The ALP have made the coal-miners of QLD into the new Tasmanian timber-workers.
To Rudd, the beautiful ring of the policy rhyme of '20% renewable-energy by 2020' is worth a thousand coal-miners jobs. Heck, ten, twenty thousand.*
Their sacrifice for the good of the Rudd will noted, and filed away in the anals of the uber-bureaucracy to come.
Unless that is if they decide to vote for the Nationals or Liberals, as Queensland blue-collar types often like to do. Howard with his technical college funding is pitching for their votes at the same time as Rudd is ditching them in favour of Keating's 'basket weavers of Balmain'.
It's not just QLD that he is risking by this hasty policy announcement. Nobody in the country believes that the cost of wind, solar etc will be negligable. The UK has just backed away from such ambitious targets because they are so hard and costly to achieve - and they have perfectly good and safe nuclear power-stations. I guess Rudd had to throw economic caution to the wind when he had just thown away the one unassailable electoral advantage he had: the brain-numbing power of Kyoto-powered environmental symbolism.
It was genius for Howard to announce at the debate a fund to help pensioners pay the power bills that will inevitably rise as we factor climate costs in. That bit of news was just sinking in when Rudd pooed in his pants and plucked his target out of the air. Oops. He did it again. He's too hasty to be like Howard. Conviction politicians take a long time, 11 years in some cases, to make decisions. They take time to decide, like the Ents in LOTR (hi nerds), because the decisions are that important. Screwing them up can be very damaging.
(*thanks to my Dad for pointing out that the main motivation for the 20% by 2020 policy figure was poetic, not economic or environmental).
