What an extraordinary capitulation.



Just 24 hours of controversy from entirely predictable quarters and a carefully calibrated process to try to engineer a truce in Australia’s utterly wretched climate politics has been all but abandoned by its architects.

Josh Frydenberg has gone in the space of 24 hours from saying quite clearly the government would consider an emissions intensity trading scheme for the electricity sector to trying to pretend he said no such thing.

The retreat is, frankly, unseemly.

Actually, the retreat is more than unseemly, it’s pathetic – and the consequences of it stretch far beyond yet another apparent failure to do what needs to be done to ensure our economy makes an orderly transition to the carbon-constrained world that the Turnbull government willingly accepted when it signed Australia up to the Paris international climate agreement this time 12 months ago.

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Forget the intricacies of the climate policy debate – the government through this botched process has again revealed its true nature to the public.

Yet again the Turnbull government has shown the voting public that it is a divided, roiling, rudderless, chaotic and gutless political outfit, locked into a cycle of chasing its own tail, jumping nervously at shadows.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you are intrinsically a fan of governments embarking on rational policy solutions to vexed public policy problems, whether you accept the science of climate change or whether you don’t, this particular episode chalks up yet another episode in government as chaos theory.

The government now presents to the public as an outfit completely devoid of organising principle, careening to try to stay ahead of the next imbroglio, not because of any external pressure, or ferocious rent seeking by powerful special interests, or slick politics by the opposition – but because everything is about the metastasizing internals.

At the end of the political year, the government looks like a bunch of people clinging to their jobs, and doing whatever it takes to keep clinging to them – or if they are not doing that, they are trying to engineer the downfall of others, week after week, issue after issue.

Sensible people in the government would of course tell you this process of reviewing the manifestly inadequate Direct Action policy was doomed from the start – that it would be impossible to engineer a rational climate policy, one which reduced emissions at the least cost to taxpayers, and steer it successfully through this particular Coalition party room.

Sensible people would say this process was always going to degenerate into a battle of straw men and a proxy war about leadership.

They are doubtless correct in that assessment.

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This is, after all, the group of people who elevated something as inoffensive as a market-based mechanism to the status of mass moral panic and a national thought crime.

That’s a collective trance of pure stupid that is very hard to break out of.

Sensible government people would also tell you that the review of Direct Action is still afoot, and it will hear a bunch of arguments in favour of evidence-based policy from business, from the energy sector, from environment groups – arguments that might be able to carry some weight over the next 12 months.

Right now, that’s a very big might.

Right now, the conclusion looks inescapable.

On climate policy the Coalition has backed itself into a tight corner of its own making – and it shows no sign of finding the courage, the steadiness or the integrity to try to manage its way out.