The parliamentary calculus for the British election was of course different: a Labour minority government would have had a bare majority, but adding the Lib Dems to the Tory benches delivered a substantial majority in the House of Commons, bigger than that which has often enabled a single party to govern. That’s not the case here – whichever way the seats finally fall, any government will rest on a very slim majority. So, in parliamentary terms, there’s not a compelling stability case for either side.

In this parliament, each division will be key, and by-elections could change the partisan complexion of the House.

In Britain, the danger for the Liberal Democrats is that they bleed support to their left, because their main opposition in most of the seats they hold is the Tories. In other words, they’re in government with the party which could take seats from them, and opposition within those seats coalesces around Labour.

In our parliament, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott sit for seats which in their absence would be held by the Nationals, who are their major opponents in elections. Bob Katter’s electorate is different – the Nats have tried very hard to take it off him in the part, but Kennedy has also been held by Labor in living memory.

So, there’s some logic in their support for an ALP minority government, aside from the other factors I identified last night. To retain their seats, they’re better off not being embraced by their partisan enemies at electorate level.

The calculus for Adam Bandt in Melbourne is different: he can only hold his seat by continuing to fend off Labor, but, conversely, he needs to keep the support of left wing voters who would be horrified if he were to prop up a Coalition government.

The other difference with Britain is that there’s the promise of a change to the electoral system. In the medium term, Labor might have much to gain from a shift to a much more proportional voting system, given the strength of The Greens’ vote outside its former inner city redoubts. Some sort of modus vivendi between Labor and The Greens needs to be reached – the strategy of effectively taking the smaller party for granted, and hoping to reap sufficient support from swinging voters on the right clearly failed.

Another factor is that a Labor/Greens majority in the Senate which will take office next July promises a more stable environment for a non-Coalition government. But we have the intriguing position where the numbers in the House are so tight, there may well be another general election for the House of Reps in short order.

Interesting times for Australian politics.

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.

I didn’t find it very edifying.

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.

The idea is that there’d be no need for handouts or compensation to rent seekers, and that households and businesses could be compensated according to their needs. The article notes that a full range of market based solutions was never really contemplated, because the international momentum had previously been towards a production based ETS.

Despite the near absence of any reporting in Australian media, and its dissonance with the ‘narrative’, Copenhagen was not without result, and there will still be advantage in, and pressure for, Australia to establish a carbon price.

I’m no expert on the design or implications of these sorts of mechanisms, and I’d welcome input from commenters who can elucidate the nature of a consumption based ETS.

Politically, I’ve been commenting for some time that it’s highly likely that the Rudd government will seek to put something substantive in place on climate change before the election. The challenge will be to explain away the backflip on the CPRS in a more convincing manner, and why a replacement model wasn’t proposed earlier (and here The Greens’ support for an interim Garnaut Carbon Tax should have been leveraged).

Kevin Rudd is said to be disillusioned with the purported strategic geniuses from the NSW Right (Mark Arbib, Karl Bitar, Bruce Hawker, Graham Richardson, et al) whose bright idea it was to dump the CPRS in the first place. This mob never met a focus group they didn’t run in fear from, and their sole solution, aside from policy cave-ins, is leadership change. Worked well for the NSW government, didn’t it?

A substantive ETS which avoids some of the political and policy problems of the CPRS would be just the tonic the government needs, and would usefully focus attention back on Tony Abbott’s ‘Direct Action’ tokenism and denialism. But the challenge will still be to fix the mess already made with the CPRS, which has been exemplary of the government’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

Elsewhere: Richard Green at Troppo.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett has been stripped of responsibility for the household insulation scheme and other energy efficiency programs.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced he is establishing a separate, stand-alone department for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

The department will be headed by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, but her assistant minister, Greg Combet, will be given direct responsibility for winding up the insulation program and rolling out its replacement.

Discuss away.

That Council has recently released its prelimary conclusions.

Wong’s speech is significant for a number of reasons, including the fact that she rebuts the denialist criticisms of the IPCC in detail. As Gary Sauer-Thompson observes:

…development around the Australian coast assumes that sea level and storm events would function as they have in the past and our housing estates, business sites and public utilities have been designed as if the coastline and tidal levels would not change. Such assumptions are no longer valid. The Australian, of course, is not convinced.

Elsewhere: Deltoid [Brian]

In the intervening period, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the negotiations between Senator Penny Wong and Senator Christine Milne on behalf of The Greens, which began last week. I’ve sought to emphasise that there are possibilities of Senate passage via a Liberal floor crosser (perhaps Judith Troeth, who is retiring) and Nick Xenophon. In any event, I’ve argued that there are political benefits for Labor in staking out a new position which could demonstrate the desire for immediate action, and perhaps take a different bill to a double dissolution.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the media would ignore these developments, but I’ve also been surprised at the attitude of a number of commenters on several threads, which seems to assume that Labor’s posture is somehow frozen in stone.

So, in light of all this, I was very interested indeed to hear Bob Brown give a very articulate and well argued interview to Tony Jones on Lateline tonight where he discussed these negotiations, and revealed that he had also been talking to other non-Government Senators.

The politics becomes more challenging if the Libs change leaders, particularly to Joe Hockey, and the CPRS bill is defeated. The Libs will then run on “job destroying new tax”, and while Hockey would have to explain why he was for an ETS one day and against it the next, they’re likely to play down the denialism and go with the supposed economic arguments.

Interesting times.