SYDNEY: Australia's plans to become one of the first nations with a carbon trading system to cut greenhouse gas emissions were dealt a blow yesterday when the main opposition party dumped its leader who supported the idea and chose one who vowed to vote it down.

A tumultuous day in politics also means the country could also be one step closer to early elections, with policy differences over global warming placing it as a central issue of the coming campaign.

Debate in the Senate on the government's plans for an emissions trading system continued yesterday as the conservative Liberal party ejected one leader from the post and elected another. A final vote could come at almost any time.

The conservatives split bitterly and publicly in the past week over the bill, culminating in yesterday's leadership challenge. Right-leaning Tony Abbott won the vote, ousting Malcolm Turnbull, who had struck a deal with the government to support the bill.

Abbott said his party would now move to defer the bill until after next week's UN global summit on climate change in Copenhagen, and possibly longer. If the bill is not deferred, the opposition would vote against it this week in the Senate, he said. The government lacks a majority in the Senate, and the bill will almost certainly fail if the Liberals vote against it.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who met President Barack Obama on Monday in Washington, wants to take a lead role at next week's Copenhagen climate change summit by enacting a "cap-and-trade" scheme requiring polluters to buy permits for their emissions.

Many conservative senators are climate change skeptics.

Abbott said he believed in climate change but told reporters he was opposed to the government's emissions trading scheme model, the biggest economic policy change in modern Australian history, and was not afraid to fight an election on the issue.

If the bill is defeated, Rudd is handed a trigger to call an election at any time under constitutional rules meant to be the ultimate resolution to any deadlocks between Australia's two houses of Parliament.

Rudd is unlikely to call elections immediately, for reasons including that political campaigning during the Christmas-New Year holiday season is considered out of bounds. In any case, elections are due sometime in 2010, and opinion polls consistently show Rudd is so popular that - barring major stumbles - he would probably win whenever they are held.

Australia is a small greenhouse gas polluter in global terms, but one of the worst per capita because it relies heavily for its electricity on its abundant reserves of coal, which also make it the world's largest exporter of the polluting fuel. As the driest continent after Antarctica, it is also considered one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change.

Abbott said the proposed system amounts to a massive new tax that would crimp the economy - shrugging off opinion polls that say most Australians want the government to act against climate change.

Rudd, speaking in Washington, said the conservatives were dragging their heels on the issue and that "further delay equals denial on climate change".

AP-Reuters

(China Daily 12/02/2009 page10)