Page 132 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

10 FIGHTING FOR COAL: PUBLIC RELATIONS … 121

defeated. The government then conducted further negotiations with the
conservative opposition led by Malcolm Turnbull. However, these broke
down when the conservatives elected a new leader, Tony Abbott, who was on
record as claiming that climate change science was ‘crap’ and was strongly
opposed to the ETS (Readfearn 2014). Chief Executive of the Minerals
Council of Australia, Mitchell Hooke, would later boast to journalists about
his role in changing the leadership of the parliamentary Opposition, claiming
that the public relations campaign from the mining lobby had emboldened
climate change sceptics with the Coalition to oppose their leader and his
support for the Rudd government’s ETS (Grigg 2010a, b, c).
With Tony Abbott in charge of the parliamentary Opposition, the Rudd
government’s final attempt to pass the CPRS was defeated in December
2009, just before the unsuccessful UN conference on climate change in
Copenhagen. By April 2010 the Rudd government publicly dropped any
further proposals for an emissions trading scheme. This back down on
climate policy reform damaged Prime Minister Rudd’s credibility with
large parts of the Australian electorate. His popularity and leadership were
further damaged after the mining lobby launched a new advocacy adver-
tising campaign against the government’s proposal for a profits tax for the
mining industry (McKnight and Hobbs 2013). This second campaign by
the mining lobby further eroded the prime minister’s approval rating in the
opinion polls and precipitated a leadership crisis in the government. Events
came to a head in June 2010, with Kevin Rudd replaced as leader (and
Prime Minister) by his deputy, Julia Gillard (McKnight and Hobbs 2013).
Following Rudd’s removal, Prime Minister Julia Gillard proceeded to
negotiate a much more modest mining tax with the mining lobby in order
to end their advertising campaign against the government. The design of
this new tax strongly favoured the commercial interests of the big multi-
national mining conglomerates that had been funding the industry’s
advertising campaign, by including different forms of tax concessions for
“mature projects” (Cleary 2011, p. 78). Having negotiated a truce with
the powerful mining lobby, Gillard then moved to consolidate her lead-
ership as prime minister by calling a federal election for August 2010.
However, Gillard’s truce with the big multinational mining conglom-
erates would not last. A close election resulted in a ‘hung parliament’,an
outcome which gave neither of the major political parties enough seats in
the House of Representatives to form a government in their own right.
The inconclusive result in the election, forced Gillard to build alliances with
independent parliamentarians and the Greens party in order to return