On this day, in 2009, it was reported that Australian Liberal senators were telling their industry backers that secret polling had them being wiped out if they didn’t say yes to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.”
Taylor, L. 2009. Turnbull must bridge Coalition split on ETS. The Australian, 2 May, p. 18. SENIOR Liberals are telling industry their internal polling shows the Coalition losing up to 10 seats in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate in a double dissolution election triggered by their rejecting Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme
The context is this Rudd had come to power in December 2007. promising that he would do something about climate change after the inaction and resistance of John Howard for 11 years. Rudd’s something amounted to a so-called Carbon Pollution Reduction scheme.
The :iberals were on the hook because they had agreed to an emissions produce reduction scheme of their own in the run up to the 2007 election campaign. And so it would look churlish if they did not support. Rudd knew this and was busy sticking the knife in
Significant portions of the Liberal Party and even more significant portions of the National Party which is the other part of the Coalition were not convinced by the climate science and are still not
Why this matters
We need to remember that even periods of so-called bipartisan consensus are fragile, and that there are those who will, until (even after?) the waters close over their heads/they all die of thirst, still deny 19th century physics.
What happened next?
In November Malcolm Turnbull already damaged opposition leader overplayed his hand and ended up being toppled as opposition leader by an unexpected candidate Tony Abbott who had declared that the climate science was “absolute crap”
This led to a stop astonishingly turbulent period in Australian politics with multiple defenestrations, and assassinations, thanks to Rudd’s spinelessness after the Copenhagen debacle, in not calling a double-dissolution election.
But the short version is that a relatively anodyne and inadequate proposal for an economy-wide carbon price became impossible. And nothing in Australia’s future suggests anything other than an uninhabitable hellscape.