal positions indicates deep shitedness within the Coalition. Iceberg tip comes to mind.
And Minchin? Has he been losing it in recent years? Are we witnessing cynicism cut free from Howard’s pragmatism, almost to the point of giving up, and grown politically senile? He’s poisoned a few things (politically/publicly) for the LNP, since losing, and appears willful in how he goes about it, almost a touch of zealot there.
Good point, JohnL - they made a big fuss over the AP6 at the time, which definitely included China and India. Not that anyone was fooled, but you’d think the Libs would at least pretend it was real action so they’d have some credibility now. My understanding was that the USA let it stagnate because they didn’t get the trade deals they expected from it, although I can’t find any info on that right now.
Things aren’t going to get better in the LP until Minchin is gone.
He should either front the pack or be put on gardening leave.
His puppeteering from behind the scenes is not only obvious, but also woeful.
Banking on denialism seems like an odd choice. The odds seem slim.
Sitting on the fence (with a view to moving with the masses) as a means of seeking common ground with a large chunk of the population seems odd too - people are hardly going to look back, when the chips finally fall, and admit, even to themselves, that they too sat on the fence - peoples memories are much more black and what than that.
Because we missed the first decade of the debate, the experts are pretty much polarised at this point, and fence sitters basically are defining themselves as ‘non-experts’.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - a good 10 year old chess champ could run rings around them at the moment.
Can anyone spot an intellectually competent strategy amongst it all?
Turnbull’s comments last night other than fence sitting can be taken as political strategy. Obviously LNP can’t position themselves this early to have business rule them out. From their perspective it is a positive to want to ensure Australia can be competitive. This provides an excellent catalyst for Rudd to better hone his policies: arguably it’s healthy for Australia for the Libs to hold that position. At least for the interim.
What Turnbull is saying is that if Australia holds out until the big emitters commit, we can remain competitive (with in LNP mind a lesser damage) and then - this being the positive from their perspective - Australia can ramp up its response. I think it would be unfair to assume (at least for some) in the Libs a strong response is not desirable, but not now.
Notwithstanding the mash they’re presenting, behind the Libs’ strategy seems a belief that over time industrial innovation will help provide a catch up. This was ever Howard’s position for so long: that he would hold out, suffer least damage, while all the time expecting innovation to provide the solutions such that he’d only have to tinker at it. What he didn’t expect was that voices would raise sufficiently and swiftly to demand an answer.
Punditry gives the Libs two realistic positions: they can go the more populist least damaging path as a catch-all should Labor get it wrong, or they can merge their agreement into Labor’s and hope to make the issue politically invisible.
With that once intense opportunism now ghosting everything they do, CC strikes to the heart of who they are, what they are about, and how they go about it. This is quite something. Here is a longer term imperative, with roots preceding today’s dilemma, forcing them towards decision. And never before has the weight of big business been countered by the weight of public sentiment in that political decision.
So their strategy if it is anything at the moment is to make sure they don’t make a mistake. At some time though they will have to make a definitive choice about which path to take. That’s a crunch-time occasion and it is obviously bound up in leadership questions. Labor hasn’t cemented yet - their real CC response is some while away, which allows for all sorts of LNP mashing to take place.
To give them a thought of understanding, that’s the best we could expect from a deposed government so briefly in Opposition. Far from ideal of course.
But none of that suggests the Libs will do anything other than muddle through on a hotchpotch populist quibble for some years.
If Turnbull is elected boss, things might then pick up in terms of a better CC decision. But if he’s elected too early, that is, before CC is biting more strongly (other than as general sentiment in the suburbs or in the 4WDs), it could be a terrible waste of him as his traction in leadership (dubious, internally) is tied to public response, and CC is his thing. Too early, that traction isn’t there, and it’s party bickering all over again.
The Coalition really is in the shit at present. At a guess, what to look for would be Turnbull doing a Rudd and pushing forward with a profile from the bench. And then, of course, who and how in LNP counters that.
I with you there 100% Jo. With Turnbull leader we’d (hopefully) end up with a David Cameron vs Blair/Brown political dynamic with the major parties trying to out-green each other, and the denialists completely sidelined.
The Minchin/Robb/Nelson cancer needs to be excised from the Liberal Party.
Oh BTW, I suggest you all email Turnbull, Hunt and other sane members of the Liberal Party and ask them what the hell their position is on the ETS. They reply to me, they might reply to you.
Bernard Keane in today’s Crikey (excerpt):
Abbott confirms the rift. Obviously the misrepresentation was misrepresented.
Here’s that link.
I can’t believe it! The Libs have managed to split over the first substantial policy issue they’ve come up against as an opposition!
They could actually take some skin off Rudd with a good old-fashioned scare campaign on the costs of an ETS - if they were co-ordinated about it. Instead, they’re at each others’ throats.
They really didn’t learn anything from 1983-1996!
Well, no they couldn’t, Merc, because John Howard - however insincerely promised an ETS and also claimed that Australia under his leadership would be a major contributor to international action on climate change. So they’ve got the “Howard legacy” issue to contend with - even if - from the Dear Leader’s perspective - it was a convenient untruth.
Another problem for the Libs in taking shots at Rudd via a scare campaign is that it flies in the face of general public sentiment, entrenching the perspective they are out of touch. “What are you doing about it?” the people would say.
The public clearly want leadership on this. Whether that is partly to absolve themselves of lifestyle change (”you do it for me/us”) doesn’t alter the need for the Coalition to make a stand. However, I believe it’s politically unreasonable to expect the Coalition to lock in their albeit starting position until the Government has committed itself. Doing so leaves them totally vulnerable, without a mouthpiece, inflexible to any developments and probably left at the station. We do need an effective Opposition on this.
But we need them to get well first.
Michelle Grattan agrees with you, Mercurius, in a brief remark at the end of her summation:
Dunno. Two questions, given a quibble on details isn’t a scare campaign. Have the Libs enough credit in the bank on CC to mount a scare campaign? And how do you mount a scare campaign (which isn’t electable) while trying to look sound on similar ground at the same time?
Surely CC in public won’t disintegrate into Hanson-like shitfight? Hells bells. Perhaps one can never underestimate the power of that.