The papers are reporting that the Lame Stream Media in Australia are expressing a profound sense of betrayal by Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd's spectacular capitulation on his much vaunted Emissions Trading Scheme ("ETS"). We understand the dynamic. Rudd went to bat for his "essential to have" ETS hyperbolically and grandiloquently touting it as the most urgent and necessary thing since the creation of the first human breath.
The elites, the chattering classes, and the media proved enthusiastic, gyrating cheerleaders for the Prime Minister--ignorant, credulous, unsophisticated bimbos all. Now that Rudd has pulled the plug, to change metaphors, they have been left high and dry--cruelly exposed as swimming naked. They are throwing all kinds of hissy fits at their humiliation and public degradation. It turns out they leaned on a thin reed and it broke.
The New Zealand Herald provides a summary of the outrage of the jilted lovers:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's decision to jam his proposed greenhouse emissions trading scheme into the back of the darkest cupboard he could find has unleashed his worst demons. The media that had once admired his resolve and energy have turned on him with a vengeance, attacking him as a weakling lacking the courage of his convictions and scrambling back in panic from the attacks of Opposition leader Tony Abbott.The government spinmeisters have tried to defend the embarrassing volte-face by blaming it on the stubborn intransigence of Tony Abbott. It is not working.
It is not a defence that sits well with the nation's most influential commentators, especially not when climate change had earlier been at the vanguard of Rudd's policy agenda, and an issue on which his critics had been lambasted as cowards for refusing to face "the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time".
"As retreats go they come no bigger than Kevin Rudd's delaying of his once-cherished emissions trading scheme, probably the most spectacular backdown by a Prime Minister in the past half-century," Paul Kelly, one of Australia's most distinguished political journalists, wrote in the Australian. "There will be many words written about Rudd's retreat but it is simply crystallised: he is a Prime Minister without the courage to champion the policy that defined him."
Political columnist Dennis Shanahan, writing in the same newspaper, was equally scathing, depicting Rudd's Government as an Administration spiralling into political and policy chaos. He said the public and the media were sensing an air of confusion and retreat, with the ETS decision the latest and most dramatic reversal in a slash-and-burn campaign ahead of next month's federal Budget.
But the most trenchant non-hypocritical criticism has comefrom Andrew Bolt, a correspondent for the HeraldSun, who has consistently skewered Rudd's extravagant and reckless stand. (Hat Tip: Fairfacts Media)
The great fraud has been found out, and his country saved - for now - from the greatest of his follies. Here’s the worst lie that Kevin Rudd, perhaps our most deceitful Prime Minister, once told about global warming and his Emissions Trading Scheme: “The biggest challenge the world faces in the decades ahead is climate change. “It is the great moral and economic challenge of our time.”
But on Tuesday Rudd decided “the great moral challenge” of our time wasn’t, after all. It was just “a” challenge, he said. And with public trust falling in his ETS “solution” - a great green tax on gases - he cut and ran. His ETS would be shelved until at least 2013. Two elections away. Yet only last year this same Government claimed “delay was denial”, and we could not wait to save “our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future”. To stop “700,000 homes and businesses” on our coast from drowning. (Another lie.)
Now Bolt is aware that we may think him a bit extreme and intemperate--sort of like the Prime Minister himself, maybe. His final sally is telling, however:
You may think I’m harsh on Rudd, but I say little that he hasn’t said himself - and of delayers just like him. I remember his speech last November to the Lowy Institute in which he vilified me and a few other sceptics he named: “The third group of climate deniers are those who pretend to accept the science but then urge delay because they don’t want their country to be the first to act. What absolute political cowardice. What an absolute failure of leadership. What an absolute failure of logic.”
You said it, Prime Minister. Or were you just spinning then, too?
Finally--and here is where all New Zealanders need to sit up and take notice--Miranda Devine reports on how the Rudd backdown has immediately affected electricity prices in Australia, for the better.
Despite all the denials, we now see in black and white how the defunct - or in Kevin Rudd's language "extended" - emissions trading scheme already has an impact on electricity prices. No sooner had the Prime Minister announced he was scrapping - sorry, "extending" - the scheme, all the energy companies came out to say the extra cost factored in for a scheme that hadn't even passed the Senate was, miraculously, no longer necessary. So now they'll only increase our already inflated bills by 36 per cent instead of 60 per cent, in EnergyAustralia's case.
There you have it - a glimpse at the tip of the iceberg that was Rudd's dearest folly, that had him prancing around the world stage and which he pitched as the defining achievement of his first term. (Emphasis, ours)
But we have to say to Mr Rudd--full marks for facing reality, albeit it at the eleventh hour, and loving your country sufficiently to decide to put its interests above your own political vanity and grand-standing self-importance. We have yet to see such from our own Prime Minister, John Key and nouveau-ETS zealot, Minister of the Environment, Nick Smith, who eighteen months ago was fulminating against the evils of imposing an ETS upon vulnerable New Zealand.
One is reminded of the adage of John Maynard Keynes: "I, sir, base my opinions on the facts. When the facts change, I change my opinions. What do you do, sir?" Yes, indeed, Messrs Key and Smith--what do you do, sirs?
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