THE AUSTRALIAN senate rejected an emissions trading scheme (ETS) for a second time yesterday, leaving prime minister Kevin Rudd to go to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen later this month without the legislation he hoped to have in place.
The Labor government holds 32 of the 76 upper house seats and so needed at least seven crossbench votes to pass the Bill. With the Greens and two independent senators rejecting the ETS legislation, Labor was relying on the opposition Liberal Party for the necessary votes.
A compromise deal with major concessions for the mining and agriculture industries was reached with the Liberals last week, but internal opposition led to a party leadership vote on Tuesday which saw the moderate Malcolm Turnbull replaced by conservative climate change sceptic Tony Abbott.
Immediately after winning the leadership (by 42 votes to 41), Mr Abbott called another vote, which saw the ETS dumped from Liberal Party policy. Though two Liberals broke ranks and voted for the scheme yesterday, this was not enough to pass the legislation.
Under Australian electoral law, a second rejection of a Bill in the senate can be used to trigger a “double dissolution” election. This is where the lower house and all 76 upper house seats are dissolved. In a normal election only 40 senate seats (half of the state-based seats and all four of the territory-based seats) are dissolved.
But the Labor government has not called a double dissolution and has instead invited the Liberals to spend the Christmas break thinking about climate change. Labor will bring unchanged ETS legislation back into parliament in February.
Mr Abbott says he will immediately start working on an alternative plan, to be ready before parliament resumes. He is seeking to portray Labor’s ETS as a “stealth tax”.
“The [Liberal-National] coalition will not be going to the election with a new tax. Whether it’s a stealth tax – the emissions trading scheme – [or] whether it’s an upfront and straightforward tax, like a carbon tax, there will not be any new taxes as part of the coalition’s policy,” he said.
Mr Abbott is the fourth Liberal Party leader in two years. In a party which a generation ago had few Catholic members or voters, he is its third Catholic leader in a row. He once said: “In the 60s Liberal Party it was a severe handicap to be an obvious Catholic.”
While his two predecessors wore their Catholicism lightly, Mr Abbott is a former trainee priest who is sometimes referred to as “the mad monk”. He has spoken out against abortion in parliament, saying: “Why isn’t the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy?” He is also an ardent monarchist and was prominently involved in the No campaign during Australia’s republic referendum a decade ago.