Ackerman and Devine on the carbon tax woes

Backroom deals

Two great reads for a Sunday morning. Firstly, Piers Ackerman in the Telegraph:

IT would be easy to dismiss New England independent Tony Windsor as a whining, whinging wimp and a rat, but he has now assumed national importance in the carbon tax debate.

He has had undeserved relevance thrust upon him.

Last week, Windsor earned the opprobrium of all sensible MPs and public figures around the nation when he connived with Channel 7’s Mark Riley to publicise a purported threat he claimed to have received.

In what was one of the more disgraceful media moments in a year already marred just two months in by Riley’s attempt to smear Opposition leader Tony Abbott with a false and innuendo-laden report on the death of a young Australian soldier, Windsor said on Tuesday he had received his first-ever death threat.

It didn’t help that Riley’s report added false claims about the shooting of a US congresswoman, dishonestly implying that the accused in that horror had been influenced by so-called shock-jocks and right-wing political commentators.

“You’re a f****** liar, a dog, a rat … I hope you die, you bastard,” a caller said, apparently in relation to Windsor’s role in assisting the Gillard Government develop its global-warming strategy as a member of its Multi Party Climate Change Committee. (source)

And then Miranda Devine in the Herald Sun:

YOU have to feel for Julia Gillard, the grand negotiator.

Saddled with a minority Government, she has to appease the Greens and accommodate the silky Bob Brown, while throwing a few bones to Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie and buttering up the turncoat independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, mopping their brows when the heat gets too much.

All the while she has to make sure she doesn’t venture so far into Left-loony land that her own MPs revolt.

Can you imagine what a nightmare for the Prime Minister those daily cups of tea with the Greens and independents have become? She must just feel like picking up the Earl Grey and smashing it against a wall.

No wonder Bob Brown looks pleased with himself, striding around Canberra like the Deadly Mantis, dispensing his wisdom to all and sundry. He can’t believe his luck, as Gillard cedes her power and authority. He smells total capitulation to his world view, with the shadowy shock troops of GetUp at his disposal.

It was his carbon tax that opened up the fault line Gillard is struggling to straddle now, as angry voters bombard Labor MPs’ offices with emails complaining about the Green colonisation of Labor’s soul.

They’re the people who really count — Labor’s authentic base, the working families in suburban seats, the aspirational classes for whom soaring electricity and fuel costs aren’t some theoretical exercise but a painful daily reality. Working people employed by BlueScope Steel are Labor’s base, not inner-city greenies with protected salaries.

And nothing will alienate them quicker than Green demands that petrol be included in the carbon tax, no matter how Brown tries to sugarcoat it. As Graham Richardson told Gillard: include petrol and you’re dead (memo to Tony Windsor: that’s not a death threat). (source)