Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott went face-to-face on this one and Kevin blinked.  There’s no other way of putting it.  Oh sure, Kevin’s really good at, you know, explaining things, and nothing is ever really his fault.  “Honest, Dad, I was backing into that parking space and the power pole just jumped at me and well, you can see what happened. By the way, can I borrow a few bucks?” 

But there’s no way to cover up the emissions trading scheme disaster, which actually started back with the Copenhagen funfest.  If you believed Kevin in the lead-up, the whole world was going to come together in a big environmental bunny hug, except the whole world didn’t quite agree.  The result made the League of Nations look like a Special Forces unit. 

As soon as you started talking money, delegates suddenly wanted to break for lunch.  Then everybody went home and Kevin got the runner-up award in the Who-the Hell-Was-That? competition. 

As I recall, there were about 27 ties for first place.  This was a great touch:  “The opposition has decided to backflip on its historical commitment to bringing in a carbon pollution reduction scheme,” Kevin said, “and there’s been slow progress in the realization of global action on climate change.” 

In other words, the rest of the world is plotting to screw Kevin, who has all the answers but just can’t get anybody to go along with him.  Darn that world, anyway.  Here was Kevin with the solution to everything from carbon pollution to brake fluid leaks and premature balding, but nobody believed him.  Of course he had to back down.  Who wants to go into an election telling voters how much more you’re going to raise their taxes?  That’s like telling your future spouse, just before you get married, that you’re broke and, by the way, you’ve just been fired. 

In NSW, the carbon pollution reduction scheme would have increased energy prices by about 46 per cent – a real vote-getter in a state Rudd needs to carry.  This would have been especially difficult to sell, as people in general are taking emissions trading schemes about as seriously as they take teenage Canadian pop stars.  This may not be right in principle and maybe we should be taking it more seriously (along with possibly taking seriously the teenage Canadian pop star, who’s making more money than most of us), but for right now, it’s not on the map.  Let’s check that list. 

So far we’ve got the emissions trading backdown, the tank job on roofing insulation and the ongoing Building the Education Revolution hijinks.  Also, for some reason the government has been sitting on the Henry tax report since last year and is about to release it in one of those idiotic annual budget-style lock-downs for reporters. 

If this thing is so important, why do we have to wait so long to see what’s in it?  How much wonking do they need to do to reform a tax system that covers a country with the population of metropolitan New York?  This is political capital you can’t get back, not to mention the fact that if you’ve been keeping up with these things lately, Kevin isn’t exactly popular within his own party.  Forget whether Abbott will win the election.  At this point it looks as though he can’t.  (Although with my record on election predictions, I may just have made Tony the next prime minister). 

All Abbott has to do is pick up a few seats for the coalition and it’s hello, Julia Gillard. 

Kevin has one of the weirdest career paths we’ve seen, starting with his steamroller run through his party, defeat of an incumbent prime minister and then one balls-up after another once he got the big gig. 

Everybody in the ALP gang was happy to support him on the way up because you can’t beat a good coat-tail to hang onto, but as things start to go wrong, we’ll see how much further the path goes. 

In Abbott, he’s finally got an opponent who likes a fight, so now Kevin has it coming at him form all sides.  The good news for Kevin is there’s no much left for him to back down on. 

Source: Peter Ruehl – AFR 29/4/2010