On this thread @ 22 Chris linked to an article in the Financial Review by Geoff Kitney and David Crowe saying that as Deputy Prime Minister to Rudd Gillard proposed:

seeking a bipartisan agreement with Mr Abbott on measures to achieve the goal of a 5 per cent reduction on the year 2000 level of Australia’s greenhouse emissions by 2020 without a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme.

That was on the say so of “a source with close knowledge of the matter”.

The dead tree version of the article makes it clear that the Gillard proposal was never seen by Cabinet. It was put to and rejected by other members of the Strategic Priories and Budget Committee of Cabinet (‘Gang of Four’) that is by Rudd, Swan and Tanner, and then by Penny Wong as environment minister. Also the proposed approach of not having an ETS was only to last while Abbott retained the leadership. According to that one source.

Gillard’s response was that she wouldn’t be talking about cabinet decisions but she flatly rejected the report.

I don’t talk about cabinet decisions, but I’m certainly happy to talk about my beliefs and in doing so I’ll make it very clear that those matters reported today have no veracity or truthfulness to them.

I’ve always believed that climate change is real. I’ve always believed that carbon pollution caused by human activity needs to be cut. I’ve always believed that in order to do that the most efficient way of doing it, the best way of doing it was by putting a price on carbon.

And I have never believed that this nation could reach its 5 per cent emissions reduction target other than by putting a price on carbon.

But

Of course it would be better if this big economic reform was bipartisan. Of course it would. I offered Tony Abbott a seat on the MPCCC.

Gillard always appears to have been mindful of the advantages of bipartisanship on the issue. In this post I reported on Pamela Williams’ article in the Fin Review (from more than one source):

Gillard spoke forcefully in favour of dropping the [CPRS] until a bipartisan position could be re-established with the Opposition.

That was clearly a different occasion with a dozen or more attending a crisis meeting called by Rudd.

It seems to me that Gillard’s statement that “those matters reported today have no veracity or truthfulness to them” leaves little wriggle room. But is it all that important if she did suggest that strategy? If so it doesn’t add up to an endorsement of Abbott’s policies. At the time the Gillard paper was supposedly written, did Abbott have an articulated policy? I can’t recall, but I doubt it. And there is no reason to assume that Abbott’s policies would have been adopted unchanged by Labor.

Meanwhile Jeremy Thompson’s write-up for ABC Online sees the affair wholly through the eyes of Tony Abbott. OK, it was written before the radio National PM item went to air. Will the ABC update it tomorrow? Possibly not as it will be yesterday’s news.

Rudd and Gillard

In last Friday’s Australian Financial Review Pamela Williams had an investigative piece on the conflict between Rudd and Gillard over the future strategy on the CPRS.

The image on the left shows the two in happier times, I’m not sure exactly when.

To recap the background briefly, the consensus position with the LNP forged through talks between Ian Macfarlane and Penny Wong disappeared when Abbott replaced Turnbull as leader late in 2009.

Rudd appears to have invested hope in the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 as a game-changer, and was probably wounded by its failure to come to a comprehensive agreement. The double dissolution option, favoured by the likes of Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib, was put to him in December 2009, but he seems to have spent the Christmas-New Year break in escapist activities, such as writing a children’s book about a mongrel dog which interrupted a party in the garden of The Lodge.

When he returned in the new year no-one seemed to be able to engage him on the issue of a double dissolution. He was always going to have trouble with the cross-bench with Senator Fielding on it, but The Greens say he wouldn’t seriously engage with them either on a suitable compromise.

Williams says:

By April 2010 Rudd had been under ferocious pressure from key party powerbrokers to delay plans to introduce a carbon tax by this year and a trading system by next year. But Rudd was desperate not to lose all credibility by walking away from a policy he had described as one of the great moral challenges of our time and which he had taken to the 2007 election.

She doesn’t identify the powerbrokers or say why they wanted a delay.

Then the SMH ran a story suggesting that the CPRS had been deferred indefinitely. On 27 April Rudd called an urgent war council to finalise a position. There were at least a dozen at the meeting, including Penny Wong, Arbib, Bitar and numerous staffers.

Rudd wanted to “announce that the ETS would wait until there was broad international agreement” and spoke forcefully to that end. Many views were put at the meeting, but Gillard spoke forcefully in favour of dropping the whole thing until a bipartisan position could be re-established with the Opposition. She felt that they had already taken political pain and such a move would take the politics out of it.

Arbib was of the view that waiting for international agreement would trash Rudd’s reputation any way. Whether this view was put to the meeting was not clear.

The odd thing is that Rudd apparently decided to do it his way. According to one who was there:

“He said he was not walking away. We would look at the next opportunity to reach an international agreement; and we would say that because the Coalition had stopped the passage of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, and the next international opportunity was some years away, then that was when we would proceed.”

Rudd blames himself for not explaining his position clearly. Amen to that!

But Arbib was also right, I think. His position was no significant advance on Gillard’s in terms of political credibility.

Williams says that neither has emerged with much authenticity or respect for their convictions.

I suspect Gillard, apart from lacking a sense of political strategy, has also failed to understand the nature of climate denialism and the effectiveness of forces who only need to induce doubt in the science.

Gillard’s notion of a citizens assembly as an exercise in deliberative democracy and consensus building may have been rational, but unfortunately it was too easily lampooned. I think here of Barry Jones and his ‘Knowledge Nation’ policy, which may have had a chance if Beazley hadn’t ticked off on using the famous spaghetti and meatballs diagram to promulgate it.

Gillard’s policy explanations and advocacy in recent times have not been a significant advance on Rudd’s if the Lowy Institute Poll (download from here) is any guide. According to the SMH 75% think the Government has done a poor job in addressing climate change.

Now only 41% support action even if it involves “significant costs”, down from 60% in 2008.

Another 40 per cent said climate change needed to be addressed but favoured gradual, low-cost action.

The survey was conducted from March 30 to April 14. John Connor of The Climate Institute said:

a recent Nielsen poll and an analysis of talkback radio comments by Media Monitors suggested a gradual turnaround in declining support for carbon pricing in recent weeks, after the Lowy Institute had gathered its data.

The critical graph is this one:

Lowy poll 2011

For me the take-out message is not so much the increase in scepticism or denialism. It’s the feeling that the issue is not urgent and can be dealt with at our leisure. The stuffing around by the political class and the low ambition of the targets set play an obvious part, I think. But on the whole I would take some heart from the survey. The situation with public opinion is far from irretrievable.

Hugh Mackay thinks the slide in support goes right back to Rudd’s silence on the issue in the first six months of his government in 2008. What I remember is a lack of advocacy in the second half of the year, especially when ‘Climategate’ was dominating the media. Rudd probably thought getting on with action was more important with a focus on bipartisanship and then the Copenhagen Conference.

Gillard has made the same mistake in providing virtually uncontested space for the nay-saying Opposition to sloganeer. My fear is that when the scheme is introduced, increases in power and fuel costs from other reasons will confuse the issue in the public mind. And it still remains that the actions proposed lack urgency and don’t match Rudd’s ‘moral challenge’ rhetoric of 2007.

Update: Gillard promising a price on carbon just before the 2010 election.

Ian Dunlop – CPD Fellow – argues that it was the fault of the CPRS itself and not the Greens which led to its failure.

Published in ABC’s The Drum Unleashed on 2 August 2010.

Demolishing the myths on emissions trading

One of the great myths being perpetuated in this election campaign is that the Greens, by refusing to support the Government’s CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme), prevented the introduction of effective emissions trading in this country, thus blocking serious action on climate change. Penny Wong was at it again on ABC’s Q&A on Monday night. Utter nonsense!

To read more click here.

So far, the Liberals haven’t been emphasising their “Great Big New Tax” line as much as might have been anticipated (and it was a clever political ploy for Julia Gillard to turn it around on them, talking about the implications of the big business levy for supermarket prices).

This theme appears to be some sort of bogey for Labor strategists, despite the fact that most of us are actually paying less income tax this financial year. The Henry Tax Review was pretty much dead on arrival, and the only suggestion which had high profile support, the Resources Super Profits Tax, of course, became one of the issues Julia Gillard identified as needing a fix when she became Prime Minister.

I’d venture to predict, based on so far sotto voce rhetoric from Tony Abbott at his press conferences, that the Coalition intends making a Carbon Tax an issue, if not the issue, in the last stretches of the campaign.

It’s here that Labor’s attempt to fudge the politics of climate policy with its much derided Citizens Assembly pledge could be highly problematic.

The original CPRS, it’s not often remembered, contained generous compensation provisions for households (as well as free carbon permits for Big Pollution). The effect of the ETS, had it been implemented, would have been a net transfer to many lower middle and low income households.

The failure of Labor to sell the ETS meant this never really sunk in.

At the same time, voters in Queensland and New South Wales, in particular, have seen electricity prices rising at a rate far higher than CPI for some time. In Queensland, resentment at this is closely associated with sentiment against the Bligh government’s privatisation agenda. Power is more expensive, the perception goes, because electricity distribution has been privatised, and promises to restrain the rate of increase in tarriffs haven’t been kept.

Hence the feeling among Labor strategists earlier in the year that a scare campaign on electricity prices for households would be fatally damaging to the ALP in Queensland and NSW marginals. The irony, of course, is that the dumping of the ETS proved fatally damaging to Kevin Rudd’s leadership, and recent polls suggest that the government as a whole has yet to recover from it.

Last night’s Nielsen shows that 60% still support an ETS.

There is other polling around which purports to show support declining as perceived costs to voters increase, which has become standard political wisdom among party strategists and the commentariat.

But that polling is occluded by the lack of public information about the actual costs, and the effect of already increasing prices I’ve mentioned above.

If we take the example of water usage and pricing in Queensland, we can see that public awareness of resource scarcity can drive changes in behaviour and attitudes, and that public support for shifts in price signals can be secured where there is a sense of collective endeavour and purpose.

There’s no reason to believe that the same would not hold true for an ETS, particularly as the net impact of a carbon price would either be small or negative.

Labor’s problem, in the face of a Coalition campaign against a ‘Great Big New Carbon Tax’, is going to be that the ALP has already ceded ground on the issue.

But, although there’s a political imperative not to walk away from the climate initiatives announced so far (however derisory their reception), it’s by no means impossible for Julia Gillard to still make a virtue out of a carbon price in this campaign.

That would take an early start to the leadership she says she intends to give on the issue in the next term.

At the moment, the Coalition is creating a phantom in the minds of voters, because no one knows or can say what a carbon price will be under Labor, and how its impact would be ameliorated.

Scare campaigns work best when their object is hazy around the edges, because it enables all sorts of worries to be projected onto the one theme.

The ALP could still announce an intention to legislate for an interim carbon price, and release the modelling that must have been done within the Department of Climate Change when the Garnaut option received serious consideration earlier in the year.

The Prime Minister should then take the Australian people into her confidence, and communicate the ALP’s actual intentions in this area, and talk up the impact on carbon emissions.

It would be a bold play, but it would be one that would also bear fruit in shoring up Labor’s primary vote among the many electors for whom climate change is a key issue.

And it would shake up a somnolent campaign message, seemingly designed to avoid attacks, rather than to go on the front foot.

With Labor’s announcement of a citizen’s assembly and a climate change commission continuing to attract puzzlement at best, it’s worth observing that we already have a price on carbon. Robert Merkel writes:

Well, not quite. We have dozens of different prices on carbon, based on the grab-bag of various energy efficiency incentives, renewable energy targets, and other abatement measures already in place. On top of that, we’ve got businesses making investment decisions based on their best guess on future government policy.

We now have another one – $394 per tonne.

That’s from Labor’s “Cleaner Car Rebate” (aka the cash for clunkers plan).

We’ve also got a pledge from the Prime Minister that we will move forward towards a carbon price, via an ETS. So it’s hard to understand why a path to that goal can’t be mapped out now, and put to the people in this election. Kevin Rudd was heavily criticised for postponing decisions through commissioning an endless series of reviews. The puzzle is that Julia Gillard claims to have decided that we will have an ETS, but all we have now is a series of short term rhetorical fixes to get Labor over the hump of voting day.

Polls show majority support for action on climate change and an ETS. The GST never enjoyed that. There is more than enough basis on which to formulate policy. The government has not even asked for a mandate to do anything real, but consult. If Gillard is serious about introducing an ETS, her policy will prove to be a very poor political basis on which to “move forward” in the next term.

The government (and opposition) have also signed up to emissions reduction targets, but both have policies which will increase emissions.

Our tragedy is that this need not have been so.

Nicholas Stuart’s Rudd’s Way (which I wrote about the other day) includes this fascinating tidbit about Kevin Rudd’s intentions on climate change in the last months of his Prime Ministership:

The ETS that had been so laboriously negotiated with Malcolm Turnbull was dead, and there was no chance that Tony Abbott would enter into negotiations to let the government off the hook.

The only alternative appeared to be doing a deal with The Greens to impose a carbon tax. Their leader, Bob Brown, had been begging to meet Rudd for the past year-and-a-half, but the PM had been adamant in his refusal to talk. Rudd asked Gillard what to do. She strenuously urged him to hold fast.

Stuart observes that Julia Gillard had been “united with Treasurer Wayne Swan in urging the abandonment of the ETS”. As he writes, this was the policy decision which “caused chaos in the polls” and “destroyed Rudd’s popular support”.

Kevin Rudd’s desire for an October election was to allow enough time for the government to turn its fortunes around, and crucially, to allow time for the Department of Climate Change to complete work on a credible plan for a carbon price. We know from reporting in the Financial Review that this work was underway. Rudd had decided Labor needed to propose a market based climate change solution, and that this had to be advanced in the face of Tony Abbott’s ‘great big new tax’ theme.

A deal for an interim carbon price, the Garnaut plan, would have not have passed the Senate just with Greens support. Nick Xenophon and at least one Liberal Senator would need to have come on side. Nevertheless, it could have been put to the people, as could another ‘cleaner’ ETS cooked up in the Department of Climate Change. A strong mandate for a carbon price, combined with an improvement in The Greens’ numbers in the Senate, could have led to a re-elected Labor government having much legitimacy to claim a mandate for legislation next year when the new Senate takes office.

Instead, we face more delay.

Writing yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher seeks to disentangle the responsibility of various Ministers, including Julia Gillard, for the climate change policy imbroglio. Hartcher’s article is acerbic, to put it mildly. In truth, it doesn’t matter so much who exactly within the government was arguing for climate change delay. What’s more important is that this is an issue on which our entire political system has been unable to deliver, despite large public majorities in support of action.

As Ben Eltham argues today, the politics of climate change in the next parliamentary term will probably be much harder, even with a likely Greens balance of power in the Senate.

Perhaps Julia Gillard’s move to ‘reset’ the debate will help. It seems unlikely. Big Carbon will still want significant concessions, a Coalition defeat could see all its internal fractures reopen, and the fact remains that we have retreated a long way from a consensus that appeared to have been established in 2006. The clock is ticking, as the Kevin07 ads reminded us.

In the meantime, all we’re seeing is symbolic policy announcements which seem to be at best problematic in securing emissions cuts, and which come at the expense of better designed programmes.

There’s not a lot of point, at this stage of the game, in arguing the toss over how exactly we came to this pass. The Labor government, and all of its senior figures – including both its leaders this term, and the opposition have a mighty weight of responsibility. What can be said with some certainty is that an honest and well thought out plan to take us towards a rational carbon price would have greatly aided the chances of “moving forward” in the upcoming term.

That, sadly, is not on offer from either major party.

Cross-posted at the ABC’s Campaign Diary blog.

So where does that leave those of us who think that we’ve all been consulted to death on this issue, and it’s time for polluters to start paying? More to the point, how can we use the upcoming election to send that message?

Below the fold, a little idea I’d like to float for discussion.

Like John Quiggin, and for similar reasons, unless something completely unexpected emerges I’ll be giving my first preference to the Greens. Yes, I still disagree with their policies on many issues, but of all the options available they are closest to the mark on the ones that matter the most. I imagine many of you will do the same. But I’d like to make completely clear to the ALP hacks scrutineering my booth the key issue motivating the vote – the lack of action the one key policy measure governments need to take to address greenhouse gas emissions – putting a price on carbon.

Furthermore, I imagine that many LP readers might still choose to vote Labor, but might wish to inform the same hacks that they too want action.

So…I was thinking to borrow an idea from the fight to stop the Franklin Dam. As the Wikipedia puts it:

In the federal Lowe by-election in Sydney, March 1982, volunteers at every polling booth encouraged voters to write “No Dams” on their ballot paper, and 9% did so. At that first ‘Write-in’ campaign, few people knew that they could write a message on their federal ballot paper without invalidating their vote. In the ACT Legislative Assembly mid-1982 election, 25% of voters wrote “No Dams” on their ballot paperAugust 2009.

In the federal Flinders by-election in Victoria in December 1982, 42% of voters wrote “No Dams” on their ballot papers. This had been a marginal Liberal seat, and given the Liberal’s poor polling at the time it was widely expected that the Labor candidate would win by a large margin. However Liberal candidate Peter Reith overstated his anti-dam position,May 2009 and the Labor candidate only reflected federal Labor’s sympathetic but ineffectual No Dams platform. Reith won the Flinders by-election (only to lose the seat 3 months later). It has been suggested that Reith’s win prompted federal Labor to harden their No Dams platform from sympathetic words to a promise of federal intervention to stop the dam, despite anticipating how unpopular mainland intervention would be in Tasmania’s 5 federal seats. It has also been asserted that Malcolm Fraser called his 1983 election 7 months early on the strength of Reith’s win; if not for that early election the bulldozers would have done much more damage.

So, in a nutshell, let’s use the same tactic again – use our ballot papers to directly communicate with our political parties that we need a carbon price ASAP.

I propose the simple phrase: “Carbon price now” – but if anybody has something snappier I’d be glad to hear it.

So what do you think?

There’s coverage everywhere, but frankly you’d be better off reading Gillard’s actual speech.

The idea of a randomly selected consultative body is an interesting one, related to notions of deliberative democracy the more sociologically-inclined LP hivemind members can discuss better than I!

On this particular issue, however, the time for extended deliberations is long, long past. We’ve been discussing climate change for decades. Emissions trading has been on the agenda under three Prime Ministers. The Howard government proposed an ETS before the 2007 election. The merits of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and hybrid schemes like Warwick McKibbin’s have been debated to death. Big business has done its sums, and the businesses most affected mainly want to fix the ground rules on which they will operate for the next few decades.

Gillard knows this – indeed, the speech has actually locked in a key part of the final shape of the scheme that will result from this process. From the speech:

To give industry certainty about future investment, the Government will ensure that emission baselines for industry assistance will not be increased – they will be as determined under the CPRS.

I think the endgame’s pretty clear – we will eventually end up with an emissions trading scheme, and it will look very much like the CPRS. There will be plenty of pork for Big Carbon, though not necessarily quite as much as in the Turnbull-Rudd compromise.

But in the name of small target election strategies, we’ll go through another couple of years of pseudo-consultation.

Elsewhere: Right on cue, Mark’s just popped up at the ABC’s campaign diary blog to give his take. Read the whole thing, but it seems we are basically of a like mind in our conclusions:

Consensus is never achievable in a democracy. This announcement, I fear, is a recipe for real inaction rather than moving forward.

Update: Tim Dunlop responds. He makes the obvious point – clearly, the government believes that support for an ETS is soft at best (and shifted from 2007), and a potentially election-losing issue in the face of an Abbott-led scare campaign. Christine Milne has apress release out that, as well as skewering the consultation process, contains some good points about the other announcements in the package.

More update: Press release from the Australia Institute: “The idea that we can delegate this to a citizens’
assembly when the government already has expert advice from Professor Ross Garnaut and the Chief Scientist to name two is absurd.”

Yet more: Bernard Keane in Crikey, who is also appalled by the policy, and notes the promise to ensure that any new coal-fired power stations are “carbon capture ready” presumably doesn’t apply to projects like the planned plants in WA and NSW, as they’re already in the planning approval process. In any case, what is a “carbon-capture-ready” power station when the technology is still so immature that there are no commercial-scale integrated examples in operation anywhere in the world?

And more: Quiggin. I think we have consensus – Quiggin is equally scathing.

The survey, part of Auspoll’s national omnibus of 1500 voters, found:

* When asked which party leader “do you trust most to deliver on the issues of pollution and climate change?” 43 per cent of voters responded “no difference”.
* Fifty-eight per cent of soft voters (uncertain about their vote) saw “no difference” between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott when asked who they trust more to deliver on pollution and climate change.
* Forty-five per cent of soft voters said they would be more likely to vote Labor if Prime Minister Julia Gillard was to commit to negotiating and delivering a pollution reduction scheme within the next 12 months.

Julia Gillard has identified climate change as the third issue she wants to resolve before an election is called, and Cabinet is expected to discuss climate change policy tomorrow. If, as appears likely, the policy announcement won’t vary the timetable for considering an ETS, and will focus instead on energy efficiency and funding for renewable energy, this policy stance will be more about neutralising the prospect of a Coalition scare campaign than anything else. The direction of rhetoric emanating from the government seems to suggest that talk of a carbon price is just that, and the talk about consultation and consensus appears directed largely at business.

Given that Kevin Rudd’s backflip on the CPRS was a key moment in Labor’s loss of public support, the ACF poll would indicate that there’s a political opportunity going begging here. At a deeper level, it’s hard not to wonder about why the government is still so shaky about its election prospects.

NB: Previous discussion of the possibilities for an interim climate change policy is here.

That is to say, it relied on a small group (Bill Shorten, David Feeney, Don Farrell, Mark Arbib) making claims to Gillard about being able to deliver right votes. It’s noted in all the articles that no attempt was made to canvass members’ views. MPs close to the mining industry such as Gary Gray played a supporting role.

It was about creating an atmosphere of crisis, and forcing Julia Gillard’s hand.

Numbers weren’t counted until after Kevin Rudd gave his press conference at about 10.30pm.

Gillard then insisted some of her long time supporters canvassed MPs, rather than the plotters, because with the exception of Shorten, they’re hardly held in high esteem by their colleagues.

A number of Ministers supported Gillard reluctantly because they realised that Rudd would be permanently damaged. After the die was cast, there was effectively no alternative to a change of leadership.

Some members of the NSW and Queensland Right and many first term marginal MPs intended to vote for Rudd, as well as the NSW left sub-faction around Anthony Albanese, who organised canvassing for Rudd. Other left members from other states also intended to support the then PM.

There are two points of contrast with previous leadership challenges:

(a) the organisers aren’t well respected “faction leaders” (like Robert Ray or John Faulkner) but machine men who are disliked by many MPs;

(b) Usually, serious number counting only starts after a coup is brought on, and there are several days in which to canvass party opinion – this one happened at the speed of light.

So I think it’s accurate to see all this as a putsch rather than a typical challenge.

Labor MPs were effectively given two options – to support Gillard, or to vote for Kevin Rudd in the knowledge that his leadership would be crippled and all chance of communicating a political message drowned out by a media firestorm over disunity and the prospect of a second challenge.

The paper also notes that Gillard had been kept in the loop by Shorten for several weeks. She may indeed have only decided to challenge on Wednesday, but it would be quite wrong to minimise her agency in what transpired.

Clearly, the plotters were the ones (along with Karl Bitar and the AWU leadership outside parliament) who’d been the “unnamed sources” for all the News Limited stories over the past few weeks, and the ones who’d been talking up the supposedly dire polls. It should also be obvious that the ‘clean air’ claim is self-reinforcing when the coup was cooked up with elements of the press gallery either in cahoots or rapturous with delight about having a leadership issue to write about.

Kevin Rudd told caucus that Arbib, Gillard and Wayne Swan had been the main movers in convincing him to dump the ETS, and all were opposed to resurrecting it, while Lindsay Tanner and Penny Wong had argued strongly to keep it.

Tingle notes the irony that those who urged the decision which started the rot were also the ones who benefited from it.

Laura Tingle wrote today:

Arbib is one of a new generation of “powerbrokers” behind this coup who seem to have no respect for the traditions of one of the oldest democratic political parties in the world, nor any apparent commitment to its values.

Their only value is staying in power. Their only modus operandi is tearing down leaders.

But is that any different to the party of old, in the days of “Richo” and Robert Ray and all the other colourful “key factional powerbrokers”?

Yes, it is. For a start, in the olden days it was the caucus, whatever its factional groupings, that decided who would be the ALP parliamentary leader.

This time around, Labor MPs watched appalled as the head of the Australian Workers Union, Paul Howes, told viewers of the ABC’s Lateline on Wednesday night that his union had switched allegiance from Rudd to Gillard and cheerfully explained why the prime minister would be losing his job.

The leadership challenge was almost over without anybody making a phone call to any MPs.

The coup occurred without the cabinet and the caucus knowing it was on and, from the public’s perspective, it was a play by the unions.

In the olden days, prime ministers were only dumped after bruising contests about changing policy direction. Powerbrokers were also trusted by their colleagues. The new ones are not…

NSW politics, of course, has been very different for some time.

NB: Previous coverage at LP of the Labor leadership change can be found here.

Update: In the Sydney Morning Herald today – Peter Hartcher:

So why the change? The truth is that some mid-level operatives in the Right faction were angry with Rudd. These powerbrokers hated Rudd for his high-handed leadership style.

And they were frustrated that Rudd was slow to take their advice in changing policy. They wanted Rudd to take a harder line on asylum seekers, to dump the emissions trading scheme, and to back off on the mining tax.

These were the people who decided to launch the challenge against Rudd. And when Gillard took their gift, her remarks to the media appeared to deliver what the Right wanted – a harder line on asylum seekers, a more protracted approach to climate change and backing off the mining tax.

Before he walked away, Rudd told the caucus: “We can’t allow this federal caucus to have embedded in it the same type of culture as NSW where, every time you make tough policy decisions and polls dip, you get a campaign to cripple the leader. It’s not good to bring the NSW culture to Canberra.”

Andrew West:

Last night, while some said Arbib simply boarded the train that was the Gillard leadership push, others insisted he was instrumental, planting leaks in the press for weeks to undermine Rudd. ”He’s the biggest harlot in the caucus when it comes to the media,” an opponent said.

”If you’re now hearing that he was a passenger on the train, not the driver, that’s an attempt to guard his arse so it doesn’t look like he plotted to take down an elected prime minister.”

Elsewhere: Sinclair Davidson, Trevor Cook.

Update: In today’s Fin, Pamela Williams confirms that the AWU’s Paul Howes and Bill Ludwig were directly phoning MPs on Wednesday night.

Elsewhere: Peter Hartcher’s take on how events unfolded.

Elsewhere: Guy Beres asks if the big miners toppled Kevin Rudd.

All quantitative polling tells you only so much, without asking questions about strength of voting intention, or whether it is likely to change. The sense of who is moving gets lost.

In an ideal world, it would be read together with qualitative polling which would give us an idea of what voters feel, and how important various issues or factors are to their vote (or one could ascertain something similar with a much larger, say x4, sample size in quant polls).

To some degree, Essential Research has been filling in that interpretive gap in other polls with a range of other questions. Bernard Keane, writing in Crikey today about their latest poll, parses the numbers:

In its more qualitative questions, Essential tried to get a handle on whether the Greens were drawing people to them, or it was the major parties pushing people away. Based on the results, voters rate the Greens pretty poorly. Even on an impressionistic issues such as honesty and ethics, where you’d expect the Greens to have some appeal to voters, they rated worse than the major parties. They weren’t even considered better at standing up to multinational companies?—?that was one of the few areas where Labor still has some brand strength. Only on environmental issues did the Greens out-rate the big parties.

So a substantial chunk of voters are happy to turn to the Greens, but don’t think much of them. That might account for why the Greens have the highest rate of voters who say they might change their minds before the election, and lowest rate of “very firm” votes.

Labor didn’t fare as badly in the qualitative polling, but trailed the coalition in most of the criteria?—?even in areas such as international relations, where the coalition is demonstrably incompetent. That suggests it’s not so much individual issues that people are making a decision on?—?it’s the whole Labor brand that is badly tarnished at the moment.

I was also surprised at the ratings The Greens got on some questions, but the thrust of the polling confirms what I’ve been arguing for some time – that the very high level of support The Greens are currently registering in various polls is not explicable solely by the climate change issue, nor completely reflects enthusiasm for the third party per se.

It’s well worth reading the entire Essential report. Of great interest also is the fact that the media are both the least trusted group and the group respondents feel most strongly has too much influence.

Keane poses the question of whether voters are still listening to Kevin Rudd. There’s also warrant in this poll for asking whether voters are listening to the media narrative.