"Extraordinary, Gutless Capitulation" In Less Than 24 Hours By Oz Gov On Carbon Trading Plan

What an extraordinary capitulation. Just 24 hours of controversy from entirely predictable quarters and a carefully calibrated process to try to engineer a truce in Australia’s utterly wretched climate politics has been all but abandoned by its architects.

Josh Frydenberg has gone in the space of 24 hours from saying quite clearly the government would consider an emissions intensity trading scheme for the electricity sector to trying to pretend he said no such thing.

The retreat is, frankly, unseemly. Actually, the retreat is more than unseemly, it’s pathetic – and the consequences of it stretch far beyond yet another apparent failure to do what needs to be done to ensure our economy makes an orderly transition to the carbon-constrained world that the Turnbull government willingly accepted when it signed Australia up to the Paris international climate agreement this time 12 months ago.

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The government now presents to the public as an outfit completely devoid of organising principle, careening to try to stay ahead of the next imbroglio, not because of any external pressure, or ferocious rent seeking by powerful special interests, or slick politics by the opposition – but because everything is about the metastasizing internals. At the end of the political year, the government looks like a bunch of people clinging to their jobs, and doing whatever it takes to keep clinging to them – or if they are not doing that, they are trying to engineer the downfall of others, week after week, issue after issue.

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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/07/what-an-extraordinary-gutless-capitulation-by-josh-frydenberg