Direct (In)Action To Be Enacted

...And Al Gore Was Nowhere To Be Seen...

Oh brother. Clive Palmer and PUP have reached an agreement with Greg Hunt to pass the Coalition's bizarre policy of paying polluters to pollute, 'Direct Action'.

Direct Action, the key plank of which is a $2.55 billion fund that pays major polluters to reduce their emissions, is now set to become law, assuming independents Nick Xenophon and John Madigan also back the legislation. 

The breakthrough represents a major win for Mr Hunt and a step forward for the government, which has been without a carbon abatement policy since dumping Labor's carbon price in July. 

But to achieve it, it has had to embrace the possibility of a return to emissions trading scheme at some point in the future.

At a media conference late on Wednesday with Mr Palmer and CCA chair Bernie Fraser, Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the government would restore funding to the authority, which would be "appropriately resourced" to conduct an 18 month inquiry. 

While Mr Hunt maintained that the government opposition to carbon pricing remained absolute, the government is now in the strange position of funding independent advice which may well recommend it does just that before the next election. 

A draft terms of reference, seen by Fairfax Media, shows the authority will be charged with investigating if and when Australia should implement an ETS, and what Australia's emissions reduction targets should be after 2020.

So Clive Palmer and PUP have offered a fig leaf for the Coalition, just in time for the G-20 meetings. No, we don't have a carbon price, but yes, we have this immensely cumbersome and white-anted policy called 'Direct Action' which is big government spending for dubious results. Very DLP. John Madigan will vote to support it. I would guess this works very well for the lobbying edifice of the energy sector because hey, it can be argued they get paid something for doing what they do best - keep polluting.

Despite Jacqui Lambe's far-right ethos of fining people for wearing religious garments, the Palmer United Party has put itself in the unlikely middle between outright climate change denial and having some kind of sensible policy. Unfortunately, they're not close enough to the sensible policy, but they are pushing for it. They've made the Coalition commit to another inquiry into the effectiveness of an Emissions Trading Scheme. 

Thus, the cycle of irony has gone full circle, possibly around some square peg-holes. Greg Hunt originally devised the Emissions Trading Scheme as mooted under the late years of the Howard Government, which Kevin Rudd cooped for the sake of convenience, and which Abbott and Hunt subsequently fought hard to brand a Carbon Tax and destroy. Now Greg Hunt has a chance to retrieve his original ETS from the mire of politics and look quite sensible. You wonder if the rest of the climate change denialist nutbars of the Coalition will let him. 

...but back to Clive Palmer for a moment. He and his party have somehow come up in the middle in the way that would have made the Democrats of old proud. You can almost hear Natasha Stott-Despoja squeal with joy at the deft manoeuvre. "Match-ia-vellian", she would've called it. Still, what exactly is the PUP platform that can pull Al Gore from a hat ("get into that, get into that!") and abolish Carbon Pricing, and then allow Direct Action to pass with a proviso to have an inquiry about an ETS? 

It helps to not really explain what the philosophical underpinnings of the party are, but it seems to be some kind of Whig-ist pragmatism mixed with hokey individualism and an avuncular populism. You could do worse. You could have no policy whatsoever on the issue of carbon emissions control. It is a kind of pragmatism to take a bad policy over no policy and promise to go investigate (again) a better policy. That, actually looks so much like actual politics. Natasha and Match-ia-Velli would approve!

I hate to say this but the Greens have so far dealt themselves out of the equation on the singularly most important issue on the environmental agenda. That can't be good. They might be the rising third force in Australian politics, but because they're too far to the left, it won't change the agenda in a meaningful way at all. It may transpire that the partnership they had with the Gillard Government in a hung Parliament was the high point of their electoral support, because as of now, you have to wonder how they're going to contribute in a meaningful way if the Palmer United Party can just put this deal together and make the whole party obsolete. 

Besides which it's not as if they managed to pull Al Gore out of a hat.