Julia Gillard has staked the future of her Government on a costly, complex, and probably unpopular climate change policy.
And she had to break an election commitment to do it.
Call it brave or perhaps crazy-brave but Ms Gillard is nothing if not a quick study. She plans to move fast and get it done this year. Not for her the glacial pace, the bloated timelines, and reams of ponderous reports favoured by Kevin Rudd.
She may have convinced him to walk away from his CPRS and she may have gone to the election promising no carbon tax, but she now sees a hybrid model, which begins with a tax and ends in a full market trading scheme, as her salvation.
In this, her self-declared year of delivery and decision, she wants to drive the scheme through parliament and then use that as proof that she can govern despite her minority position. And she wants to cast her opponent, Tony Abbott, as unerringly negative.
Predictably, Mr Abbott did not disappoint. Within minutes of her announcement, he came out swinging.
The proposal, he said, proved that Bob Brown - who has argued for a hybrid model before - was the real Prime Minister. And he went further, describing the idea as not merely a ``flagrant’’ breach of faith but ``the greatest betrayal in recent Australian history’’ no less.
As hysterical as these claims were however, they were merely small arms fire. For Tony Abbott, the big gun is fear. He will now argue that a carbon tax will hit ordinary households hard, sending fuel and electricity prices soaring and flowing through to just about everything else. This is the ``great-big-new-tax-on-everything’’ line and it is bound to find its mark with some voters.
Labor MPs are bracing for the onslaught. They know that appearing insensitive to cost pressures on suburban households is deadly.
But they also know that having set out on this path, with all baggage from the Rudd era, retreat is not an option.
Yesterday, with Ms Gillard’s bold declaration and Mr Abbott’s trenchant opposition, we saw the core of the political contest in 2011.
Whoever wins this fight will probably win the next election. The loser may not even last that long.
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