As said on my earlier announcement, we are about to switch the larvatusprodeo.net domain to point at the new server, but propagation may take some time.

This means that I need to migrate all these latest Exile posts over there for you to enjoy alongside our previous archives.

Which also means that I need to shut down comments on all posts here for now so that I don’t lose any recent comments in the shift.

I’ll let you all know the new provisional domain once I’ve ported over the latest posts. It should take only ~10-15 minutes.

ADDENDUM: I put up a new post to point you over to the new site, but in case you didn’t see that, you should head on over here.

The one and only topic that is not welcome on principle on these Election Open Threads is Endless Rehashing of the Labor Leadership Change.

So where does that leave those of us who think that we’ve all been consulted to death on this issue, and it’s time for polluters to start paying? More to the point, how can we use the upcoming election to send that message?

Below the fold, a little idea I’d like to float for discussion.

Like John Quiggin, and for similar reasons, unless something completely unexpected emerges I’ll be giving my first preference to the Greens. Yes, I still disagree with their policies on many issues, but of all the options available they are closest to the mark on the ones that matter the most. I imagine many of you will do the same. But I’d like to make completely clear to the ALP hacks scrutineering my booth the key issue motivating the vote – the lack of action the one key policy measure governments need to take to address greenhouse gas emissions – putting a price on carbon.

Furthermore, I imagine that many LP readers might still choose to vote Labor, but might wish to inform the same hacks that they too want action.

So…I was thinking to borrow an idea from the fight to stop the Franklin Dam. As the Wikipedia puts it:

In the federal Lowe by-election in Sydney, March 1982, volunteers at every polling booth encouraged voters to write “No Dams” on their ballot paper, and 9% did so. At that first ‘Write-in’ campaign, few people knew that they could write a message on their federal ballot paper without invalidating their vote. In the ACT Legislative Assembly mid-1982 election, 25% of voters wrote “No Dams” on their ballot paperAugust 2009.

In the federal Flinders by-election in Victoria in December 1982, 42% of voters wrote “No Dams” on their ballot papers. This had been a marginal Liberal seat, and given the Liberal’s poor polling at the time it was widely expected that the Labor candidate would win by a large margin. However Liberal candidate Peter Reith overstated his anti-dam position,May 2009 and the Labor candidate only reflected federal Labor’s sympathetic but ineffectual No Dams platform. Reith won the Flinders by-election (only to lose the seat 3 months later). It has been suggested that Reith’s win prompted federal Labor to harden their No Dams platform from sympathetic words to a promise of federal intervention to stop the dam, despite anticipating how unpopular mainland intervention would be in Tasmania’s 5 federal seats. It has also been asserted that Malcolm Fraser called his 1983 election 7 months early on the strength of Reith’s win; if not for that early election the bulldozers would have done much more damage.

So, in a nutshell, let’s use the same tactic again – use our ballot papers to directly communicate with our political parties that we need a carbon price ASAP.

I propose the simple phrase: “Carbon price now” – but if anybody has something snappier I’d be glad to hear it.

So what do you think?

I’ve been dipping into it and have written a post about it for the ABC’s Campaign Diary blog. I think Stuart shows us that the accepted narrative of Kevin Rudd’s failure, now ‘overshadowing’ the issues of this year’s federal election, is only a partial one, and without much nuance. You can read why here.

There has not been and will not be a similar examination of Gillard’s long involvement as a key member of the extreme Left group, the Socialist Alliance formed by members of the old Communist Party of Australia.

Nice to see Piers holding himself to the same punctiliousness on points of fact that he demands of others.

There’s coverage everywhere, but frankly you’d be better off reading Gillard’s actual speech.

The idea of a randomly selected consultative body is an interesting one, related to notions of deliberative democracy the more sociologically-inclined LP hivemind members can discuss better than I!

On this particular issue, however, the time for extended deliberations is long, long past. We’ve been discussing climate change for decades. Emissions trading has been on the agenda under three Prime Ministers. The Howard government proposed an ETS before the 2007 election. The merits of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and hybrid schemes like Warwick McKibbin’s have been debated to death. Big business has done its sums, and the businesses most affected mainly want to fix the ground rules on which they will operate for the next few decades.

Gillard knows this – indeed, the speech has actually locked in a key part of the final shape of the scheme that will result from this process. From the speech:

To give industry certainty about future investment, the Government will ensure that emission baselines for industry assistance will not be increased – they will be as determined under the CPRS.

I think the endgame’s pretty clear – we will eventually end up with an emissions trading scheme, and it will look very much like the CPRS. There will be plenty of pork for Big Carbon, though not necessarily quite as much as in the Turnbull-Rudd compromise.

But in the name of small target election strategies, we’ll go through another couple of years of pseudo-consultation.

Elsewhere: Right on cue, Mark’s just popped up at the ABC’s campaign diary blog to give his take. Read the whole thing, but it seems we are basically of a like mind in our conclusions:

Consensus is never achievable in a democracy. This announcement, I fear, is a recipe for real inaction rather than moving forward.

Update: Tim Dunlop responds. He makes the obvious point – clearly, the government believes that support for an ETS is soft at best (and shifted from 2007), and a potentially election-losing issue in the face of an Abbott-led scare campaign. Christine Milne has apress release out that, as well as skewering the consultation process, contains some good points about the other announcements in the package.

More update: Press release from the Australia Institute: “The idea that we can delegate this to a citizens’
assembly when the government already has expert advice from Professor Ross Garnaut and the Chief Scientist to name two is absurd.”

Yet more: Bernard Keane in Crikey, who is also appalled by the policy, and notes the promise to ensure that any new coal-fired power stations are “carbon capture ready” presumably doesn’t apply to projects like the planned plants in WA and NSW, as they’re already in the planning approval process. In any case, what is a “carbon-capture-ready” power station when the technology is still so immature that there are no commercial-scale integrated examples in operation anywhere in the world?

And more: Quiggin. I think we have consensus – Quiggin is equally scathing.

Kevin Rudd with Alister Jordan in 2008

Seriously, just how many senior members of Cabinet really need to be present for every single NSCC meeting?

This leak smacks totally of senior defence and/or police personnel feeling slighted by the age of Alister Jordan sitting in as Rudd’s representative. Jordan may “only” be 31, but he was Rudd’s Chief of Staff, the most senior person in the PMO after Rudd himself, not some junior office boy. The Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister’s Office is surely entirely the right person for Rudd to delegate as his representative at meetings that he cannot himself attend. Questions that have been raised regarding Rudd’s judgement in appointing Jordan in the first place are, or at least damn well should be, an entirely separate issue from whether the PM’s Chief of Staff is an adequately serious and responsible level of prime-ministerial representation at senior-level meetings that the PM cannot, for whatever reason, attend.

The Opposition says the revelations show that Mr Rudd is not fit to be a minister in a future Labor government.

The committee, attended by senior officials including the chief of the Defence Force and the Australian Federal Police commissioner, is where some of the most important decisions of government are made.

One senior official said that in his nearly 30 years of dealing with this committee and its earlier incarnations he could not remember a prime minister treating it with such disdain.

Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop says, if true, the claims mean Mr Rudd should not be considered for any ministerial position in a future government.

The Opposition is also trying so hard to paint this leak as coming from a Labor Cabinet figure – disunity in Labor! Danger, El Ectorate, danger! – that, in combination with the quote I’ve bolded above, it only makes me more sure that it’s actually coming from an old-school-Tory-leaning defence or police official.

It’s interesting to note how the two-smears-for-the-price-of-one spin on Rudd’s first day campaigning in his own electorate as “sucking oxygen from Gillard’s federal campaign” echoed this narrative: the idea that Rudd is such a loose (and disloyal) cannon, obviously not fit for senior office and that thus Gillard is not fit for senior office either if she gives him a Cabinet position. Oh yes, how dare he get his office to send out press releases about where he would be for his local election campaign (shock! the gall!), and then not give the milling press pack any juicy #spill soundbites?

Then we get another two-smears-for-the-price-of-one spin on Rudd’s consideration of taking up a position on a UN panel for climate change:

Mr Rudd, who discussed the post further with Mr Ban when in New York last week, said the panel would be comprised of many former and current heads of government, foreign ministers and ministers from developed and developing nations.

Obviously, if Rudd is re-elected as MP for Griffith (high probability) and then given the Minister for Foreign Affairs post (also high probability), being part of such a panel would actually be part of his duties, not some part-time perk at all. Surely he should be considering the role seriously given his understanding of his future prospects, and talking about it is being transparent about how he sees what the job of Foreign Minister entails. Gillard surely should be happy to have someone so willing to look into larger aspects of the Foreign Minister’s international role. But yet again, it’s being spun as Rudd the loose cannon and Gillard being irresponsible to want him in her Cabinet.

Don’t fall for it, Julia. Don’t fall for it, Kevin. The LibNats and the media magnates are so shit-scared that there will be a rapprochement between Rudd and Gillard that will look good to the electorate, that they are trying to set up great walls of division between them. Don’t let them get in the way of the larger message.

crossposted at Hoyden about Town

Unfortunately, I didn’t get home in time.

But, moving forward, I’m taking real action by reporting what I heard on ABC Local Radio in Melbourne. Julia and Tony weren’t campaigning, as they were at a funeral for an Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd has confirmed he’s been offered a seat on a UN panel; however, the panel meets infrequently and he claims he could combine it with his job as an MP or minister. Julie Bishop thinks that a minister, in particular, should be fully committed to his job. Oh, and Christopher Pyne isn’t going to run a billboard featuring a quote from Nick Xenophon saying that Pyne is “An incredibly effective politician”, after bumping into Xenophon at a coffee shop, running the idea by him, and finding out that Xenophon was (surprise surprise) less than thrilled.

This was, however, not the top story on the local news – that was reserved for the verdict in the retrial of Robert Farquharson, who was found guilty of murdering his three sons.

Did anybody happen to catch a commercial news bulletin tonight?

Of course, for news junkies, ABC News 24 launches tonight, and we have an hour-long ad for it on ABC1 at 7:30. Can’t say I’m terribly excited about the prospect of spreading the ABC’s resources even thinner – and, frankly, the thought of an hour-long promo makes the Colbert Report on ABC2 (or The Daily Show on IView) an even more attractive prospect.

And, finally, some historical perspective, courtesy Crikey’s daily email:

As Crikey says, the title sequence is straight out of Tron, and the newsreaders’ clothing is good for a giggle. But the lead item – coverage of the Economic Summit – is actually a pretty serious and substantive piece by Laurie Oakes.

Note: this thread is specifically for discussing news coverage of the campaign in the mass media. We have an open thread here for more general discussion.

We have noticed a tendency for all threads currently to devolve into general election threads. Off topic posts in other threads are liable to be summarily deleted at the discretion of the moderators.

Now, the folks at Open Australia have put up a site where you can scan in and upload leaflets. It’s here.

In the past 10 elections, the gap in the level of electoral support for Labor and the Coalition reported by the polls at the start of a campaign, more often than not, has differed significantly from the gap recorded at the election.

The last election was no exception, but there were three – 1996 with Labor in office and 1998 and 2004 with the Coalition – where the gap in early polls proved a good guide to the outcome.

Where campaigns produced significant changes in party support, the pattern was always the same: the lead either narrowed or was reversed. There were no cases of an initial advantage increasing.

He finds no evidence of either an incumbency or an underdog effect.

If the pattern he discern holds for this election, it makes a fair bit of difference whether Labor really is starting at 50-50 or 55-45.