Fed: All the symbolism of the plunge into gloom

AAP General News (Australia)
08-11-2009
Fed: All the symbolism of the plunge into gloom

By Don Woolford

CANBERRA, Aug 11 AAP - Halfway through question time on Tuesday, the main lights failed
and the House of Reps was plunged into gloom for nearly 10 minutes.

It could have symbolised all sorts of things.

The opposition thought it was hilarious, which was fair enough as nothing less could
have halted Kevin Rudd's flow.

At the time, he was eight minutes into a lecture praising his government's actions
to stimulate the economy while warning of tough times ahead. All the usual phrases - not
out of the woods; the road to recovery will have many twists, turns and bumps - had already
come.

So maybe the power failure was a harbinger of tough times ahead.

Rudd, who waited a couple of minutes before carrying on in the half light, had another idea.

The storm and tempest outside was nothing to the storm and tempest in the Liberal ranks, he said.

Which takes us to what the first question time in six weeks was all about - the government's
climate change legislation which will almost certainly be voted down in the Senate on
Thursday.

So maybe the failure presages the bill's defeat; or perhaps it's a sign of what will
happen to the electricity supply when some system to cut carbon emissions is finally in
place.

The opposition spent most of the session wanting to know why the government wouldn't
consider an alternative scheme, proposed by Frontier Economics and unveiled by Opposition
Leader Malcolm Turnbull on Monday.

Turnbull says it's cheaper, greener and smarter.

Yet the opposition hasn't adopted it as policy, which gave Rudd the excuse to blast
his opponents for not knowing what they want. The scheme, he thundered, was the opposition's
eighth different delaying tactic.

This theme led to his most convoluted metaphor - the Liberals "couldn't organise a
unity ticket in a brown paper bag". That's got a very Labor and Queensland sound to it.

As for the Frontier scheme itself, well it was just magic pudding, he said. He liked
the Norman Lindsay allusion so much he used it at least seven times. Once it was "the
magic pudding from central casting".

Later, Peter Garrett, in the course of carefully not saying why the government wouldn't
decouple its bill to set targets for emissions reduction (which the opposition supports)
from its main carbon reduction legislation, elevated the phrase to acronym status.

"We have ETS (emissions trading scheme), they have MPS (magic pudding scheme)," he said.

The great absentee from proceedings was Godwin Grech. There wasn't a mention of the
Treasury official and fake emails which have caused Turnbull such grief.

Rudd has presumably picked up the message that the voters are sick of righteous gloating.

AAP dw/sb/jl/mn

KEYWORD: PARLY VIEW

2009 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.