The politics of climate change in Australia

Turnbull is a brilliant lawyer and businessperson but abrasive courtroom and business skills don’t necessarily work well in Australian politics. (There have been very few examples of successful businesspeople making a successful transition into politics.)

Turnbull put himself into a corner by saying that he would only lead a party that was as equally concerned as himself on combating human-induced climate change. It is therefore necessary to note that in all the international media coverage of the Turnbull sacking, his personal abrasive leadership characteristics were as important as the substantive debate over climate change.

In effect he challenged his critics within the Opposition to challenge his leadership.

On December 3, 2009, Malcolm Turnbull lost a challenge to his leadership. He was replaced by Tony Abbott, a professional politician and “climate change sceptic” if not “climate change denier”. Abbott has appointed a shadow cabinet noted for its inclusion of opponents of CPRS.

The Turnbull experiment is over. The Liberal Party is opposed to the CPRS.

The CPRS legislation has therefore been blocked in the Senate and the Rudd government had had to go to Copenhagen with no legislation and little immediate prospect of getting it.

The Australian Constitution enables the legislation to be tabled again in the Senate and if it is rejected again (around March 2010) then there will need to be fresh elections. On current showing, the government is reluctant to risk this electoral confrontation.

How did the government lose the debate?

Australia is fairly unusual among developed western countries in that it is wracked by a fundamental debate on whether or not climate change (if it is occurring) is human-induced (rather than caused by, say, the sun or volcanic activity).Only the United States is in such a similar situation.

Here are a few observations based on my media experience of the debate.

Information is not enough

Humans are motivated by their hearts and not their heads. The Labor Party was brilliant at exploiting fears of the risks of climate change in the 2007 election - making it a wedge issue within the Liberal Party - and then it got lost in technical information once it won government.

Ironically, John Howard would have probably handled this problem a lot better! He would know the value of hitting the media airwaves and “talking up the issue” in all the media and not just on the elitist radio stations.

Information is not enough (an interesting new book on this subject is: Randy Olson Don’t be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, Washington DC: Island Press, 2009). Dull speeches by insipid ministers - no matter how well-meaning - do not attract much interest (and Australian voters soon got bored with Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth).