THE federal opposition has demanded that Kevin Rudd follow the US President, Barack Obama, and wave the white flag on his emissions trading scheme.
With the climate change debate now hopelessly deadlocked in the Australian Parliament, the Coalition took heart yesterday from US reports that Mr Obama might abandon his cap-and-trade scheme because of an obstinate Senate.
As the opposition used the reports to ramp up attacks on Labor's scheme, the government brandished departmental figures that purported to show the cost of the Coalition's alternative scheme over 10 years would be $27 billion, not the $10 billion it had claimed.
Mr Obama, who will visit Australia late next month, told reporters in the US that he still believed in putting a price on carbon to reduce emissions but he accepted that he might have to abandon the idea.
He said he would persist with having Congress pass another element of his greenhouse gas abatement package that offers incentives to move to clean energy. The same principle is behind the opposition's scheme. ''We may be able to separate these things out,'' Mr Obama was reported as saying. ''The concept of incentivising clean energy so that it's the cheaper, more effective kind of energy, is one that is proven to work and is actually a market-based approach.''
The opposition climate change spokesman, Greg Hunt, said: ''This is a strike at the very heart of the Prime Minister's [ETS].''
Mr Rudd showed no sign of withdrawal. ''It's called the Senate,'' he said of Mr Obama's dilemma. ''The Senate in the United States is not necessarily going to be accommodating.''
The emissions trading scheme legislation is back in Parliament and will pass the House of Representatives next week but has next to no hope of passing the Senate.
The Coalition stepped up its assault yesterday by focusing on the impact an ETS would have on the cost of living. The Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, and the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, visited a Canberra supermarket to complain about the price of food and warn that it would be higher under the ETS.
In scenes reminiscent of Labor's attacks on the GST a decade ago, the Coalition used Parliament to try to embarrass Mr Rudd with examples of workers and families who would be left out of pocket, despite generous compensation under the ETS.
Mr Rudd did not give direct answers to questions about specific examples and stuck to a broad guarantee that of the 8.8 million families in Australia, 8.1 million would receive compensation. He said individual circumstances would vary because of different tax and welfare arrangements, but he said that no pensioner would be worse off.
A departmental assessment of the Coalition scheme, which would pay firms that chose to cut emissions, found it would fall well short of the 140 million tonnes of carbon dioxide it was supposed to reduce by 2020.
Instead of emissions falling by 5 per cent on 1990 levels under the Coalition plan, they would rise by 13 per cent. This meant the cost of the scheme would blow out to $27 billion if cuts of 5 per cent were to be believed.
Mr Hunt produced advice from Frontier Economics to dispute the departmental claims.
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