Rudd's Environmental Disaster

The latest Newspoll has come out with Labor ahead 53-47. No doubt Possum Comitatus will be ripping this supposed 'Liberal creep' to shreds shortly. The upshot of this poll is that despite Garrett's gaffe getting two days' coverage throughout the polling period, the Labor vote went down a solitary point. Howard's preferred PM rating went up 2 points, but this is recognition that he has done a pretty good job. Rudd's rating barely moved, giving a net change of 3 points in the preferred PM stakes. Remember Rudd spent a lot of time talking about interest rates (Howard ground) and Howard spent a lot of time giving away road funding.

However, the story of this poll may turn out to be the 'which party best handles the environment question'. Labor's commanding lead, 39-24 over the Coalition has collapsed. The bad news for one J.W. Howard is that the beneficiary is the Greens with 'Someone Else' posting a comparable 27%. This suggests that the electorate thinks that Rudd is too close to Howard on climate change, with only the older voters favouring Turnbull's stewardship. That would suggest that the thing that cut through was Rudd's perceived 'backflip' to cover Garrett's first gaffe, not the 20% renewable energy target. Rudd got no positive benefit from his grand climate launch and the Al Gore walk-on ads did not permeate.

Rudd must hammer Howard's inaction and misleading solutions to gain this impetus back. I suspect that real conviction on climate change might even sway some worried true liberals thinking of voting for conservative independents or climate parties and preferencing Liberal candidates on economic grounds. The mainstream media commentary is peppered with phrases like Rudd has a 20% clean energy target while Howard has a 15% one, plus the bizarre suggestion that Howard will post-election announce a 50% reduction target by 2050. The simple fact of the matter is that Howard is an extremely reluctant mover on climate change, being outpaced by the melting glaciers in Greenland.

Note that Howard has 6% of voters - identical to the 'other' category as it happens, sitting on the fence about his performance. Rudd has 13%, giving him an extra 7% of people he can convince to firm up his standing as preferred PM. By my estimate, the Liberals are officially dead in at least 10 seats and a couple of extra percentage points for Labor's primary vote will kill them off completely. Reminding them of the positive policies Labor has and demonstrating their difference from Howard's creative accounting on issues such as climate change and workchoices may be one way to get them on board.