Tag Archives: carbon scheme

China, Vatican City

Xi’s hard power trumps papal soft power on climate change

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US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping arrive at Beijing's Great Hall of the People in November 2014 (White House).
US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping arrive at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in November 2014 (White House).

Despite the Fellini-esque excitement that swept the American capital over Pope Francis’s first-ever trip to the United States, it’s the arrival of China’s president, Xi Jinping (习近平), this week that will have the broader impact on global affairs.vatican flagChina Flag Icon

While the pope invoked human rights when he spoke about the environment in spiritual terms at the United Nations General Assembly Friday morning, Xi was preparing to announce that China would initiate in 2017 its own national cap-and-trade program, giving teeth to a pledge for carbon emissions in the world’s most populous country to peak in 2030, declining thereafter, part of an ambitious bilateral agreement signed between the United States and China last year.

It’s hard to think of two actors in international affairs who reside more starkly on the spectrum of ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’ more than the two men who visited Washington this week. Francis, nominally the head of a country of less than 500 residents and 110 acres, leads a church with over 1.2 billion members, and he carries the moral authority with Catholicism’s believers to influence everything from LGBT rights to immigration reform. But Xi, as the leader of a country with 1.3 billion people, wields the political, military and economic power that comes from controlling the world’s largest economy and military force.

For all the talk about Francis’s ability to deploy soft power with tactical skill, it is Xi’s hard power that is setting the agenda for climate change policy around the world, and the dual contrast on Friday revealed the limits of soft power. There’s no indication that Francis’s exhortations have made any difference on the willingness of the Chinese government to embrace transformative environmental policy.

What’s more, Xi’s increasingly progressive stand on climate change isn’t driven by the desire for international praise or even necessarily the merits of a policy that will reduce global emissions, but by hard domestic politics. In a one-party state, the Chinese Communist Party knows that it ‘owns’ every problem in China (there’s no alternative Democratic or Republican Party it can blame), so Xi knows that his government has to be seen as doing something to ameliorate his country’s crippling and health-threatening pollution. Continue reading Xi’s hard power trumps papal soft power on climate change →

Australia

History shows Abbott faces long odds in holding Oz premiership

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abbottspill

More than an unpopular mining tax or one of the world’s most progressive carbon trading schemes, Australian voters booted the last Labor government as a punishment for the personality-driven drama between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard who, in six years of government, traded the premiership twice and fought through four different leadership battles.australia new

Rudd eventually returned to leadership in the summer of 2013 when its fickle members worried that sticking with Gillard would result in an electoral catastrophe. Labor lost the election anyways, and Tony Abbott, the conservative leader of the opposition Liberal/National Coalition, became prime minister.

Just 17 months after taking office, however, Abbott now faces the same dynamic, and Australia’s prime minister survived a ‘leadership spill’ earlier this week by a narrow margin of 66 to 39. If successful, the challenge would have opened the way for a direct leadership contest, presumably against either two more popular figures — communications leader (and former Liberal leader) Malcolm Turnbull or Australia’s foreign minister Julie Bishop, a rising star.

The leadership wobbles point to a growing trend of snap leadership contests that are reshaping Australian politics by narrowing the time horizons for leaders of both major parties. Though that makes party leaders conceivably much more responsive to their colleagues and it also gives individual government ministers more power and leverage, it correspondingly creates uncertainty and drives weaker leadership. Think, for example, of the rotating-door premierships so common in Japan or Italy for much of the post-war era.

Why Abbott was so vulnerable

Abbott largely did what he said he would do when he was elected in September 2013. He’s deployed enough military personnel and detained enough asylum seekers at detention centers in Papua New Guinea to sufficiently disincentivize immigrants from attempting the dangerous trek to Australia by boat. He successfully won enough support among the Australian Senate’s independents to kill both Rudd-Gillard era accomplishments — first, their landmark carbon trading scheme and, a month later, an unpopular tax on mining profits (that, in any event, raised far less revenue than initially anticipated). For good measure, Abbott finalized two key free trade deals, with Japan and with South Korea, at a time when the Australian economy is reeling from both China’s economic slump and a decline in global commodities prices. In the crisis over downed Malaysian Airline flight 370, he showed genuine regional leadership, especially in contrast to the Malaysian government. In Abbott, Australians got exactly the prime minister that was advertised — a passionate right-wing conservative not afraid of controversy.

But that meant that Abbott too often embraced awkward positions. Continue reading History shows Abbott faces long odds in holding Oz premiership →

Australia

Revoking mining tax, Abbott dismantles Labor achievements

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tonygoesmining

If the carbon trading scheme was the signature accomplishment of six years of Labor government, perhaps its second-most important policy achievement was the promulgation of a mining profits tax that came into effect in 2012.australia new

But a month after Australian prime minister Tony Abbott successfully scrapped the carbon scheme, he’s now also managed to repeal the mining tax as well, which levied a 30% tax on mining profits. Ironically, the tax failed to raise anything close to the projections that the Australian Labor Party hoped, due in part a slowdown in demand for Australian commodities as China’s economy decelerates. Eliminating the tax was one of the chief campaign pledges that Abbott made in his campaign to defeat Labor last September.

Nevertheless, with the decision by Australia’s Senate to scrap the tax by a margin of 36 to 33, Abbott will easily pass the repeal through Australia’s lower house, the House of Representatives, where Abbott’s Liberal Party / National Party coalition holds a more solid majority.

As with the carbon scheme, Abbott secured the legislative victory with the support of Clive Palmer, a former mining magnate, and his new Palmer United Party, an alternative to the center-left Labor and to the center-right Coalition. Palmer holds the party’s sole seat in the House of Representatives, but the PUP holds three seats in the Senate, making it a key power broker in enacting Abbott’s policy agenda.  Palmer himself is an often beguiling mix of ideologies, but he seems more at home on the right than on the left.

Palmer, who made millions as the owner of several coal and nickel interests, agreed to the repeal after securing the government’s support for several family-based initiatives. He also received a promise to freeze government contributions to Australia’s superannuation plan for nine years, forcing Abbott to rescind a campaign pledge, thereby halting a planned rise from 9% to 12% — employer contributions  are now capped at 9.5%.

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RELATED: How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon scheme

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Under a policy introduced by former prime minister Paul Keating in the 1990s, agreed with business and labor unions, employers are required to make annual contributions to each employee’s ‘superannuation’ fund. The contribution level began at 3%, rose to 9.5% and was set to climb to 12% before the Abbott government’s latest decision, which would freeze contributions at 9.5% through 2025. That, in turn, has caused Keating and other Labor leaders to denounce the mining tax deal, arguing that it could derail the full potential of the superannuation program, which itself was designed to meet the rise of retirement-age Australians set to expand in the current decade and beyond.

Nevertheless, the deal leaves Labor in somewhat of a quandary under the leadership of former education minister Bill Shorten.

Australian voters aren’t exactly keen on Abbott’s government, which hasn’t had an incredibly easy first year in office — it’s been captive to small parties like Palmer’s in the Australian Senate and Abbott was also forced to shelve his plan to expand paid parental leave, one of his top campaign pledges last summer. 

But it makes the drama of the last Labor government even more pointless. It now seems less relevant than ever if Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard was prime minister in 2010, because Abbott has, in about one month’s time, dismantled Labor’s two policy cornerstones. To have spent his first months as opposition leader railing impotently on the sidelines doesn’t make Shorten look like a prime minister in waiting, even as Abbott’s government suffers from its decisions on superannuation and paid parental leave.

Australia

How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon trading scheme

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abbottclimate

In the end, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott didn’t have to call a special, massive ‘double dissolution’ election to roll back Australia’s carbon pricing scheme, the signature policy accomplishment of the six-year Labor government that preceded him.australia new

All it took was some deft maneuvering to cobble together a working majority in the 76-member Senate, where Abbott’s Liberal/National Party holds 33 seats, just short of a majority.

Nevertheless, Abbott (pictured above) won a narrow 39 to 32 victory last month in the upper house of Australia’s parliament, on the strength of six additional non-Coalition votes to repeal the carbon trading market. Having been one of the first countries to adopt a carbon trading market, Australia on July 17 became the first country to repeal a carbon trading market.

clive palmer

That included the support of a mercurial former mining magnate named Clive Palmer (pictured above), whose maverick conservative Palmer United Party (PUP) became the swing vote in determining whether Abbott’s repeal push would succeed or fail.

The Labor Party’s new leader, Bill Shorten, led an unsuccessful push in alliance with the Australian Green Party, to oppose the repeal. Labor holds 25 seats in the Senate, while the Greens hold another 10. 

Abbott’s resulting victory is primarily a triumphant tactical and policy victory for the Australian right, giving Abbott an easy talking point on reducing the price of electricity for the average Australian voter (though the real long-term impact of the repeal of a carbon scheme that had reduced emissions by less than 10 percent nationally is yet to be determined).

It’s also a narrative about the fragmentation of the country’s two-party system, as far as Australian senatorial elections go, with voters placing increasingly greater power in the hands of independent third-party candidates.

On the global scale, it marks a symbolic victory for opponents of similar climate change legislation worldwide, though the battle over carbon emissions was never going to be won or lost in Australia, a country of less than 23 million. Arguably, China’s decision in June, for the first time, to limit carbon emissions at the national level, will have a much wider impact on global climate change policy.

While British prime minister David Cameron continues to promote a progressive stand on climate change as an issue to pull his Conservative Party to the middle in the United Kingdom, there’s no indication that the UK is set to introduce any major climate change legislation on the scale of Australia’s experiment with carbon pricing beyond the EU’s own carbon trading scheme. Though there was a brief window in 2008 and 2009 when a carbon-based exchange system might have been enacted in the United States with bipartisan support, those days seem long gone. Nevertheless, the administration of US president Barack Obama and the US Environmental Protection Agency, however, introduced executive actions this summer that aim to reduce US carbon emissions by 30% by the year 2030.

Australia’s carbon scheme has its origins as one of the major promises of former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s widely successful 2007 campaign that brought the Labor Party back to government after more than a decade in opposition. It was, in part, Rudd’s decision to back away from climate change legislation that caused his Labor colleagues to dump him in 2010 in favor of then-deputy prime minister Julia Gillard.

After Gillard won a narrow reelection campaign of her own later that year, she enacted a comprehensive climate change bill in 2012, as well as a broader tax on mining profits (that hasn’t raised nearly as much revenue as expected). 

The problem, both in Australia and beyond, is that the global financial crisis of 2008-09 left many national electorates wary of climate change legislation that, almost overnight, suddenly seemed much too costly to introduce at a time when so many developed countries were struggling with the highest unemployment and lowest GDP growth in decades.

That made Abbott’s pledge to repeal what’s popularly become known in Australia as the ‘carbon tax’ one of the most popular aspects of his agenda, which won wide support the parliamentary elections last September that brought Abbott’s Coalition into government. His recent victory in winning Senate support to repeal the carbon scheme will almost certainly rank among the chief legislative successes of his first year as prime minister. Continue reading How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon trading scheme →

Australia

Rudd’s departure from Australian politics vital to Labor’s future

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ruddquits

It’s hard to find anyone in Australia who lacks strong feelings about former prime minister Kevin Rudd.Australia Flag Icon

Some Australians believe that Rudd is among the most talented politicians of his era, who led Australia’s Labor Party out of the wilderness and into government in 2007, who set the stage for a landmark carbon pricing scheme (that Australia’s new center-right prime minister Tony Abbott now hopes to repeal), and who earlier this year salvaged what would have been a landslide loss of devastatingly historical proportions under Labor prime minister Julia Gillard.

Some Australians believe that Rudd, for all his political gifts, is a temperamental figure who failed to push through legislative accomplishments and  whose dysfunctional leadership inevitably led to the 2010 putsch that ousted him and installed Gillard as Labor Party leader and as prime minister.  They also believe that his constant briefing after the 2010 leadership change almost fatally wounded Gillard and Labor in the August 2010 election, and that as foreign minister between 2010 and 2012, Rudd continued to harm Gillard to the point that a desperate Labor caucus turned to Rudd at the last minute in June 2013 to save them from impending electoral doom.

That’s why there was simply no way that Labor can fully move forward from the poisonous Rudd-Gillard era while Rudd continues to sit in the Australian parliament — and that’s why Rudd stepped down on Wednesday from his Queensland seat in the House of Commons, which he had held continuously since 1998.

As Rudd himself noted in his announcement that it was ‘time to zip,’ it’s become a precedent that former prime ministers on both the left and the right leave parliament shortly after losing elections:

“It was right and proper that I report my decision to the Parliament at the earliest opportunity. “That day is today. I have chosen to do so now to create minimal disruptions to the normal proceedings of the house.

“My predecessors as prime minister, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating, reached similar decisions to leave the Parliament before the subsequent election.  As did would-be prime ministers, Costello and Downer, perhaps prime minister Howard would have done the same had he retained the seat of Bennelong, although we will never know.”

The sharp ding at Howard was classic Rudd — Howard famously lost his seat in the 2007 landslide that ushered Rudd and Labor to power.  Rudd himself faced a difficult fight in the September 2013 election, though he ultimately survived a strong Liberal challenge (moreover, it’s not certain that Labor will retain the seat now that Rudd is resigning).
Continue reading Rudd’s departure from Australian politics vital to Labor’s future →

Australia

Shorten set to lead Australian Labor through its wilderness period

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shorten

Hardly a month after the Australian Labor Party lost its bid for a third consecutive term in power under former prime minister Kevin Rudd, Australia’s chief center-left party has a new leader — Bill Shorten.Australia Flag Icon

But Shorten, who won the leadership without the support of the party’s rank-and-file membership, will face an immediate showdown with prime minister Tony Abbott over scrapping Australia’s carbon pricing scheme, which in turn could lead to early ‘double dissolution’ elections within months that would favor Abbott’s Liberal Party (which governs in coalition with the National Party) — and that could see Labor switch leaders just as easily.

Shorten has his work cut out for him.

For now, however, the leadership victory caps a meteoric rise for Shorten (pictured above), who came to national prominence as the head of the Australian Worker’s Union between 2001 and 2007, when he was first elected to the House of Representatives on the wave that brought Rudd and Labor to power.  As the AWU’s national secretary, Shorten attained national prominence for his role during the Beaconsfield mine collapse in Tasmania in 2006.  Reelected in 2010, he was appointed minister for financial services and superannuation under prime minister Julia Gillard, and he took on the workplace relations portfolio in 2011.  Shorten, who supported Gillard when Labor kicked Rudd out of office in June 2010, played a key role in backing Rudd in June 2013 when an increasingly desperate Labor Party caucus believed Gillard would lead them to an electoral disaster, and Shorten served for two and a half months under Rudd in 2013 as education minister.

But even under the more popular Rudd, Labor still lost the September 2013 elections, and the Coalition won a solid (if not quite landslide) victory, Gillard left parliament last June, and though Rudd was narrowly reelected in his Queensland district, no one expects him to play much of a role going forward — and if he follows the well-trod path of former prime ministers, Rudd will step down from parliament sometime within the next year.

Picking up the pieces of a defeated Labor Party — and facing down the conservative Abbott government — now falls to Shorten, who will benefit from a fairly united Labor Party supporting him.  He certainly won’t face the toxic interpersonal, intraparty Rudd-Gillard schism that plagued Labor when it was in government, and new party rules adopted when Rudd most recently returned to the leadership mean that it will be especially difficult to remove Shorten from power.

In addition to the new rules for the leadership contest (described below), a 60% supermajority of the Labor parliamentary caucus (or 75% in government) is now required to remove a leader.  That should slow Labor’s propensity to change leaders with such frequency — at least, unless Labor decides to change the rules to lower the threshold.  The rules change dates not only from the poisonous Rudd-Gillard rivalry that so damaged Labor’s last stint in government — Labor went through five leadership changes the last time it was in opposition: former deputy prime minister Kim Beazley from 1996 to 2001, Simon Crean from 2001 to 2003, Mark Latham from 2003 to 2005, Beazley (again) from 2005 to 2006, and finally, Rudd until the successful 2007 election.

In the most recent leadership race, Shorten faced former deputy prime minister Anthony Albanese in Australia’s first dual leadership ballot — unlike prior leadership spills determined solely by the parliamentary caucus, the new rules require that the Labor caucus and the rank-and-file party membership hold dual votes — each vote has 50% weight in determining the final result.

That means that a leader can be elected despite losing a majority of the Labor caucus or of the Labor party membership and, sure enough, that’s what happened in the first contest under the new rules.  While Shorten, traditionally Labor’s right wing, won 55 of the 86 Labor MPs (62.95% of the Labor caucus), Albanese, from Labor’s left wing, won 59.92% of the rank-and-file vote.  So although Shorten lost the party membership by a wide margin, he won the combined vote with 52.02% due to his superior strength among Labor’s MPs.  Continue reading Shorten set to lead Australian Labor through its wilderness period →

Australia

At the dawn of the Abbott era of Australian politics, what comes next?

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abbotthockey

You’d be excused if you thought that Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s concession speech earlier today sounded more like the victory speech of a man who had just won the election.Australia Flag Icon

In a sense, Rudd did win the battle against expectations — just barely.  Even though Rudd will soon become a former prime minister and has already announced he will step down as the leader of the center-left Australian Labor Party, he can breathe a sigh of relief that Labor did not fare as poorly as some worst-case scenarios projected — either under Rudd’s return to the leadership or under former prime minister Julia Gillard.  So Rudd was probably right to gloat in his speech that he preserved Labor as a ‘viable fighting force for the future.’  What Rudd didn’t have to say was his belief that Gillard would have led Labor to an absolute collapse.

With three seats left to be determined, the center-right Coalition government led by Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott has 91 seats in Australia’s  150-member House of Representatives to just 54 seats for Labor and two independents, with Adam Bandt, the sole MP of the Australian Greens, holding onto his Melbourne seat despite a strong Labor push.  That’s a very strong victory for Abbott, who has picked up 18 seats, but it’s not a historic landslide — four of those gains come from seats formerly held by independents.

Rudd, on the other hand, can claim that his three-month leadership of the party helped avert a catastrophe, though we’ll never know whether Gillard would have done better or worse (and there are some reasons to believe that Labor should have simply stuck with Gillard through September).

You can get all of the seat-by-seat results here, and you can read the pre-election analysis of the marginal seats here.

Here’s the result of the primary vote count:

primaryvote

The most striking piece is that more than one of every four voters chose as their first preference someone other than a Labor, Coalition or Green candidate, and it corroborates that the election was more a statement of disapproval of the Rudd-Gillard governments than an embrace of Tony Abbott.

So what comes next?  Within a week, Abbott will likely become Australia’s new prime minister.  What does that mean for Australian politics?  Continue reading At the dawn of the Abbott era of Australian politics, what comes next? →