• Rodney Tiffen

09 May 2010There are seven good reasons to suggest that the government’s backdown on emissions trading will have costs both in electoral and longer-term political terms, argues Rodney Tiffen in Inside Story

IN THE JARGON of the trade, political spin doctors speak of putting out the trash – releasing bad news at a time and in a manner designed to minimise the damaging impact. In the two weeks leading up to the release of the Henry review of taxation, the Rudd government had the equivalent of a council pick-up.

In quick succession, it abandoned its commitment to introduce a charter of rights; abandoned its promise to build 260 childcare centres in school grounds, now reduced to the 38 already budgeted for; and reversed its promise to reintroduce a new home insulation scheme. These are all major backdowns and each is a broken promise.

But they pale into insignificance against Rudd’s decision to shelve the emissions trading scheme, surely one of the most monumental surrenders in Australian political history. Quite properly, critics are now using the government’s previous rhetoric against it. Responding to climate change is “the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time,” the prime minister once declared, and...

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Photo: Australian Science Media Centre