Larvatus Prodeo

dk.au’s quite right that from a policy angle, the ETS Green Paper is highly problematic. In the short term, politically, obviously what Kevin Rudd is doing is stealing Malcolm Turnbull’s clothes on petrol, adopting his proposal of an excise cut. This snookers the Libs on petrol, but then, they were hardly getting any political traction on that issue anyway. It’s a missed opportunity in more senses than one – it plays to the populist narrative and avoids the much more important task of communicating why an ETS – and a rigorous ETS – is necessary. You can’t do short term populism and long term policy at the same time. Ross Garnaut made that point effectively last week. The government might have done well to take note.

More broadly, I think the context for this is that Labor is looking to cut the Greens out of the Senate equation on emissions trading. I said a while ago that I thought the Turnbull/Hunt position reflected the weights being put on the Liberals by business to go with an ETS, and become Labor’s negotiating partner in the Senate. Penny Wong and Kevin Rudd’s equivocation over the starting date and Malcolm Turnbull’s 2011/2012 position – along with all the noise from business lobbies – also suggests a deal might be cut. It would be over Brendan Nelson’s dead political body, but that’s hardly an impediment. This also doesn’t bode at all well for responsible policy making.

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