Malcolm Turnbull’s speech on climate change science has been widely reported, but unfortunately largely in the predictable context of Liberal leadership murmurs. It’s well worth reading what Turnbull actually had to say, and you can do so here.
Turnbull made a strong case both for the absurdity of denialism and for the real stakes of the climate change debate. He compared climate change skepticism to a pub conversation where smoking is alleged to be harmless because Uncle Ernie puffed like the proverbial chimney and lived to be 95:
And this is actually — this war on science and on scientists which is being conducted is much worse than the case of person who ignores his doctor’s advice and follows the advice of his friend down the pub, drawing on the life experience of the fortunate Uncle Ernie.
Because the consequences of getting our response to climate change wrong will not likely be felt too severely by us, or at least not most of us, but will be felt painfully and cruelly by the generations ahead of us. And the people in the world who will suffer the most cruelly will be the poorest and the people who have contributed the least to the problem. There is an enormous injustice here. When people try and suggest to you that climate change is not a moral issue, they are wrong. It is an intensely moral issue raising grave moral issues.
Those of us who do not believe the CSIRO is part of an international Green conspiracy to undermine Western civilisation or do not believe that leading scientists like Will Steffen are subversives should not be afraid to speak out, and loudly, on behalf of our scientists and our science. We must not allow ourselves to be deluded on this issue.
Interestingly, Essential Research found this week, in a question commissioned by Channel Ten, that 46% of respondents are more concerned than they were two years ago about the environmental effects of global warming.
At the same time, of course, public opinion has moved strongly against carbon pricing, or at least against the Gillard government’s carbon price plan. (It would be interesting to see if there were more support for carbon pricing in the abstract, though in practice hard to separate that out from the actual carbon tax proposals on the table).
What accounts for this?
It is largely a matter, I’d suggest, of communications errors from the government (and to a lesser degree from other advocates of carbon pricing). It’s not just the litany of reasons why Julia Gillard has a trust problem (most of which are traceable back to the manner of her ascension to the top job). It goes deeper than that.
Three fundamental strategic errors have been made.
The first was to switch the conversation away from the deleterious effects of global warming. Perhaps this was a response to the noise of the so-called ‘debate on the science’. But it’s had the effect of sundering measures to mitigate climate change from the issue itself. Turnbull, rightly, talks about the moral challenges of climate change. Labor, since Kevin Rudd dropped the ball, is unable to.
A related error is to be reactive and frame the plan in terms of economic reform. This stems from the usual round of criticism from newspapers and commentators that the Labor government pales into insignificance compared to Hawke and Keating. But playing the game in terms of tax feeds the critique. So, when the Clean Energy Future detail was released, everyone rushed to the online calculator to see if they’d be ‘better off’ or ‘worse off’. It became all about short term gain and pain, and reinforced the narrative that Labor was ignoring cost of living pressures.
Again, an own goal.
(Incidentally, it was very regrettable that more effort wasn’t made to make it clear that the modelling which produced the numbers about ‘cost to households’ made the assumption that there would be no changes to consumption patterns. Choosing cleaner energy, which will be able to be done off the grid as well as by installing solar panels or whatever, could well, and in fact should over time, reduce costs.)
And here’s the third error; another one where strategy has been shaped by being to reactive to the agenda of carbon pricing opponents. Releasing modelling, and highlighting it so much, renders the debate both abstract and static. Talk of % increases in employment or whatever pales against the putative reality of lost jobs (and the employment insecurity which drives those concerns). It would have been much better to communicate some concrete examples of people working in ‘Green Jobs’, to highlight the skills needed to re-equip workers and re-equip kids for prosperous and sustainable futures, and generally to shape a message which resonates with the everyday. And makes a contrast with a positive future and what lies ahead for us if nothing is done.
What to do? Turnbull has actually pointed the way. Whether Labor is or is not capable of taking a leaf out of his book is moot. But Labor is not the only force involved in the climate change and carbon price debates. Others should take heed.
Update: Cross-posted at The Drum.
Thank goodness Turnbull has got the message back onto the dangers that global warming pose to continued human habitation of this planet.
As many conservative women won’t vote for Captain Catholic perhaps Malcolm is preparing to re-apply for Liberal leadership or is he preparing to return to banking to make a motza on Emissions Trading?
I disagree – there’s also the big matter of News Limited’s continuing war on science. That doesn’t excuse any communication errors on the part of the government but it has created an environment where those errors are compounded enormously.
Mark, in terms of the public response to the Carbon price, you left out the effect of the media on the debate. The Murdoch press (and many in the ABC) have effectively turned many in the public against the Government (and the PM in particular) to the extent that I doubt that it would matter what was proposed, the response in the polls would still be negative. I dont think that its possible to blame the strength of anti government feeling purely on their own actions. This is not to suggest that Abbott is popular (he isnt) or that anybody likes his alternative CO2 reduction plan (everyone seems to know its nonsense). I’m consistently surprised just how unpopular the PM is, especially among women – and for the most part they are unable to give coherent reasons why they dislike her so much – the manner of her succession gets surprisingly little mention, less in fact, than the colour of her hair.
@2 and 3, the effect of the media on the debate has to be taken as a given. So any communications strategy has to be able to counter that, without engaging in it, and getting dragged down into the morass by accepting the terms in which it’s framed.
As to Turnbull, me thinks he’s reapplying for the job as leader. I dont think Malcolm could stomach the thought of Abbott being PM, or worse having to work under him as a Minister if he was.
The basic problem Gillard has, as I said, was the way she became PM (and the way she failed to articulate a convincing position during the election campaign almost immediately following). Talk about “illegitimacy” and the cut through of Abbott’s argument that she’s a liar are a direct reflection of the perception that she seized power for no good reason, out of overweening ambition. The research indicates female voters particularly hold the view that the move against KRudd was wrong, and the hung parliament adds to a feeling that she “hasn’t been elected”.
I think she’s pretty much finished. It’s gone beyond the point where I think it’s likely that she’ll be able to overcome some confounding and deeply entrenched negatives.
Gender bias is also part of all this.
But, yet, the carbon price has to be sold.
Mark, do you think that women are harder on her than men? I have a suspicion thats the case, but I dont think the polling reflects it. I know they dont like Abbott either, and that shows in the polling.
Mark
You ignore the elephant in the room and that is that no one, including true believers in AGW like Turnbull or even yourself can make a valid claim that this Tax regime will do anything to change the climate in any meaningful way.
Frankly unless the general public can see some actual benefit for all of the social and economic upheaval that this Tax will produce they are just never going to support it.
I think that the public are never going to warm to this futile scheme and the government and the parties and individuals like Turnbull who continue to promote it are just buying themselves a one way ticket to the political wilderness.
No, the polling doesn’t reflect that, Michael – it shows she’s lost more ground, and lost it more quickly among men:
http://resources.news.com.au/files/2011/07/01/1226085/238103-110701-newspoll.pdf
The reports of qualitative research around seem to suggest that the concern about the way she became leader is stronger against women, so that might be a bigger factor in the smaller decline in the female vote for Labor.
Mark do you think Gillard will lead Labor to the next election? I have heard Simon Crean mentioned lately?
@ 8
Absolutely nobody from the Prime Minister down is, was or has claimed that the CEF scheme will change the climate. Action on climate change revolves around attempting to slow the heating of the planet to reduce the chances of catastrophic climate change. This is the problem with the carbon price debate. Opponents of pricing either do not understand or openly misconstrue the science.
I see no possibilty of anyone other than Gillard leading Labor to the next election. MPs will know that if they simply put their heads down and work hard over the next two years, they have a chance of at least keeping the Labor Party alive post-2013. Another backflip on climate change and the deposing of a second Prime Minister in under three years would wipe Labor off the electoral map permanently.
billie, Simon Crean would be political suicide.
The problem is that the rest of the world is busy trying to fix their broken economies and have no time to spend on the global climate problem.
In some sense the state of some major international economies is more of a political problem than global warming. I don’t mean that in an absolute way, but the response to the GFC, or rather the lack of a response, seems to indicate that the liberal democratic political systems of nations like the US, UK, etc are defect.
In Australia we see the same kind of thing with the pandering to mining companies and private interests.
Fact is that the percentage of the economy going to wages has decreased over the last 20+ years by almost 10%. The money has been disproportionately taken from the low income earners of the society and given to “investors”, who have lost it speculating in financial markets. Which really means, that the money has ended up in the hands of the bankers.
National politicians are somewhat helpless in this situation and so politics becomes a game, characterised by dramatic effects and superficiality.
The European, Japanese and the US financial crises are far from over and they are far from being resolved.
From Turnbull’s speech:
I remember him saying something similar when Environment Minister in the Howard Government. He understands the implications of the science like no other politician in the major parties, feels it in his gut and is particularly brave and clear-eyed about the implications for the coal industry. What he says about that is incompatible with the simplistic lies put forward by Abbott.
So I very much welcome a return to discussing the reasons for the the whole CEP and agree with your identification of this as a Labor error.
Agree with the other two errors, BTW.
Mark,
It seems to me that telling Australians that we need to decarbonise is as palatable as telling an obese person that they need to lose weight.
But it’s worse than that. Gillard is forcing us onto a diet.
It’s a tough sell.
It’s a tough sell, for sure, but it hasn’t been a clever one. To date.
I think the Simon Crean thing is nonsense. The only way Julia Gillard will cease to be PM, if the Labor party still has and wants to have a majority in the House of Representatives, is if she steps down. I don’t see that happening.
The Crean talk, as Sir Henry says on another thread, emanates from a cabal of commentators – Bolt, Akerman and now Pearson. It’s not impossible that there might be one or two deluded Labor MPs fueling it, but that would be it, I would think.
It’s quite a bizarre scenario.
I think Labor does have problems with both messenger and message. But, get the latter right, and it might improve perceptions of the former. Or not. But they don’t have a lot of good options.
I would reiterate that selling the carbon price is a task for more people than the government.
The carbon pricing plan might not be very popular in the opinion polls, but there has been very little discussion of the policy detail. This is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it is quite well designed in terms of being able to cost effectively address climate change as well as having good governance arrangements. Secondly, I doubt that Tony Abbott is really across the policy. If he got asked a few technical questions he could be in a lot of trouble. This could lead to a situation similar to Abbott’s ‘I am not a tech head’ moment during the last election campaign.
Ummm…. if it’s ALP policy to put a price on carbon, and Turnbull, of all the current crop of politicians, is doing the best job trying to make people think, then the solution is obvious… get Malcolm T to defect by offering him the leadership in the house), solve the problem of dangerous by-elections …
Well, Malcolm /is/ probably the second preference for PM of most ALP-leaning voters.
It’s ridiculous, I know, … but … Cheryl Kernot and all…
Besides, Malcolm doesn’t need to actually join the ALP to be PM any more than the Green or Indies. He’s just got to have to get support on the floor of the house, be able to form a coalition. And he, a party of one, could act as the major partner.
It’s probably the best chance the ALP has got to keep Tony out, and given the power in Lib back rooms, it’s probably the best chance Malcolm will get to get in.
Yes… silly idea… but delicious.
Are there any ALP insiders reading here?
Who is concocting the ALP strategy at the moment? Criticism seems to be coming from all directions but I always wonder if the NSW Right rump still influences decisions.
Various commentators have been wondering in the media about where the current campaigns are coming from and I can see why.
@4 Mark, I think you’re right, the ALP hasn’t taken the rest of the media context into consideration when selling the package (not just the tax). Tony Abbott’s message is ‘great big new tax on everything’ which is simple and has a lot of cut through. Plus, the tax announcement without any detail basically gave everyone the chance to project their worst fears onto the policy.
Also, Gillard introducing the tax this term has allowed her to be framed as a liar.
I think they should have had one main goal: tax reform. Gillard could have done what Howard did with the GST in that she could have taxed households directly but at the same time remove all other carbon abatement measures (soil carbon, solar subsidies, green car program etc). The spending cuts could have paid for some small tax cuts.
They could have even gone further and give most or all of the revenue collected to the states as incentive to phase out their own inefficient direct action measures. Access to another consumption tax would probably buy some political support from State Premiers including some Liberal ones.
Then just go out and sell, sell, sell how its making the tax (and spending) system more efficient.
The question is, why wasn’t this trumpeted as “Senior Liberal breaks ranks wilth Abbott”?
It is a two-tier discursive field, and Turnbull knows that whatever he says will be ignored by the tabloid media.
I was impressed with Turnbull- less phony, I think he is actually persuaded as to enviro. I agree with Mark that the bias against Julia Gillard by sexist and reactionary tabloid msm is grievous, she’s starting to fight back, but does she have time and adequate support.
Abbott is so negative, he is closer to the trog labor right than some in his own party, whereas Gillard andTurbull at least are in sync with the times and its issues, if overwhelmed or isolated in being able to respond.
But Chumpai – the ‘tax reform’ isn’t the main point of an ETS. The ETS is.
Why tax households when you can charge the emitters directly? It’s much easier to administer that way.
@22, in the context of this thread, (in hindsight) I was saying that Gillard should have simplified her message.
You say the tax is the point of the tax… However, the message is confused, Gillard says we need to ‘price carbon’.
Why do we need it though? We need it to stop climate change (but it won’t affect the temperature), we’re going to tax polluters (but then we’re going to compensate them), we’re not going to tax individuals (but we’re going to reform the tax system to help them) etc. There’s no easily identifiable raison d’etre. Added to all this I’m sure plenty of people are wondering whether it was done to appease the Greens or plug a hole in the budget (both legitimate reasons). IMO its a mess of motivations.
With the GST it was to eleminate inefficient state taxes, my point is tax reform (and consolodating all green programs from an implied price to an acutal price) could be the primary reason for having the tax. Climate change could be a secondary ‘feel good’ objective (and maybe reduced particulates as noted in another thread)?
Admittedly Jess, my idead of taxing households might be a flawed as household electricity bills don’t include all companies but I guess you could extend it to every electricity bill. That said, is taxing the top 500 easier? Couldn’t you just get the companies to add the tax to their bill and pass on the receipts?
I & U @14 The government isn’t forcing us onto a diet. As individuals it’s giving us additional incentives to diet, and commercially it’s giving suppliers incentives to reduce their fat content. For those of us on over $80k there’s a tiny bit of stick in the incentives, for people under that income it’s all carrot.
Have to agree on Turnbull, but a sensible and intelligent person in the Liberal party? They couldn’t possibly accept that. And as PM he might be equally at risk of schoolmasterly lecturing as Gillard is accused of being. Admittedly as a male he might be forgiven this more. And he must be almost as rich as Cate.
Mark, I don’t disagree with the three criticisms of Labor’s selling of climate action that you raise, but I think it’s naive to see them as disconnected from the nature of the reform being proposed.
It’s pretty clear, for example, that Gillard selling this as the next stage of market reform in Australia is not just an artefact of her recent (reactive) re-embrace of neoliberalism, but was the raison d’etre of looking to market solutions to the climate problem. To be palatable to the capitalist class, rather than primarily actually effective, it always had to be designed with their interests up front, of course tied up in neoliberal ideology about markets somehow being able to deal with a problem like this. As the Piping Shrike commented yesterday, “As a means to deal with climate change the ETS is just silly since it relies on letting the market decide when, as we know, the market is incapable of making a decision about anything.”
To keep the ruling class happy this was probably the most palatable political option, but as a policy to sell most people after the lived experience of the last 30 years of market reforms… hmm. Isn’t that the real problem here, that the gap between elite and popular opinion has grown massively over that time? By pursuing an elite policy Gillard has left the door wide open for Abbott’s populism, despite the fact the electorate seems (sanely) pretty unconvinced about him.
Turnbull nailed the issue in the second para in your extract, Mark. That should be enough reality to win a thinking public to accept the need for action. But so also should some simple but real examples of the impact of the carbon price on common business classes demonstrate that the Carbon Price is in fact a minimal impost and likely to only create the smallest of impact ripples on the Australian economy.
Not a single commentator or reporter that I have heard or read has demonstrated the ability to calculate the cost of the Carbon Price on the cost or electricity, let alone be able to do the simple calculation of how that impacts on business gross turnover. So they are locked into the rhetorical debate with its massive capacity for distortion, exactly as Turnbull argues.
In the coffee queue at the netball yesterday I found myself talking to several guys involved with banking. It took just a few sentences to demonstrate conclusively that for my business the increase in the cost of electricity to my business would be about 0.1%, and that I am not going to adjust the pricing of my product for such a low cost change, and that most small businesses will be equally unaffected. The most important benefit of the compensation part of the policy is that it minimises wage pressures during the Carbon Price implimentation period and, again, most business will not feel any impact caused by household cost increases as a result of the Carbon Price, nullifying wage pressure as reason to adjust product prices.
Just a few facts should have been sufficient to prevent this massive political damage. I argue that Julia Gillard should have partnered with Christine Milne far more comprehensively to deliver this policy. Gillard should have used her ability to capture camera time to co present the essentail details, as Milne has by far the best understanding of the substance of the entire debate and has a highly respected ability to slice through inflamed rhetorical argument to reveal the reality of these issues.
I don’t know whether ego prevented this approach from happening but I see an opportunity lost here. I do not believe that Labour’s independence would have been damaged by such a joint presentation any more than it already is from their coalition with the Greens in the need to form government. Gillard does not have the dexterity with technical detail that Milne has and so was forced to argue the case for Carbon Price on the basis of concept, which drives the argument right back into the path of rhetoric, the territory where Abbott’s style of debate based on predudice, inuendo, fear and doubt has his only strength. But also the territory where Turnbull is operating, the main reason why his very solid and perceptive arguments will have little impact
Several thoughts on a “thinking public”.
The take away message from Rove McManus’ “So you think your smarter than a fifth grader” is that for most people, life beyond fifth grade invloves a steady building of person’s body of knowledge consequtive with a narrowing of their field of knowledge. In other words we become specialised in order to be best prepared to survive well in our specific situational environment. Some people try to limit this isolation from the broad body of knowledge by reading the Sydney Morning Herald, or the Telegraph, but this in itself sets in a narrowing of another kind as News media seek to capture their patrons into an ideology driven by a narrow field of ideologues.
So when we, the “public”, are faced with decisions which carry a “you definitely need to know this” tag such as Global Warming, Climate Change, Species Decline, Resource Depletion, and Carbon Pricing, we need help with the assimilation as this all requires a sudden broadening of our knowledge base. So we need some “hints”, we need the occaisional “peek” at the answers, we even need to be able to “tweet a friend”.
What we don’t need is the megamouth distraction of the kind that the Coalition is hell bent on delivering. But as that is part of the game, the real players need to employ the very best of “reality” commentators.
Paul @25,
“The government isn’t forcing us onto a diet. As individuals it’s giving us additional incentives to diet…”
My analogy was comparing Australians collectively to an obese person, so in that sense “Australia” is being put on a diet of lower carbon (ignoring international trading of carbon permits).
But the point I was trying to make was the emotional tension that arises when ones know that one has to do something but simply doesn’t want to do it.
Is that “cognitive dissonance” or something?
@Chumpai – there were proposals for a consumption based carbon tax, but the issue here is that it doesn’t really capture the international dimension of carbon emissions. Well, one of the issues.
@Dr_Tad, there may well be something in that about the distance between public opinion and neo-liberal reform, but the quote from Piping Shrike is a silly one. It’s not the case that ‘markets’ always work in the same way, and markets for carbon permits will not be speculative ones, which is what I think is implied.
Whether there end up being derivative markets around the carbon price is another issue.
Mark, I think Piping Shrike is right in general. It’s not about markets being speculative or not — there are, as you say, different kinds of markets. But markets cannot make political decisions (which is what a decision for serious climate action has to be) except in the sense that politics is already subordinate to capital accumulation.
Maybe I’ve been guilty of this in my own writings, but “markets” have been reified too much in Left discourse in the neoliberal era. We need to dig underneath them to think about the social relations really at play. The big question for us re: climate is “how do we get the outcomes we need?” To rely primarily on the mechanism of capital accumulation, which is anarchic on a society-wide level, is an abrogation of that kind of politics in the service of certain interests.
The carbon tax/future ETS is primarily a market reform to further capital accumulation in the context of the threat climate change poses to that accumulation. Its creators think that it will have positive spin-offs in terms of the climate, but to see that as their primary aim would be mistaken.
BTW, all I’m advocating is state capitalism in the service of human/ecological need. We can have a chat about revolution some other day.
If Malcolm Turnbull was from the other side of politics News Limited and their followers at their ABC would be harking back to Godwin Gretch every day of every week until the next election.
That’s the way it is for Labor in the MSM. Ignore the Policy and play the man or woman. And especially the woman Prime Minister.
@Dr_Tad, yes, I think there’s been too much reification!
It is true that market mechanisms are designed to support capital accumulation – that’s almost tautologically true (except where markets exist in non-capitalist societies, but we don’t live in one). But you can almost take that as a given in a neo-liberal polity, and I’m not at all sure that you’re right about a lack of motivation among the designers of this one to do something to ameliorate emissions.
Dr Tad, sorry to be a bit thick here, but are you really claiming that markets don’t make decisions?
There’s plenty of scope for arguing that the market is the wrong mechanism for making a particular decision, or that the decision-making role of markets in our society should be dramatically scaled back.
But I would have thought that it was obvious that markets are perfectly capable of making some pretty big decisions all the time. Sure, many of them don’t align with your preferences (or mine) but they sure as hell make them.
I find a lot of the left critique of the current plan a bit reactive and simplistic eg “its a market, bad”.
Firstly, its not a market at all – its a straightup, old fashioned piece of state regulation, making industy pay its own pollution costs throught a state-imposed levy, and redistributing the gains: in part as compo to punters, in part to trade exposed industry, but also as direct investment in renewable technology.
When it *does* become a market in a few years time, it will obviously create some opprtunities for spivdom – but among those will be clear disincentives for investment in coal fired electricity, clear incentives for renewable energy instead. A social market in the sense that scarcity will be artifically imposed the state as an emissions cap. Therein lies the politics – and the key decision-making that ultimately remains with the state.
And, for what it’s worth, Dr. Tad, I think you’re simply mistaken on the effects of the carbon price/future ETS. It will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and in the short term it will do so primarily at the expense of the richest fraction of the population.
Yes, it does so in a manner that endorses capitalism. But, frankly, the final victory over capitalism can wait until after we’ve stopped the planet cooking itself.
Yep, Rob, and Lefty E, I agree with those observations.
All these comments have been legitimate replies to Dr_Tad, but I think that the discussion is a little off topic. The thread is supposed to be about the Labor government’s communications strategy, and the relevance of Turnbull’s intervention.
A large part of the power of the policy is in the cap together with the long term goals (80% reductions by 2050). Someone contemplating building a power station with a 40 year life must take account of these aspects of the policy.
Turnbull (rightfully IMHO) has upped the ante to 100%.
If Gillard wants to talk the science, she has to convince people that such reductions are necessary, that it requires a transformation of the economy, that it won’t involve us running around in hair shirts and that Australia has probably the best renewable energy prospects in the world with plentiful sun, wind, hot rocks, waves and tides. It doesn’t mean an energy scarce future.
The question is whether all that is just too complex against a cynical “toxic tax on everything” successfully sloganeering Opposition leader
Yep, fair enough Mark.
Back on-topic, I think while Turnbull’s argument is one that the Labor Party hasn’t made enough, not enough emphasis has been placed on the idea that Australia and the wider world, is capable of responding to tough problems when we try hard enough.
Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the arguments from Tony Abbott is the idea that if something looks difficult, we shouldn’t even try.
I have a hard time with the idea that this is consistent with the way Australians would like to see themselves.
Rob, I think Abbott has been appealing to the strain of pessimism in the collective Australian psyche. It’s as if we have to rely on ‘the world’ for our living (resources, international capital, China, etc) and we couldn’t possibly do anything that might rock the boat, let alone get above our station. There’s something linked in all this to the traditionally supine posture of Australian conservatism.
Agree Mark – surprised in this context that the ALP hasnt made more of the UK Tories upping the ante on emission reductions.
Sorry, but I see no real difference between what Malcom says, and what Julia Gillard says here
The facts are clear, so we must act to save the planet
Probably the major difference is the way it is reported in the media, and ‘gravitas’ that is given to each.
Is the PM’s speech so bad? Does she not cover the relevant topics?
Click on the tag at the bottom of the article, and there is a generous list of what I read as quite good arguments putting their case forward
Sorry, but I don’t think that Labors message is that poor or conveyed that poorly. It is more a case that our media does not convey it accurately, and continue to conflate their arguments, and generally dismiss them with the ‘she lied’ meme, or with lies of their own, even from our publicly funded broadcaster.
http://cafewhispers.wordpress.com/archived/media-watch-ii/#comment-19918
How Labor can combat this, I don’t know. But I think you criticism of Labor is misplaced. Look instead to the media responsible for passing that message on, and note the lens through which they present it.
…as in, that still has the ability to signal to certain older conservatives that change is now ok: the Brits say jump, you forelock-tugging douchebags, so hop to it and quit yer yappin.
The shift to the US has diminished some of that impact, its true.
Mark Bahnisch said:
Ahh, the old “we have to get out there and sell this better” line. No doubt its part of that, anyone looking at the government’s ads on carbon tax can’t help but hear the ringing in their tin ears. And a new tax is always a hard sell.
In general Gillard’s carbon tax is a policy improvement on Turnbull-Rudd but a political set-back.
No doubt Gillard-ALP has a legitimacy problem – stabbed her boss in the back to get the top job, relied on Green preferences for ALP seats and the votes independent members in conservative electorates to scrape together a bare majority in the HoR.
I strongly suspect that is a quirk in political culture that is queering the ALP’s carbon pitch. There general public follows a tactical Machiavellian “cross-wired” line on big issues. They tend to prefer the ideologically opposed party to put in place large scale economic reforms, to ensure that these reforms are not carried out at the hands of ideologues. ie Nixon’s “Nixon-to-China”, Clinton’s “end-welfare-as-we-know-it”.
Thus the AUS public preferred the Hawke-ALP to put in place reduced economic regulation, tarrifs etc. And they preferred the Howard-LNP to put in place higher taxation – such as a GST or an ETS and gun-control. (The GST was always a bridge too far for Keating, no matter how much he was secretly in love with the idea.)
The general public don’t like the idea of Greenie extremists running ecological policy, or any other policy for that matter. No one outside the Left likes the Greens, they stink to high heaven of moral sanctimony, without the saving grace of religious piety. And Australians don’t like ideologues, even – or especially – well-meaning, scientifically validated ideologues.
Thus the ALP is having difficulty selling the ETS (or CPRS or CST or whatever they are calling it now). I expected the LNP would have much less trouble in clinching the deal. No one made much of a fuss when Howard unveiled his late ETS.
Unfortunately since Minchin’s Martyrdom Operation that option has now been closed off. So the real problem is climate denialism in the LNP – which is the target identified by the always sensible Malcolm Turnbull.
The key to getting a carbon tax up is to make Turnbull the leader of the LNP in the next year. Or for Gillard to win the next election. At the moment both of these bets look long odds, although I would tend to favour a shortening of odds on Gillard if and when the electorate see the carbon tax does not cause the sky to fall in.
In general, in politics, and in love, it is best to just do it and save the explanations for afterwards. If the policy works at the political level then the explanations will be for the historians. If the policy fails at a political level then at least you tried and failed rather than not tried at all.
Just do it.
Back on topic, then, isn’t the problem that the reform is seen by its salespeople as what it is… the next big neoliberal reform for Australia? Should they be lying harder about why they think they’re doing it?
I’ll pay that Mark. But I’d be tempted to explicitly draw some WWII parallels.
Australia found itself in a very difficult situation, against an existential threat it could not face alone.
As well as a massive military and industrial mobilization and well-documented military heroics in battlefields near and far, Australia’s politicians skilfully negotiated alliance politics to ensure our own interests were not lost in the broader war effort.
For sure, Rob, there’s a flipside to it… It’s a bit like Manning Clark’s famous distinction between the enlargers and the straighteners and the punishers that Keating adopted with relish.
Im with Jack. Just do it. That’ll take 90% of the fear factor out – and leave one-trick Abbott with the much harder task of whipping up hysteria about a fait d’accomplit.
If Abbott does become PM – how long would he last?
The reason the Greens have suffered proportionately less than the ALP is that they have always framed it as a climate action thing. It obscures their effective commitment to market reforms in this scenario (which is also disguised by their other anti-neoliberal stances).
Right from the start the major parties have framed this debate through how to keep capitalism healthy, which is where Robert’s comment about “the final victory over capitalism can wait until after we’ve stopped the planet cooking itself” misses the point in terms of the current politics. I’m not arguing for a final victory over capitalism but I am arguing against a policy that looks and smells like just another round of economic rationalism.
Supporters of the carbon tax/ETS need to make clear why they think it wouldn’t be taken that way when Swan is saying things like that the “only way to drive investment in [clean-energy] technology is to put a price on pollution. Only a market mechanism does the job.” It just strikes me as naive to imagine people would be so dumb as to lap this up given what market-based politics has meant in Australia for the last 30 years.
We’re back where we started, Dr_Tad, because “market-based politics” is probably too broad a category. A lot of what goes under the rubric of neo-liberal governance is far from being market based, and indeed it’s something of an ideological myth that neo-liberals themselves promote (and their critics fall for) that it’s about markets. But I fail to see how this discussion, again, is germane to the topic!
Mark, I think you’re mincing words because again I just made the point that if the people selling the reform are banging on using the same terminology — “markets”, “economic reform” — that is widely recognised as the code for more economic rationalism, then they shouldn’t be surprised that people reject it.
Surely that is very germane to the selling of this policy, whatever you think of its merits. Why is that so hard to grasp — unless maybe you think these things are as popular among the electorate as they are among mainstream progressive commentators (from George Megalogenis to Ben Eltham)?
Update: Cross-posted at The Drum.
the modelling which produced the numbers about ‘cost to households’ made the assumption that there would be no changes to consumption patterns
I think it’s regrettable that modelling made such an assumption in the first place. Why do the people who generate models make such boneheaded assumptions?
I thought the whole point of carbon pricing was to get people to change their patterns of consumption. Part of that involves the price of fossil-fuel based energy to go up. As we mainly consume coal and petroleum one result of a price spike would be to consume less either thru austerity or efficiency.
Malcolm Turnbull is very lonely on his side of politics when the warmening is discussed.
It just strikes me as naive to imagine people would be so dumb as to lap this up given what market-based politics has meant in Australia for the last 30 years.
The longest boom in our history? Phones that take less than three weeks to get connected? Domestic flights that don’t cost a million dollars?
What technique would be superior to this neo-liberal policy in disguise? I’m curious.
I’m not arguing for a final victory over capitalism
You’re no longer a Marxist?