Polls are an awful thing really, because they measure results of what people allegedly think when given thoughts they wouldn't ordinarily have by themselves on choices they didn't formulate. If somebody told you the options for managing emissions was a 'carbon tax', an Emissions Trading Scheme', 'Direct Action' and nothing at all, you would be led to thinking this was the be-all and end all of all solutions and answer something out of this bunch of bad choices. Not to mention the inherent hostility of the polled person who can then bag out the incumbent for their incumbency and berate the Opposition for their opposition and so on and so forth.
In that light, I can only shrug at the newest poll showing the ALP have surged ahead of the Coalition.
The graphic says it all - less than 3months since the fateful election, the current Government finds itself in a position it would lose the two-party preferred vote. It didn't take long, and it didn't take much for the dissatisfaction to set in. If these people had exercise a bit of forethought, they might have avoided the Abbott government altogether. Doesn't it make you sick?
The truly interesting thing might be this bit here:
But in a blow to the Prime Minister's plans, more people like the supposedly ''toxic'' carbon tax than his proposed replacement policy.
An Age-Nielsen poll shows little support for Tony Abbott's proposed carbon tax replacement policy.
Just 12 per cent of voters believe Mr Abbott's ''direct action'' policy of using taxpayer funds to purchase emissions reductions from polluters, and planting trees, is the answer. That amounts to a virtual vote of no-confidence in direct action, which has support 4 percentage points lower than the 16 per cent in favour of keeping a fixed carbon price.
The Age-Nielsen poll of 1400 voters found that Australians overwhelmingly wanted to see Australia meet the nation's commitment to cut emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 based on year 2000 levels.
While both sides of politics have committed to the minimum target, the poll shows voters prefer the policy Labor took to the last election - a switch to an internationally linked emissions trading scheme.
Fully 29 per cent nominated an ETS as the preferred mechanism to combat global warming - well ahead of ''some other policy'' on 24 per cent and 11 per cent who favoured ''no policy at all''.
In other words, the only reason people want the Carbon Tax removed is so they can go to an ETS. That's right, the only tangible reason people want the Carbon Tax gone is because they want the ETS So much for that mandate Tony Abbott's been going on about. Listening to his coded dog-whistling you would have thought Australia's electorate wants to go the way of the Ostrich in any discussion on trying to mitigate Climate Change.
The Drum on ABC 24 featured some Liberal Party apparatchik last Friday who wanted to tell us that the future lie in adapting to climate change, and not mitigating it. If I were a man in possession of inclinations like Elvis Presley I would have shot my TV set. instead I screamed and turned it off. It's like some bad joke from the Easter Bloc of old that Tony Abbott got elected.
Delaying The Carbon Repeal
In another one of those election promises that is being broken by the Coalition, we have the Carbon Tax repeal. They've got it through the Lower House but there's enough resistance in the Senate to shoot down the repeal. The Coalition solution is therefore to hold off taking it to the Senate until the new Senate sits in July.
The Abbott government has scheduled two weeks of sittings, two for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives.
Usually Parliament stops for the winter break at the end of June, returning for the spring session in mid-August.
In the last 15 years federal Parliament has only sat once during July - for a single week in 2011 - which lends weight to the theory that the Abbott government has deliberately arranged this voting period for the carbon tax repeal.
Leader of the House Christopher Pyne released a schedule of sitting dates on Monday, showing the Senate sitting for a fortnight from Monday, July 7.
Mr Pyne said more sittings provided an opportunity for debate and consideration of the important bills that will come before the Parliament in 2014.
The lower house will sit for a week from Monday, July 14.
It seems the Coalition has twigged to possibility they would lose a Double Dissolution election - which is to say they had no mandate at all like they have claimed. The fact that the new poll has blunted their resolve points to the inherently opportunistic, populist and largely spineless nature of this government. Have they no shame? It appears not. Have they no dignity? No. Clearly, that's why they need the Monarchy to drape them with some (imagined) dignity.
Christopher Pyne has been rather disruptive in other ways.
Mr Pyne told Sky News on Sunday evening that two of the states that had agreed to the Gonski reforms, Victoria and Tasmania, had never signed "final agreements" with the federal Labor government, and neither had the National Catholic Education Commission.
"That isn't a national model, and it's very difficult for us to implement the complicated, confused, very dense model that they came up with because of Labor's predilection for prescription and regulation," he said."We want less regulation, less prescription from Canberra, and that's what I'll set about trying to put in place when we can do that."
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten accused the Coalition of breaking the promise it made before the election that it was on a "unity ticket" with Labor on school funding.
"The weasel words of the government saying before an election they will look after schools and properly fund our children in the future, and ... they now dial forward and say all deals are off, there were no deals."
Well, Bill, the answer is that these people really will do and say anything to get into power, hold power and abuse power. No surprises whatsoever there.
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