Passing a law’s one thing: now for the taxing bit

POLITICS ... with Mungo MacCallum

So, amid cheers and jeers and tears and sneers the Clean Energy Australia legislation is finally through the House of Representatives, on its way to a rubber stamp from the Senate. It is a genuine achievement – almost a deliverance. But it’s also the easy bit.

The scenes at Parliament House last week were rather reminiscent of the climax of the 1998 Constitutional Convention, when John Howard announced that the proposal to make Australia a republic would be put to a referendum – a clear case of premature elation. Malcolm Turnbull and his acolytes celebrated what they imagined was a great victory, before waking up to realise that they had been stuck with an unsaleable proposition in what proved to be an unwinnable fight.
And so it may yet prove for Julia Gillard and Labor. Their belief, which in fact is no more than a hope, is that everything will go smoothly; in July next year the arrangements will slide into place and that it will be full steam ahead from there – or full wind power, or full solar power, but at least it will be ahead.
Tony Abbott’s apocalyptic prophecies of doom and gloom will be revealed as baseless, and the compensation packages will bring the voters flooding back to the ALP weeping with gratitude. Well, it could happen; but the political climate will have to undergo truly radical change if it is to be so. For starters, the disenchantment among the voters is not driven entirely by fear and loathing of the carbon tax, although that has been a powerful catalyst, ruthlessly exploited by Abbott.
A significant portion of the electorate has clearly turned off the Gillard government altogether; nothing it now says or does will bring all of those lost voters back. Whether there are enough of them to put the next election beyond Labor’s reach is another question, they constitute a formidable handicap before the race has even started. Second, the prospect of the new tax being implemented without problems, glitches, hiccups, stuff ups and outright disasters seems remote.
Not only does Labor’s record in carrying out its programs inspire little confidence, but the new tax and its infrastructure involve complexities and vulnerabilities that make it uncommonly difficult. There will, of course, be unforseen consequences. But some of the more foreseeable ones include the boundaries: just who pays and how much? And who gets compensated and how much?
There are, inevitably, margins and cut-off points, and those who miss out on what they imagine is their due can be guaranteed to wail like banshees. Then there is the general atmosphere.
The world economy is, to put it mildly, volatile, and some of the volatility is bound to filter through to Australia. And Abbott and his media pack can be relied on to blame the carbon tax for everything – absolutely everything. Every job lost, every reduced profit, every movement of the CPI or of interest rates, indeed every set back of every kind will be the fault of Gillard and her capitulation to the civilisation-wrecking Greens.
And this points up another hurdle: Gillard is yet to persuade the public that she is really, truly committed to the policy. She had to contend with the memory, not only of her pre-election promise that it wouldn’t happen, but of her part in persuading Kevin Rudd to shelve his own plans for action on climate change in 2010. Circumstances, she says, have changed; sure, but the change the punters see is that she was forced to adopt the tax by Bob Brown’s mob as the price of forming government. She must now claim it as her own. Wayne Swan insists that it is Labor to the bootstraps (whatever they are – come on, Wayne, that was Bob Menzies’s line half a century ago) but with Brown triumphantly claiming the credit, his audience will be hard to convince.
And Gillard’s problems are compounded by the terrible shemozzle over asylum seekers. Once again the government has been forced to adopt a policy it publicly disparaged: onshore processing. Never mind the fact that this is the most sensible and humane policy, in place throughout the developed world, sanctioned by international law and practice and, according to the polls, favoured by a majority of Australians, Gillard and her government determinedly rejected it and fought to a dishonourable defeat against the very idea of it.
Now she must implement it and, presumably, defend it. Not only will it be a ghastly distraction and a permanent reminder of the government’s administrative and political incompetence, it will detract further from Gillard’s already suspect credibility.
This is not a promising base from which to launch a campaign to sell a carbon tax, a policy already unpopular with a majority of the population and opposed by some very powerful and not always scrupulous interests. The attempt would be risky even under normal conditions; with minority government facing uncertain economic conditions and a host of other controversial to deal with it looks positively foolhardy.
If Gillard were playing chess the move would be marked as bold but unsound. But she isn’t; she’s playing the great game of politics, where the stakes are high – in the case of climate change quite literally world changing. The carbon tax is not the ideal policy, but it unquestionably a big step in the right direction.
Gillard deserves credit for her guts and perseverance in the face of some of the most vicious and dishonest opposition and abuse any Prime Minister has had to contend with.
If fortune truly favours the brave, she will eventually reap the rewards. But this was the easy bit: she only had to convince three independent members of parliament to back her. Now she needs to convince the best part of 13 million voters. Good luck.