Interesting that Murdoch is today giving Brendan Nelson space to try and explain his lack of policy on climate change. What's particularly interesting is that the article is open to comments, regular cartoonist Bill Leak has been replaced by Kudelka's cartoon above, and an accompanying article suggests Nelson is setting himself up for a fall:
Dr Nelson continues to leave the way open for the Coalition to oppose a domestic emissions trading scheme if global negotiations fail to secure commitments from other major emitter nations, despite some senior frontbenchers insisting this is not Coalition policy.There's even a nasty little gotcha in the tail paras:
Differences over the Coalition's climate policy are likely to come to a head when the Opposition front bench meets in Canberra on July 29, ahead of a two-day full party meeting on policy.
Speaking in Hobart yesterday, Dr Nelson said the Coalition's 1997 policy had committed to two points. "The first is that Australia cannot move alone without the rest of the world committing to meaningful climate change action. And it also committed the Coalition to implementing an emissions trading scheme no later than 2012," Dr Nelson said.Ouch! You know you've got troubles when the Murdoch media is biting you in the bum on climate change, of all issues.
In fact, the report to the former government by a task group headed by former Prime Minister and Cabinet chief Peter Shergold - which was adopted by the Howard government - said "after careful consideration the task group has concluded that Australia should not wait until a genuinely global agreement has been negotiated".
The report argued that waiting to act would "place costs on Australia by increasing business uncertainty and delaying or losing investment".
Bye bye, Brendan.
