His government is run along command and control lines (read Cameron Stewart’s interesting piece in last Saturday’s Australian magazine).

His media strategy is a campaign strategy.

Win the day, stay in front.  Make your opponent the issue. Control the message. Make no mistakes.

This is the goldfish in a bowl approach. Every day is new day, every week is anew week.

It works for politics, it’s hopeless for government.

Government is about implementation, not just rhetoric and across-the-despatch box abuse.

The ETS (emissions trading scheme) is the focal point of Rudd’s first term as prime minister.

It’s the self-designated ‘big test’ for the Rudd Government.

It’s a sleeper, potentially much bigger than the current fuss over asylum seekers.

It is, according to government rhetoric, the biggest single economic reform ever.

Bigger than the GST.

Very few people know how it will work and if it will achieve anything.

It sounds like something straight out of the Enron playbook.

A new round of financial trickery much like the stuff that just brought the world economy close to the precipice.

Environmentalists think it is a cop out. Too many compromises with too many big polluters.

The right, Alan Jones and the rest, are screaming about ‘world government’ and ‘loss of sovereignty’.

Increasing numbers of voters are buying the Opposition line that it is just a tax and part of Rudd’s global ambitions.

Cynics are asking if Macquarie Bank (and all the other CBD law and advisory firm spivs)  think it’s a great idea why shouldn’t we be suspicious.

In the face of all this Rudd has left a vacuum.

A vacuum he tried to fill last week with 14 pointless media interviews and a bizarre rant at the Lowy Institute.

The rant has only served to convince his opponents that they are getting under his skin, and that he is according to Jones: ‘rattled’.

What is needed is a real education program, some hard facts that might help win the debate and reassure the voters.

The Rudd Government seems strangely unwilling to do the hard work of a retail communications campaign.

Two years down the track and its media and broader political strategies seem stuck in the realms of the 33 day campaign when only the the headline matters.

Time is slipping away, if Rudd et al don’t win the implementation debate this whole thing is going to blow.

And what happens if Rudd gets his ETS through the Senate and the Copenhagen conference fails to make any progress?

Doesn’t bear thinking about. But I hope Rudd’s minders have a plan B.

The Federal Government is planning to delay its emissions trading scheme by one year, smh.com.au understands.

The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is scheduled to make an announcement at lunch time.

It is believed the Government still wants the legislation for the scheme to be passed this year but the scheme itself will not start until 2011 at the earliest, rather than 2010 as originally intended.

The ETS is a dog of a policy. It was dreamt up by the same clever financial whizzes that brought you the GFC. Rudd positioned it as a grand moral challenge, but the reality of holding onto office is always more compelling. 

The Government will try and minimise the humiliation, but they just got mugged by reality.

So here’s a classic, Senator Fielding (an accident of the Australian voting system) is a family values guy and he believes divorce is bad. And now he has a great new way of pushing what has become a pretty tired old message. Oh yeah, brothers, divorce is warming our planet faster than a forty buck kettle.

Well, not directly. It’s the tendency of the divorced to go and live what is known now as a ‘resource inefficient lifestyle”. That is living on your own you sad (world-destroying) bastards. I guess old people who have out-lived their partners, the lonely, the misfits are all similarly guilty of putting their own pleasures before the cause of keeping the sea down at a level that won’t see the rest of us losing our favourite beaches.

Fielding knows what he’s doing. His ‘divorce is cooking our goose’ pitch went down a treat with the freak show seeking media. After all that’s how I got onto it. I’m not sitting here on my own watching senate hearings on Foxtel all day while I wait for the baseball season to start, no sirree. I got people living here with me.

While Fielding has managed to re-position divorce in a whole new light, I doubt the global warming crew are all that thrilled. Winning the support of fruitbats like Fielding is not a plus. Some warming-skeptic bloggers are chortling already.

Fielding’s effort also passes the old media maxim of “everything old is new again”. The report he referred to yesterday was published more than twelve months ago:

Lead researcher Jianguo Liu, a sustainability expert with Michigan State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, wasn’t all that surprised by the results, published in Monday’s online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and fellow researcher Eunice Yu concluded that in 2005, in the United States alone, divorced households could have saved 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water if their “resource-use efficiency” had been comparable to that of married households.

Of course, another big issue out there is obesity and you guessed it fat people are villains in the global warming caper too. But fit people release more C02, so take your choice on that one.

The late writer Douglas Adams notably gave the answer to the meaning of life as 42. Those of us who got excited about the possibilities for an Australian Labor government could be excused for thinking that there was something in that number when the first listing of ministers and parliamentary secretaries came to the same total.

On Kangaroo Island, where the environment is relatively untouched, at least 42 of us – almost one per cent of the Island’s population of 4500 – thought so. Each of us sent the same letter to each of the 42 notables in the new Rudd parliament, along with a copy of The Lorax, Dr Seuss’s insightful and incisive declaration on capitalist destruction. The letter read:

“Maybe you read The Lorax when you were young; maybe you have read it to children. Please read and consider it now as you begin your ministerial work in the new Australian Government. Its message is perhaps more relevant and urgent now than when it was written in 1971.

I live on Kangaroo Island because of its natural beauty and biodiversity. Yes, I am very fortunate but I am also concerned that the expanses of habitat on the island are being nibbled away by development and gobbled up by greed.

My concern, though, is not just for my island home. I see an urgent need for a wider understanding of the natural world and its preservation across the country and the planet.

This gift is a way of suggesting that you consider a genuine triple bottom line in all your decisions and actions as a Minister and a person.

I ask you to consider not just climate change. I ask you to consider what brings people true happiness. It is not buying more unnecessary objects of passing use and momentary elation. It is appreciating and accepting what we have. And what we have is a beautiful planet – at least for the time being.

This is a time of renewal for Kangaroo Island after the recent bushfires. It can also be a time of renewal in Australia with a new Government that can encourage young people to hope again, restore a sense of community and care for others, and instill a healthy respect for the natural world.”

Not much to read is it? Pretty clear what it says, isn’t it? Not so apparently.

We hear stories of Kevin Rudd’s personal replies to old women who are in a bit of strife. He didn’t reply to us. Neither did Wayne Swann, Stephen Smith, Julia Gillard nor, horror of horrors, Penny Wong and Peter Garrett, though the vanishingly tall man did pay us a visit early this year for a bit of a holiday.

Most letters that were answered, and that was only ten, came from staffers. Most of them didn’t get it.

Top marks to Chris Evans: ‘It is a powerful story, one that I sympathise with, and I will do all that I can to support the message portrayed in this story. It is a great read for human beings of all ages.’ Pity for the environment that his portfolio is Immigration and Citizenship.

Stephen Conroy’s adviser Sophie Mitchell headed her letter ‘The preservation of Kangaroo Island’. Jenny Macklin’s staffer sort of got it. Tania Plibersek’s hand-written note was encouraging but non-committal on the substance of our letter and Martin Ferguson took the opportunity to say what he would be doing about sustainable tourism. Joel Fitzgibbon, Simon Crean and Robert McClelland all replied with thanks.

K Sperring of Ursula Stephens Parliamentary Team wrote ‘as the matter raised falls within the portfolio responsibilities of The Hon Peter Garrett MP, Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts, I have referred your letter to Mr Garrett for his attention’.

Mary Meaney, on behalf of Anthony Albanese, wrote almost the same thing but thought that the responsibilities were Penny Wong’s and forwarded the letter to her.

Two letters each for Peter and Penny (no mention of the books) and still no replies. In the interests of full disclosure, I must report that in reply to my sending a mass-generated email to Penny, I did receive a hard copy 2-page ‘explanation’ of policies. That’s two separate sheets, each printed on one side, from the Minister who’s supposed to be reducing emissions.

Still, with an emissions reduction target of 5% from 2000 levels, why should any of us bother to clamp down on wasteful practices? That target, I suppose, is the answer to our letters, finally. The other answer, the Caring for our Country Business Plan 2009–10, and its targets which will guide the government’s investment in our rapidly disappearing environment for up to five years, is equally grim and ignores vast swathes of the continent and all of its marine waters. Apparently Kangaroo Island is good for a holiday but you wouldn’t want to preserve the rich biodiversity that lives there.

For those of you who haven’t read The Lorax, please take 20 minutes out of your day and have a quiet read. You are sure to get it; and perhaps you could try and pass the message on to someone in the government.

These are very conservative targets and unlikely to encourage the investments needed to transition to a low-carbon economy. And they don’t push consumers far enough to make the behaviour changes to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

This is the crux of the matter, the extent to which behaviour changes. The Government claims it will, but few people (including one of the country’s biggest corporations) begs to differ.

On Tuesday this week, the Australian carried an op-ed from legendary botanist David Bellamy in which he claims to have been marginalised because of his global warming scepticism:

WHEN I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn’t believe what we were being told about global warming, I had no idea what the consequences would be. I am a scientist and I have to follow the directions of science, but when I see that the truth is being covered up I have to voice my opinions.

According to official data, in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that? The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming, I’ve not been allowed to make a television program.

On the other hand, some people are alarmed that global sceptics are getting too much media coverage:

Despite overwhelming evidence that global warming and its causes are real, naysayers are out there, as always is the case with any contentious issue. But what’s unique and alarming about the global warming debate is that journalists are actually spreading the views of these “climate skeptics” without actually taking a look at the facts.

Take an article posted recently on Politico that’s titled, “Scientists urge caution on global warming,” by Erika Lovely. In it, the writer cites several global warming skeptics such as the infamous Senator James Inhofe—known to have relied onfaulty theories to support his skeptical stance on climate change—to give the impression that the facts behind global warming are still up for debate, even though they clearly are not.

This idea that there are ‘facts’ that are no longer ‘up for debate’ is nonsense. As with everything in science, theories as well as facts are always up for review.

For example, earlier this week, the CSIRO reported on a study that suggested global warming may not be happening as quickly as previously thought because earlier predictions of the Southern Ocean’s demise as the world’s largest carbon sink have been vastly exaggerated. The CSIRO release said:

The new study suggests that Southern Ocean currents, and therefore the Southern Ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide, have not changed in recent decades, despite a large increase in winds.

The ABC reported that the Southern Ocean is ‘adapting’ to climate change. The idea that the Southern Ocean is adapting is clearly ludicrous and seems to be an attempt to suggest that we were right just nature is wrong. The reality is that some scientific speculation has been reviewed in light of some new evidence coming to light.

More interestingly, an article in the Australian today points out that this new evidence didn’t even get reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

In May last year, The Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reported that climate change had reduced the Southern Ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide, claiming that as a result global warming would accelerate even faster than previously thought.

The story was picked up and repeated in a number of different journals around the region.

But this week the CSIRO suggested the exact opposite…This time the story got no coverage in the SMH…

The ABC and SMH bias on global warming only plays into the hands of global warming sceptics and is a clear disservice to their audiences. 

Critics of blogging and social media are keen to point to the role of editors and the higher standards of content in heritage media, things like objectivity and fact-checking. Yet, so often in important debates these standards are more honored in the breach.