AT LEAST CAMERON PRETENDS TO CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE!:

Why vote for Cameron? Just look to Australia's Abbott: The Liberal leader offers a foretaste of a much nastier leader for Britain's centrist Tories (Julian Glover, 2/11/10, guardian.co.uk)

Sometimes you can see things more clearly from halfway round the world, the routines of one ­political culture exposing the strengths of another. Viewed from Britain, Australia's Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd looks like a model for the left to follow, a kind of Gordon Brown - only with a future, and added smiles. But from Australia, it is the British Conservative party that stands to be admired as relatively sane, centrist and capable. Beware, British progressives, of what you might get if Cameron falters. Australia is busy offering us a foretaste of a far nastier alternative.

The trigger here in Australia is climate change, but the battle is really wider, between the awkward uncertainty of the political centre ground and the easy simplicities of left and right. Australia's opposition Liberal party tried to live in the centre for a few months last year under its former leader Malcolm Turnbull, a rich, cocky Sydney lawyer with plenty of faults but nonetheless the potential to be something like his country's Cameron. A modernising and intelligent man, he fell in a party coup, which was largely about climate change, last November, and has been replaced by Tony Abbott, whose iron-man physique and much-mocked "budgie smuggler" tight swimwear is only equalled by the firmness of his views. He notoriously described climate change as "absolute crap", and has now managed to derail even Australia's plan for a mild cut in carbon emissions and the lightest touch of emissions trading schemes.

We should watch out for Abbott in Britain. Both our main parties have intimate links with their Antipodean partners. Alan Milburn, exiled from Brown's Labour party, drafted Rudd's 2007 election night speech, while Australian pollsters and strategists shaped Boris Johnson's victory. The alarming thing is that Abbott's ordinary bloke, taxi-driver approach to climate change is proving popular among Australians in the wake of the half-understood controversy over leaked emails in East Anglia.

Priceless.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2010 6:59 AM