The Killing Season Uncut by Sarah Ferguson Page A

task.

    It’s like we were doing three jobs at once: unprecedented global diplomacy concerning the crisis; the huge domestic decisions which had to be taken to prevent us from rolling into a recession or a depression; and three, the stuff we’d committed to prior to the election, which the Australian public still expected us to deliver on …
    The most ambitious commitment was an emissions trading scheme. According to the Treasurer’s deputy chief of staff, Jim Chalmers, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) was their priority after responding to the GFC.

    There were days where we’d meet for six or eight hours about economic policy and the GFC, and they’d wheel out all our thousands of pages of briefing about the GFC and they’d wheel in thousands of pages of briefing about carbon pollution. And then we would just continue on a meeting where some of the economic guys would leave and in would come Penny [Wong] and her team.
    For
The Killing Season
, our archivist looked in vain for shots of trolleys loaded with documents. A brief shot of a trolley carrying a few hundred pages being wheeled into Treasurer Wayne Swan’s office was the closest we got.
    Greg Combet explained the government’s challenge.

    It’s enormously complex. We had to send a public service team into the bowels of companies like BHP Billiton, and not just the whole company but go down to the steelworksin Port Kembla, work with the company on identifying how much greenhouse gas was produced. I counted about fifty-eight different industrial processes at one point that we were dealing with. The Europeans tried this in their emissions trading scheme and failed. We couldn’t fail.
    Senator Penny Wong, Climate Change Minister in the first Rudd government, would not agree to an interview for the series. I rang, texted and emailed her; I hand-delivered a letter to her Canberra office; I asked her close colleagues to intervene—all to no avail. I watched her have a heated discussion with Tanya Plibersek at the launch of Julia Gillard’s book. Wong’s decision to support Kevin Rudd in 2013 was a difficult one for her and I assumed she didn’t want to reflect on it, but I regretted her absence from the climate change story.
    The government’s strategy was to strike a bipartisan agreement on its climate legislation with Malcolm Turnbull’s opposition, instead of relying on the Greens and others in the Senate. After the Grech incident, the task became more difficult. Within the Coalition, Turnbull’s authority was diminished, and the climate sceptics were resurgent. Travelling with the National Party’s Barnaby Joyce for the ABC’s
Four Corners
program in 2009, I watched from the stands of a campdraft in rural Queensland as Joyce whipped up opposition to the ETS, telling his constituents it was a massive new tax aimed at solving a problem, climate change, that didn’t exist.
    Turnbull urged a deal with Labor, staking his leadership on reaching an agreement. Despite needing Turnbull’s support, the government continued to wedge him.
    Greg Combet was responsible for prosecuting the government’s case.

    I was in the House of Reps, which is where the battle’s being fought. We’re trying to get a deal with Turnbull but there was an impetus from Kevin Rudd’s office, from his staff in particular,to attack Turnbull at the same time as we’re negotiating with him, which was just plain dumb, inexperienced, juvenile advice to be giving. That was our chance to get that reform done, and to make Turnbull more vulnerable to the loonies in his own party, that was not smart.
    Others, like then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, said that in politics you have to take every opportunity to damage your opponent.

    I can remember years ago Paul Keating talking about the theory that if you get a crippled or a weak Opposition Leader, you should leave them in place, not knock them