The Weekend Australian trumpets Newspoll results… from September

Sounds like Fairfax

The Australian has really lost its way on this issue, supporting Malcolm Turnbull’s position on the ETS, referring to CO2 as “carbon pollution” – they really have swallowed the Rudd/Wong spin. And now they claim that voting against the ETS will be electoral suicide, based on a Newspoll survey… from September:

THE Coalition faces an electoral wipeout at next year’s federal election if the rebels led by Tony Abbott and Nick Minchin succeed in blocking the government’s climate change legislation.

The Coalition could lose at least 20 of its metropolitan seats, including those of its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey and climate change critics Kevin Andrews and Andrew Robb, according to an analysis of Newspoll results.

…

Newspoll chief executive Martin O’Shannessy says the most worrying finding for the Coalition is that its voters aged 18 to 34 favour the government’s legislation by a margin of almost five to one. The Newspoll survey, taken in mid-September, showed that 75 per cent of Coalition voters in this age group backed the bill, while only 17 per cent were opposed.

This is in complete contradiction to what The Australian said back in July:

Just as Malcolm Turnbull has turned the Liberal Party towards accepting an ETS before the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December, there has been a turnaround in public support for delaying finalisation of a carbon emissions trading scheme.

And while most people are still prepared to pay higher costs for petrol, electricity and gas to cut greenhouse gas emissions, support drops away rapidly as the expectations rise of higher costs.

…

Eight per cent of respondents to the survey, taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, oppose an ETS outright, taking the total who oppose the scheme or want it delayed to 53 per cent.

Unfortunately, the public are wising up to the fraudulent manipulation of climate data to fit a political agenda (widespread), the true costs of the ETS to the Australian economy (huge), and the actual benefits of the ETS to the climate (none). They are also beginning to realise that the IPCC, which is Kevin Rudd’s and Penny Wong’s only source of information on climate science, is little more than an alarmist propaganda machine (read this PDF if you want to understand for yourself, and see this post from Watts Up With That: “IPCC has run its course“).

Defeating the ETS will bring on an election, and only an election campaign will allow the required investment in informing the Australian public about this harsh realities of this issue – we certainly can’t rely on the media.