High Hopes And Dashed Expectations-The Role Of Public Opinion,Interest Groups And Political Parties In Australia’s Climate Policy Development From 2006 To 2010

Since the 1990s,Australia’s policy approach to climate change had been dominated by inaction while environmental issues like climate change never drew a lot of public attention.However,starting from 2006,the issue of climate change gradually emerged as an important political issue in Australia.The threat of climate change was drawing increasing attention from the general public and the majority of Australians supported more government action.During the 2007 federal election,under growing public pressure,both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party promised to cut carbon emissions and introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme(ETS)in Australia.The prospect for a radical policy change,a break from the carbon-intensive past,seemed optimistic.Yet the attempt to push through such policy changes was ultimately a failure.In 2008,the Rudd government released the CPRS(Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme)Green Paper and White Paper,setting out its decisions on establishing an ETS in Australia.After major revisions with added assistance to industries,the CPRS was introduced into parliament and voted down three times and the Rudd government decided to abandon the CPRS policy in 2010,marking the ultimate failure of climate policy change.This paper studies Australia’s climate policy development from the late Howard government in 2006 to the end of the first Rudd government in 2010.It explores the role of public opinion,interest groups and political parties behind this process to figure out how the issue of climate change rose to the political agenda and why climate change policy failed under the Rudd government.Applying the stages model of policy analysis by Birkland,this paper divides Australia’s climate policy process into two stages:the agenda-setting stage and the policy-formulation stage.It then conducts an in-depth analysis of political forces involved at each stage.The study finds that climate change became a salient political issue from 2006 to 2007 under the influence of various political forces:rising public concern for climate change;activist campaigns by interest groups and politicization of the issue by political parties.At this stage,public opinion was responded by government and politicians because obstruction from elite interest groups was absent and political parties were incentivized to politicize the issue.The study also finds that at the policy-formulation stage,elite interest groups and political parties dominated policy-making while environmental NGOs struggled to articulate their policy preferences.At this stage,despite the fact and most Australians supported establishing an efficient ETS without giving generous compensation to industries,the Rudd government’ s climate policy was still significantly watered-downed and heavily biased towards industry interests under the influence of elite interest groups and political parties.