Some perspective, please

Andrew Bolt, as well as the bunch of excitable commenters over at Catallaxy, are getting all worked up over an Essential Poll out today showing that a carbon pricing is not a popular idea with the voters.

Yet, given that only the intention to implement the tax/pricing scheme has been announced without the details, I find it hardly surprising that such a generic "new tax" announcement is not immediately popular.

The obvious comparison to make is to the introduction of a GST. A little bit of Googling and here's the Newpoll polling about it over a decade or so.

The percentage of voters "totally in favour" of GST was frequently in the mid 30's in the decade before, and shortly after, its introduction. This is exactly where a carbon tax is today, according to Essential.

Mind you, the successful introduction of a carbon price is almost certainly going to be with more complaint from business groups than the GST, so it's probably a harder political road that Labor will be taking than John Howard (although, of course, people were upset with him for changing his earlier undertaking on never having a GST.)

But still, at around 35% approval in the current circumstances, it is not as desperate a situation for Labor as many commentators are saying.

UPDATE: Newspoll today shows the expected decrease in Labor vote. Of course, the worsening primary vote is the worst feature for Labor, although at 46/54 TPP, this is hardly irrecoverable at this distance from an election. (Just look at the Newspolls Bolt himself showed recently for 2009.)

What happens ideally before the next election: a sensibly balanced carbon tax comes into effect, enough industry comes in behind it to make its removal impractical, tensions within the Coalition as to how to respond cause Abbott and the skeptics to lose control of the party, the pro-nuclear element within Labor changes party policy to allow nuclear power within Australia for environmental reasons, the Coalition does not disagree, the Coalition wins next election and dramatically winds back the National Broadband Network but keeps the ETS and starts the move to a major Australian nuclear power industry.

I can see just one or two potential problems with every step of the way, though!