Soul-mate debate

The latest Newspoll, which has Labor leading the Coalition 52-48 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, is not to be taken seriously. Nor is it believable that the preferred prime minister gap between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott has narrowed significantly and that Gillard's approval rating is in something approaching free-fall.

All this surely adds up to a rogue poll. After all, every media pundit and commentator – not to mention every journalist out there riding around on those campaign buses with Gillard and Abbott – had concluded, after deep and sustained reflection, that Tony Abbott had a dog of a time in the first week of the election campaign.

There were some commentators, like the social researcher Hugh Mackay, who said that the election was now in the bag for Gillard and that the next month would prove to be a big waste of time. According to Mackay, this election is simply about confirming Julia Gillard as prime minister.

The question now is, will the commentators change their tune as a result of this poll, for this week anyway? The answer is that they will – at least until we get the next poll (a Morgan Poll, perhaps, or another Nielson Poll or a Galaxy Poll – it often feels like there are more polls than voters in modern election campaigns). In the brief interregnum between polls, recent history will be rewritten and Tony Abbott's bad first week will become not so bad and the Labor Party's dumping of Kevin Rudd will be considered an exercise in political futility.

And Abbott will have won the great debate, although even for the most experienced commentator it will be hard to explain just why he won, beyond the fact that he didn't get angry or aggressive. According to one commentator, the fact that he managed to remain calm meant he looked and sounded prime ministerial.

That's what this campaign has come to. There was one question asked during the debate that gave the prime minister and alternative prime minister the chance to show they were not, as veteran political reporter Laurie Oakes has labelled them, political pygmies.

The question was: is there a point in time when it becomes too late to tackle climate change? When would the point of no return be reached, the point at which even the most robust emissions trading scheme would be too little too late?

This was a reasonable question and one that both Gillard and Abbott should have anticipated. Less than a year ago, Gillard gave a speech in which she said there was no time to waste on climate change and that those like Abbott, who opposed the ETS legislation, were really climate change deniers.

Less than a year later, installed as prime minister, with history beckoning, Gillard smiled and answered the question by saying that she was an optimist. She probably waffled on for a sentence or two after that about the need for community consensus on an ETS and how she's in favour of deep consensus, but Julia Gillard is not Bob Hawke and there are issues on which the idea of deep consensus is nonsense.

Gillard is the most controlled and bloodless politician in recent Australian political history. It is hard to imagine that anything ever makes her angry. She keeps saying she passionately cares about something or other, but she makes these declarations in the most passionless and calculated way.

It is not true that there are no major issues that divide Gillard and Abbott. Not that long ago, many Australians, especially young Australians, believed climate change was the biggest challenge facing Australia and the world.

The Rudd government, of which Gillard was deputy prime minister, agreed with them. Gillard reckons she still agrees with them. She believes climate change is man-made and that only an ETS can properly tackle climate change. Only she no longer agrees that there is a need for anything approaching urgent action.

Tony Abbott had no response to the question about whether action on climate change was urgent, beyond pointing to Gillard's political cowardice. But there was also something cowardly about Abbott's silence on this issue. The pre-opposition leader Abbott was forthright in his view: climate change was a load of bull. In his view, climate change is over-hyped nonsense, used for political reasons by lefties and environmental fundamentalists like Bob Brown.

It is doubtful that he has changed his mind about any of this. What has changed is that the old Abbott who proudly described himself as a conviction politician, is, in his words, dead, buried and cremated. He and Gillard are political soul-mates.

Abbott's view on climate change mirrors that of the overwhelming majority of Congressional Republicans in the United States. Only a handful of Republicans in both houses of Congress voted for Barack Obama's ETS legislation. The Republican leaders in the debate, unlike Abbott, are forthright in their views on climate change. The divide between those who believe it is, in Rudd's words, the greatest moral and economic challenge facing mankind, and those who believe climate change is just a scare campaign designed to fundamentally weaken American capitalism, is growing.

This was inevitable. Climate change, in the words of Ross Garnaut, the government's climate change adviser, is full of diabolically difficult policy issues. The politics of climate change is just as difficult and contested. Gillard's idea that a deep community consensus is needed before the government can act is laughable. So is Abbott's unwillingness to engage on the issue.

In 24 hours, the great debate will be forgotten. All that will remain is the sense that Laurie Oakes got it right: this is a campaign between political pygmies.

Read Michael Gawenda's previous election commentary pieces here.