Canberra, August 25: Australia’s conservative opposition has closed on the government after blocking controversial carbon trade laws, but support for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd remains high, a poll showed on Tuesday.
Support for Rudd’s centre-left Labor fell two points to 55, while the conservatives rose two points to 45 after two weeks dominated by the defeat of carbon trade laws in the upper house Senate, a Newspoll in the Australian newspaper showed.
But Rudd remained far in front of conservative opposition leader and former Goldman Sachs executive Malcolm Turnbull, with a favourable opinion rating of 66 percent to 19 percent, equalling Rudd’s record showing of late July.
“Polls come and go, but there’s only one that really counts,” conservative lawmaker Michael Johnson told local television, pointing to elections expected late next year.
The conservatives joined with Greens and independent senators to block the emissions trade scheme, which aims to cut carbon emissions by between five and 25 percent by 2020. The conservatives warned of its impact on jobs and the economy while the Greens said it did not do enough to protect the environment.
Rudd could have the option of calling a snap election if the Senate rejects the emissions laws a second time in November ¨ûID:nSYD16743¨ü.
The emissions laws were a key Rudd election promise and in part underpinned Labor’s 2007 victory, which ended almost 12 years of conservative rule.
Turnbull, whose leadership has been under pressure since hitting a low of 16 percent in July, wants an emissions regime delayed until the outcome of December global climate talks in Copenhagen and the United States decides on its own scheme.
One senior conservative lawmaker, whose rural-based Nationals party is in coalition with Turnbull’s Liberal Party but flatly opposed to emissions trade, called on Tuesday for big business to rally in opposition to carbon trading.
“A strong and public show of support of leadership from business will seal the fate of the Emission Trading Scheme,” veteran Senator Ron Boswell wrote in the Australian.
The Nationals have been ramping up their anti-emissions trade rhetoric in recent weeks, adopting an anti-ETS policy at a national conference and mounting fresh pressure on Turnbull to unify conservative forces against Rudd’s preferred scheme.
Boswell said “vested interests” want to create an expectation that an emissions scheme could be negotiated before November, but the conservative coalition had no need to cave in.
“The ETS has been rejected once. If the numbers are right it can be rejected again,” he wrote.
Election analysts have warned the conservatives could be decimated in a snap election, losing up to five Senate seats and handing the balance of power in the obstructive upper house to a strengthened Greens party, better aligned with Rudd’s Labor.
–Agencies