A Liberal dose of climate chaos

Opposition is tough enough when your party is roughly on the same wavelength. When your party is undergoing a crisis of relevance and historical purpose, it becomes akin to herding cats. Brendan Nelson was elected to the leadership based on being a compromise candidate. Instead, he has become the compromised candidate who seems to be the last person to know when his policy has changed.

This has been the case on WorkChoices, the apology debate and now climate change. Nelson is frequently trying to be both progressive and conservative in the same sentence and the first thing that goes is the syntax of his sentences, then subjected to Rumsfeld-style ridicule.

The diabolical mess that is the Liberal party's position on climate change comes from Nelson's futile attempts to reconcile two mutually exclusive positions. On one wing we have the bipartisan actors such as Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull who genuinely want to get the carbon reform ball rolling. On the other lie the science deniers led by Tony Abbott, representing the growth-is-king mantra of the Howard era. One suspects that they hold exorcism ceremonies around a portrait of Bob Brown clad with faux-Viking horns such is their distrust of Green policy. Whereas a compromise on the apology was possible but looked churlish and nonsensical, there is no way to balance these two positions down the middle. Either Nelson must lean towards the do-nothing denialists or he must lean toward the progressive wing of the party.

Nelson seems to have realised this himself but has not conjured up the escape route. His first attempt was to stand by the Howard policy of an ETS commencing in 2012. However, while Rudd can deal with both nanoeconomic and enviro-economic issues in turn, Nelson has based his entire leadership (if that's what one can call it) on nanoeconomic pain alone. He emotes on behalf of carers, pensioners, shoppers and motorists and is thus rendered allergic to price increases.

So by default Nelson is left with a leadership philosophy which does not allow him to support any price rises. Hence the compromised nonsense of 'petrol included but no net increase in taxes'. Perhaps he got caught in the GST comparison. While both the GST and the ETS result in pricing realignments, the essential purpose of an ETS is to input the price of carbon emission rights into the economic system. That means that products requiring higher level of carbon emissions will increase in price relative to those that require lower levels. Its operation can only be revenue neutral in the short term by government recompense.

However the reality that caused Howard to adopt the 2012 ETS in the first place has not changed. So Nelson cannot ditch the policy entirely but reopens it to consultation, digging up the hybrid alternative that Howard's Shergold report left on the cutting room floor. It will not take very much effort for Penny Wong to start citing Shergold's reasons for rejecting Nelson's proposal and exposing it as a fig leaf for denial. Denying climate change is as politically toxic now as advocating for asylum seekers was during the Tampa saga.

Further, the incoherency of Nelson's position makes him look an incompetent and weak leader and will do nothing for his electoral stocks. By not developing a progressive, innovative, liberal-philosophy based position on climate change, Nelson is not just undermining bipartisan action but his own party.