The Government’s willingness to cut a deal would, perversely, have been strengthened last week by yet another display of disunity and division from Nick Minchin, which would have narrowed the space within which Malcolm Turnbull can agree to a deal that won’t tear his party apart.  The Government will be aware that it can offer a generous deal that meets much of the Coalition’s wishlist and still be rejected because the Liberals are at sixes and sevens.  The result is that the Government looks like it bent over backwards to accommodate the climate denialists in the Coalition and was still rebuffed.  Manna from electoral heaven.

Bear in mind that compromises that further diminish the effectiveness of the CPRS aren’t a policy problem for the Government.  They know full well the CPRS in its current form will do virtually nothing to curb Australian emissions or establish a carbon price in the Australian economy.  But the CPRS is primarily a political tool to convince voters the Government is doing something about climate change and cause hell within Coalition ranks.  It doesn’t need to actually do anything in the real world to achieve that.

If you want a comparison, think of the Howard Government’s Temporary Protection Visas, which actually led to an increase in arrivals of asylum seekers.  The point of the policy – and why it was maintained for so long – was to convince voters the Government was tough on refugees, and to wedge Labor, and it worked.

The key to a deal will be if the Government is willing to stump up yet more compensation for big polluters who are already getting more than 94% of their permits free, and the electricity generators, foreign multinationals and the Labor Govts of NSW and Qld who are already getting billions over the next five years.

Possible compensation sources before the Government has to hit the Budget start with the fuel excise offset, which starts at around $2.2b in 2012-13 and steadily increases year in, year out.  That could be re-deployed to big polluters or electricity.  This is my tip for a compromise – if the Government can get the Coalition to sign off on it, it has the added virtue of neutering the political effect of any petrol price rises from the CPRS.  Both sides of politicis would have agreed to remove the offset, so the Government would be immune from a campaign based on the cost to motorists.

It would also be an oasis of sound policy in what is otherwise a complete dog of a scheme.

Next is the compensation to households.  It’s possible the modellers from Treasury have been called in to show how much less compensation for poor and middle-income families would be needed if more compensation went to polluters and electricity generators (who will cause the biggest impact on households via power prices).  It should be something approaching a zero-sum game – the more the generators get, the less they’ll need to increase prices, so the less need there is for compensation.  The cost of household compensation starts at $5b, lurches up to $6b in the third year of the scheme, and increases thereafter.  It’s over $7b a year by the end of the decade.  It should, therefore, have some capacity to fund more compensation.

And if that fails, there’s the Budget, particularly in the years beyond 2015, which has the status of Monopoly money for everyone except Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.  If there’s a deal, watch out for the five-year electricity generators’ compensation being extended to ten years (the Coalition proposed 15, but the generators didn’t like that, on the basis that cash flow in 2025 won’t help them renegotiate billion-dollar debt rollover now.

See, if you take away the need to actually have an effective scheme, the CPRS simply becomes lumps of money to be moved around the chessboard to meet your political needs.

Now it’s simply down to the politics, mainly the internal politics of the Liberal Party.

Update: A thought occurs about another possible compromise – given the complexity of the amendments required to implement likely deal options, and the fact that a lot may be implemented via the CPRS regulation, rather than primary legislation (the bulk of the CPRS is implemented by the relevant regulations, not the the legislation), don’t rule out the Government and most of the Liberals agreeing on a package in principle with the actual vote to actually occur early next year.  Rudd gets to go to Copenhagen with a deal (similar to the bipartisan support for the emissions reductions targets), Liberal honour is satisfied because they have not been forced to vote before Copenhagen, complex drafting doesn’t have to be rushed by harried Office of Parliamentary Counsel (legislative drafting) and Office of Legislative Drafting and Publishing (drafting of regulations) staff before Thursday when the Senate rises for the year.

Still, that involves a considerable degree of goodwill, and there hasn’t been too much of that on this issue.

Last night he rose to speak on the package of CPRS bills and gave a speech that any climate sceptics – should they be genuine sceptics rather than outright denialists – ought to read and ponder.  Birmingham supports his party’s position on the bills and recognises the Government’s cynical timing.

It is sad that this government has sought to force upon the parliament very cynical timing in the consideration of their legislation relating to an ETS … bringing it back to this place for these last two sitting weeks of the year, exactly three months later, smacks of exactly what it is: rank political opportunism.

Nevertheless, he wants to see a deal reached to pass the CPRS.  “I hope that our sensible, sound amendments to fix this legislation are accepted because, ultimately, I hope to be voting for this legislation.”

But it is Birmingham’s broader rationale for taking action that serves as an effective and clear articulation of why even sceptics should endorse taking action to mitigate climate change.

…I do not know whether climate change is real.  I do not know whether human impact on climate change is real.  I am not a climate scientist.  I have never pretended to be.  I also note that, so far as I am aware, nobody in this place or the other place pretends to be a climate scientist or qualified in such fields.  I note that many come to this debate with opinions that are doubtful of the veracity of climate science… I hope that they are right, because if they are right then the future for the planet looks much rosier than it does for those who take a far dimmer view of what climate science and climate change could possibly mean.

… with the exponentially increasing global population of people around the world, all of whom quite rightly aspire to have ever-improved lifestyles, we must be aware that this growth of populace and growth of consumption with it will of course have some impact on the environment in which we live.  I am reminded of Newton’s old law of motion: that for every action that is always an opposite and equal reaction.  In my mind, continually emitting ever increasing volumes of any one chemical compound into the atmosphere must ultimately have some impact.

For these reasons I believe, as I have said in my previous contributions on these bills, that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt and opt for action ahead of inaction when it comes to climate change mitigation.  It is, however, a case of making sure that we get that action right.

The conservative position on climate change must surely be one of risk management – the risk of not taking action is far greater than the risk of taking action in the event the climate change hypothesis proves flawed.  Like conservation, which had its historical roots in the conservative side of politics, climate change action should be as much at home on Right as on the Left.

At least she kept her teeth in.

Friday update:

Feel the power people. Feel the power.

You’d think, after THAT business earlier in the year, that Turnbull, or one of his staff, would have thought to themselves that renewing the claim of misleading Parliament was something, generally, to be avoided.  But Turnbull, as always, seems to have some difficulty with his impulse control.

The direct result was that it gave Rudd an excuse to duck the genuine question of whether the deal really was preferential.  Each time he was asked about the Oceanic Viking today – Question Time began moments after it was revealed the stand-off had ended – he circled back to the accusation of misleading Parliament.

It’s a minor matter.  It’s obviously not remotely on the scale of the Grech business, for example. And yet it confirms again what senior Liberals have said about Turnbull – he’s brilliant but too inclined to brainsnaps and misjudgements.

The broader point, though, is: who cares anymore about misleading Parliament?  Do voters care?  Does anyone outside Parliament and the Press Gallery?  Given the way in which Question Time has devolved into a cross between a particularly dire amateur theatre performance and your most boring Economics 1 lecturer’s greatest hits, does the whole supposed sanctity of telling the truth in Parliament mean anything any more?

John Howard didn’t resign after being forced to admit he misled Parliament about his meetings with Dick Honan in 2002. That was an open-and-shut case of misleading Parliament, but hardly the grounds on which any Prime Minister should have had to end their career.

On the other hand, remove Parliamentary accountability and one of the critical bulwarks of accountable government is ostensibly lost.  The right of Parliamentary privilege also surely is accompanied by the responsibility of truth-telling.  And yet those notions look curiously old-fashioned in an era when the truth is only one available narrative, and not necessarily to be regarded as any more useful than others that may be available.

This is not to say that all politicians are liars. Some are.  But the good ones don’t lie – they merely provide those parts of the truth most convenient.  Good politicians live in the margin of uncertainty between truth and deception, generally preferring not to be pinned down with too much detail unless it serves their purposes.  Misleading Parliament is a quaint concept for such practitioners.

The announcement by Mr. Holder that has gained the most media attention is the decision to pursue a prosecution in the civil courts against five detainees who are currently charged with conspiring to commit the 9/11 terror attacks. The detainees are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.  This case is to be heard in the Southern District of New York, which means in the same locale as where the attacks took place.

Holder says that the men will get a fair trial.  But will they?  Will it be possible to find enough individuals who live in that part of the New York, or on the island of Manhattan generally for that matter, who do not have strong and intractable views about who caused 9/11, or who knows someone directly affected by the events of that day?  Mr Holder’s decision to try these men ‘a few hundred yards’ from the former World Trade Center seems to be more about politics and maximizing the chances of successful prosecutions than it does about a fair trial.

In fact, the whole issue of whether or not high profile defendants charged in relation to high profile tragedies should be tried in places where the events took place is currently being examined by the US Supreme Court in the context of the decision by a trial judge to allow trial of former Enron executives Jeff Skilling and the late Ken Lay in the city that was synonymous with the company’s name – Houston.  If the Supreme Court rules in Mr Skilling’s favour, then the Obama Administration may find themselves embarrassed into having to move this 9/11 trial to somewhere more neutral.

But while the upcoming 9/11 trial hit the headlines, one other aspect of Mr Holder’s Friday announcement has, relatively speaking, slipped under the radar.  It is the decision of the US to continue to refuse to release or repatriate to Canada, Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was arrested in 2002 in Afghanistan at the age of 15 and who has been detained in Guantanamo Bay ever since.  Khadr, born in 1986, was kept locked away for five years before being charged with murder and other terrorism related charges.  He was tortured by US military personnel in the form of sleep deprivation and he was interviewed by both Canadian and US officials without having access to legal representation or having a guardian or his parents present.  Two Canadian courts have ordered that country’s government to repatriate Mr Khadr on the grounds that his rights to be treated fairly have been abused.

What makes the case of Omar Khadr so morally repugnant is that he was tortured and mistreated by authorities in 2003 and 2004 – when he was still a minor.  That itself, should be enough for the Obama Administration to release him back into the community.  He was simply a child soldier, caught on the battlefield.

Gordon Brown’s recent speech on immigration raises many issues, but so far as Australians are concerned, surely one of them must be “why the hell aren’t we a republic?”

The speech foreshadowed the closure of a range of skilled occuptations to non-EU citizens, as well as a tightening of regulations around student visas.

I’m not advocating policy changes on migration here (or not policy changes for the special benefit of Australians, anyway). And of course Australia’s own migration policy has moved a long way since the days of the 10-pound-Pom.

But shouldn’t our Constitutional arrangements – our Head of State – reflect this changed reality?

Britain has set its own foreign policy priority – and it’s Europe, not the Commonwealth. We aren’t abandoning the Mother Country. Mother’s moved on.

I grew up in South-East Queensland, in the general area whose water needs would have been serviced by the dam, and I did not pee indoors during winter for my entire childhood. Tank water – you weren’t about to waste it on flushing. Water was a treat - when we visited city relatives with town water, we’d clamour for a luxurious “big bath”.  I remember staring in hypnotised horror at a visitor who put the kitchen tap on all full-blast, instead of the usual trickle.

Admittedly,  having to confront menacing cane toads in the dark as I struggled with my undies after a pee was a childhood trauma that may have played a role in driving me south of the border for university, where I remain to this day and where I have picked up wasteful city attitudes to water. I turn the tap on full-blast, I shower for longer than is strictly necessary for good hygiene, and I pee indoors (which must come as a relief to the citizens of Canberra). Give people more or less unlimited access to water, and we’ll use too much of it. The population of South-East Queensland is booming – and it’s booming with people who (like most Australians) do not have frugal attitudes to water.  As the Australian Water Association says, that needs to change.

But quite why Fielding felt the need to reveal this today, on the morning when hundreds of representatives of the Forgotten Generation arrived in Canberra to hear an apology, and emotional speeches from Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, is a mystery.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d suggest Fielding, as always, wanted some media attention.  It’s a matter for Fielding as to whether the revelation of his abuse is appropriate in a political environment.  Maybe it is.  But his timing suggests a desire to distract at least some of the attention being paid to the Forgotten Generation in his direction.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I’m being too hard on Fielding.  But given his long history of stunts, I don’t think so.

It’s a simpler matter re Wilson Tuckey.  This morning he said “seeing as though we have an important event today the Prime Minister should apologise to me and say sorry Wilson.”

Clown.

This morning came the improbable story that a CPRS deal was “in the bag” because the Government had agreed to the Coalition’s demand for exemption of agriculture.  “Australia is likely to have an emissions trading scheme locked in by the end of next week,” we were told.

It could have only been written by someone unaware of the Coalition’s wishlist of amendments to the CPRS, of which the removal of agriculture is the simplest.  If anything, that it has taken this long for the Penny Wong-Ian Macfarlane mutual admiration society to agree on what most thought was the no-brainer of removing agriculture – which won’t even be in the CPRS until 2015 under any Government scenario – suggests the Government and Coalition are making heavy weather of negotiations.

By 1.11pm a follow-up story had been filed offering something of a reality check.  ETS “no done deal”, suddenly. Well, duh.

The chances of a deal are slim.  As I’ve explained previously the key Coalition amendments relate to a huge increase in compensation for polluters and a tripling of compensation to the coal-fired power generators.  They will take a scheme that will not reach revenue neutrality until 2022 at the earliest and ensure that it continues to leach taxpayers’ money out of the bunch much more quickly and for a lot longer. For that reason alone, the Government is likely to baulk at a deal unless the Coalition moderates its demands significantly. And Malcolm Turnbull will be flat out getting his MPs to back him even if the Government signs up to every red cent of the Coalition’s demands.

A director of Dymocks and the ‘face’ of their front-group the Coalition for Cheaper Books’, Carr lost to a motley bunch of basketweavers and it shits him.

His piece demonstrates in miniature all the arrogance and mendacity of the big chains participation in this campaign.

Even if you oppose PIR (as I do) you can’t pretend that the savings will be 30% or more on most books.

‘Cheap the precious books’ the Gollum mumbles, arguing that…

the hardback of Anthony Beevor’s D-Day can be got for $A30 online, while it’s $65 here. fair nuff, but there is no regime under which D-Day would be anywhere near $30 in an Oz bookstore  $50, maybe  presuming the chains pass on their savings, which is a big presume.

Carr’s also wrong about bookshop attitudes to PIR – the independent bookshops support it, because local editions mean it’s easier to restock backlist in small volumes. I don’t think that of itself is a compelling reason to keep PIR, but let’s not pretend PIR abolition would save retail jobs.

And finally there’s the opening line. ‘Forget Australian authors’. yeah, Bob and that has been the failure of the anti-PIR campaign right thru – the idea that readers are just Pavlovian consumers who don’t care what happens to local authors.

Wow – public hospitals, roads, now books – you’re really quite bad at all this aren’t you?