You might be right, and moreover a fractured post-election Liberal Party might well also contain some Barnaby-style Senate renegades making the balance of power situation fascinating and unpredictable.

Certainly Antony Green’s figures suggest that Labor could get legislation through the Senate with Greens support only after either a double dissolution or half-Senate election. However, after a half-Senate election there’s at least some chance of an alternative majority involving cobbling together a majority of Independents and Coalition renegades. I’m assuming here that Rudd is innately quite conservative and not likely willingly to embrace purist Greens recipes on lots of issues that would force him to forfeit the middle ground and move to the left to an extent that would give the Coalition a big chance in the next term of Parliament. If the Coalition is sufficiently fractured/disunited, then the prospect of cobbling together a polyglot Senate majority for legislation well to the right of anything the Greens will ever support would also exist in a post-DD Parliament, but achieving a majority in any given situation would be a bigger ask after a double dissolution than after a half-Senate election.

Nevertheless, as you seem to be suggesting, if Rudd judges that current Coalition chaos makes it expedient to seize the electoral day now (or rather fairly early in the New Year) and call a DD to maximise his prospects of a strong Reps majority despite the less than optimal Senate outcome, he might yet bet the farm. Somehow, however, I think he’s more likely to adopt the Keating strategy of doing the Coalition slowly. Current economic conditions seem to have reduced the impetus for Rudd to go early before a “horror” budget next May, because that prospect no longer exists (or at least can be plausibly deferred/denied). It may depend on who ends up being elected Liberal leader on Tuesday. If Turnbull survives that presumably means that the ETS will get through anyway. If it’s Hockey, then with any sort of luck Liberal minders will be able to restrain him from putting both feet in his mouth at the same time, which might increase the temptation for Rudd to pull the DD trigger to reduce Hockey’s available time to retrieve some ground. OTO with the Mad Monk in the chair I reckon the “do them slowly” strategy would certainly be the way to go.

If Rudd called an (early) double dissolution election, it would predominatly be based on a view that the chance of having a valid excuse to go early so he could grab a big swag of extra Lib House of Reps while they were in such total disarray was too big to resist, even if it meant risking missing out on getting his weak CPRS adopted.

The Senate makeup would be a minor consideration (although I think it looks vyer probabyl that the Greens will get sole balance of power after either a half or a full Senate election). A random potentially oddball independent or two from a D-D doesn’t matter much if they can’t influence balance of power – although if the Nats decide to adopt a permanent semi-Barnaby mindset going forward, then the balance of power will be a very dynamic thing in any case.

In fact Antony’s information helps to clarify just why even quite a few Liberals who AREN’T climate change deniers are now deserting the Turnbull ship. Malcolm’s political judgment looks to be radically flawed. There was probably never a real risk of Rudd pulling an early DD election, and there’s in fact little or no objective reason to finalise an ETS law before Copenhagen, except to allow Rudd to strut the international stage as a western leader who has already “delivered the goods” on climate change, albeit fairly shoddy and half-baked goods. Obama hasn’t made any real attempt to get ETS legislation through the US legislature, contenting himself with announcing his intention to proceed with a revised (similar to Australia) model in due course. If legally or even practically binding targets and programmes emerge from Copenhagen that will be time enough to tweak and finalise Australia’s legislation early next year. Turnbull, courageous, principled and admirable though his stand may be, has fallen for Rudd’s poker bluff (to adopt Tel’s preferred metaphor – although Tel then proceeds to scramble the metaphor to an extent that leaves even this proud metaphor-mangler gasping with awe-struck admiration).

Andrew

Yes, the points you make are made in the passage from Walker’s article extracted in my primary post. The point I make from that is: would Rudd be likely to force a double dissolution when all he would get out if it is an ETS/CPRS Act that is likely to be declared invalid anyway, and a more hostile than necessary Senate for the next 3-6 years? I suspect the answer is no, but we’ll soon see. BTW Thanks for the information about the Senate sitting situation.

It is quite possible that after such an election, if the CPRS Bills were subsequently passed at a joint sitting, the High Court would rule that the grounds of “failure to pass” had not been met. (assuming someone legally challenged the validity of the joint sitting, which I think in the circumstances would be a certainty). But this would negate the legislation, not the election – so the Coalition wipeout which would likely have happened at such an election would stand. Given that there are Regulations related to the CPRS which would still be at risk of being disallowed by a post- (or pre-)election Senate, I don’t think the risk of the High Court invalidating legislation passed at a joint sitting would be that much of a concern to Mr Rudd.

As for the query about how long the Senate might sit for next week, basically that’s in the hands of the Senate. At the moment, everything – including the sitting last Friday – is technically just an extension of the final scheduled sitting day (which was last Thursday), as the Senate is just continuing its sittings from that day until its proceedings are formally adjourned. At the moment, it ends each day by suspending rather than adjourning. It will continue on until a motion that the Senate adjourns at a specific time (i.e. either immediately or at a pre-determined time) is passed. This requires a majority vote. Assuming none of Greens,Xenophon, Nationals or Fielding vote for an adjournment (or a guillotining of debate), the government would need 7 Libs (out of 32)to force either an adjournment or a guillotine.

If any of these guys believed there was a genuine threat from global warming, they would have negotiated with the Greens and delivered a plain and simple carbon tax. ETS is the action you take when you want to pretend to be doing something but actually just waste a lot of money in paper shuffling exercises and hidden taxes.

Personally, the closer I look at the AGW science, the less it looks like anything I would recognise as science, but I don’t expect everyone to come to the same conclusion as myself. I do expect people to act out of integrity based on a genuine study of the available facts (and sadly, even when the private emails of Phil Jones et al are now on public display, the raw data collected and whatever real science is behind that data still remains secret so no independent scrutineers can ever fully reproduce the current AGW results).