Shaun Carney July 6, 2011
With carbon tax legislation due to be released Sunday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard is readying for the hard sell.
The carbon price issue has been contaminated by politics.
The little break in the clouds for the Gillard government lasted just a few hours. On Sunday morning, Julia Gillard appeared on the ABC and confirmed reports that petrol used by private motorists and small businesses would be exempt from the carbon tax. It was the usual weekend good news drop, a practice with a strong history in contemporary politics.
But this routine can only really work if everybody responsible for the decision being announced expresses their support, and Gillard cannot count on that. Not long after she made her announcement, designed by Labor to thoroughly disprove Tony Abbott's declarations that petrol would be subject to the tax, the Greens stepped in and flushed the whole exercise down the S-bend.
Bob Brown and Christine Milne called a media conference. Along with the independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, the Greens have negotiated the carbon price package with the government. Brown said that after the process of ''give and take'' that had characterised the negotiations, he found himself ''disappointed'' with the decision on petrol. He would prefer petrol to be taxed further. Along with Milne, he outlined how the package allowed for a Productivity Commission review of the fuel excise regime, and predicted that petrol would eventually be subject to the carbon tax - possibly as early as 2015.
The government had not intended to announce the review until it released the whole package next weekend; Brown and Milne made that announcement off their own bat. By doing so, they completely shot down Labor's political strategy and left higher petrol prices under a carbon tax as a live possibility.
At the end of the press conference, Brown was asked if his prediction that petrol would be included three years down the track was helpful, given that Gillard was saying it was excluded. His response was that he didn't give a fig about the Labor Party or its political interests. ''Look, ah, we're here to give you our point of view,'' he told the journalist. ''You, ah, you will make, ah, that decision. Um, I'm, ah, I'm not, ah, here to write the script for, um, people who wonder whether this is helping, ah, in politics. We're here to give you the best information we can from our Greens point of view.''
The last statement was important. ''The best information we can from our Greens point of view'' means that Brown and Milne will spin the carbon package in whatever way suits their political interests. Indeed, if they can spin a decision in such a way that it makes the Greens politically stronger at the expense of the Labor Party, they will - despite the fact that the two parties share ownership of the carbon tax package.
Consider what happened on Sunday. Effectively, Brown and Milne in public went as close as they could to disowning a petrol excise decision they had agreed to in private negotiations. By highlighting the petrol excise review, they showed faith with their own support base, which mostly lives within public transport networks and disdains private car use, while undermining Labor's capacity to regain some of its lost base, such as car-reliant outer suburbanites.
The experience should have been a reality check for Labor as it looks ahead to the job of explaining the carbon tax agreement. In the broad, of course, the government and the Greens should be expected to be endorsing the package and extolling its virtues. But will that happen? If the pattern of the petrol excise decision is repeated, Labor, as the government, will find itself responsible for all of the package - and pledging full commitment to it - while the Greens will go around reserving the right to indemnify themselves from anything its leading MPs think the party membership won't like.
Perhaps this is a privilege that naturally falls to a minor party that does not have to look for mass support, a form of ''all care, no responsibility''. But given the extent of public disillusionment with politics, it's not necessarily the best development for the nation's political system. It's not good enough to sign off on a decision on something as far-reaching as the price of petrol and then profess to be disappointed with the same decision.
When it comes to politics, there is an ingrained culture of critique inside our society that goes beyond natural scepticism and, combined with the politicians' addiction to spin, is slowly poisoning our democratic system.
On climate change, the country has a prime minister who promised not to introduce a carbon tax, an opposition leader who says he believes in the need to arrest climate change but appears not to, and a third-party leader who argues against his own negotiated policy choice as a way of currying favour with his supporters.
The sum total of this is that it is highly likely that even after the carbon tax package is released next Sunday, scepticism towards the policy - and the entire issue of climate change - will remain high. What's ended up being misplaced amid the anticipation of the carbon price agreement is the most important question of all: will the policies of any of the parties actually reduce emissions to the desired level in the required time?
The entire issue has become so contaminated by politics that it stands as a testament to how inadequate and dysfunctional our political system is becoming.
Shaun Carney is an Age associate editor.
