A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Election. (February 5, 2007)

27/11 2006-652 © John Ditchburn

When the Australian Liberal Prime Minister for over ten years, John Howard, uttered the phrase Carbon Tax and called those Labor state premiers to a water summit (make you think of water running up hill at bit, don't it) you begin to believe the soft-spoken leader of the Labor federal opposition, Kevin Rudd, has got Mr Howard just a tad twitchy.

And what with the bringing down of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change at the end of October 2006, and the release last week of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, federal Coalition MPs and those Senators up for re-election must be beginning to feel the heat. Sorry for the pun but it's intended.

So Mr Howard has a conundrum, how to 1) keep his troops from panicking, 2) assuaging the voting public, and 3) keeping the mining giants sweet.

(1) and (3) of course wouldn't be all the difficult except that where (2) have been well under control for over a decade they've begun to look rather more restless than is desirable, and the 49-year-old opposition leader is demonstrating that he's a pretty dab hand at working the media. He just has to be careful not to come over as a smart arse.

Makes you wonder though, if you've got an aggressive brain tumour and you must choose between a master surgeon with the personality of  Charles Emerson Winchester III or a manipulating Uriah Heep whom do you choose to operate.

Of course somewhere along the line we voters would be pleased if Mr Rudd enunciated a costed policy or two sufficiently before the election to allow time for  thoughtful consideration, at least be those who would like to do so but then that's now been said ad nauseum.