Chris Uhlmann on Rudd's ETS about-turn

Refreshing

Chris Uhlmann is a rarity in ABC circles – a journalist who isn’t a global warming ecotard with an axe to grind. So it is refreshing to read his critique of Kevin Rudd’s volte face on climate change:

The nude ball is well known in cricket circles.

It’s a derogatory term applied to deliveries that don’t spin, swing or seam. With the bowler doing nothing to defeat the batsman nude balls usually disappear over the boundary and the fielding captain is forced to change the attack.

The Government’s defence for its new position on climate change is the nude ball of politics. After campaigning for three years on the urgent need for an emissions trading scheme as the central weapon for reducing Australia’s carbon footprint it abruptly shelved the idea because it all got too hard.

The argument for delay is that it couldn’t get agreement in the Senate, and that international progress is too slow.

The Prime Minister summed up the case for delay in his recent exchange with The 7:30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien. [See ACM’s comment on this here – Ed]

“We believe that an emissions trading scheme is the most effective and cheapest way of getting there, [Tony Abbott] has rejected that position despite the Liberal Party having formally embraced it,” Kevin Rudd said.

“I now have to confront the reality of that is what he’s done… the progress on global action has been slower than any of us would like. That is why we’ve announced a decision that we would not seek to reintroduce this legislation until the end of the Kyoto commitment period and on the basis that global action has been adequate.”

Abandoning the idea because of Senate obstructionism ignores the fact that the Prime Minister could seek to have both houses of Parliament dissolved and then put the matter to the people at an election. If he won that election he could then put his Carbon Pollution Reduction bill to the vote at a joint sitting.

It’s not something anyone would do lightly but it is something you would do if you believed that climate change was the great moral and economic challenge of our age.

Read it here.