How should we interpret narratives of political strategy for climate policy? A response to Pearse and Jackson

Abstract

ABSTRACT In my article in this journal entitled ‘Narratives and counter-narratives of political strategy: revisiting Australia's carbon pollution reduction scheme’, I offered an alternative interpretation of the failure of the Rudd government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, one in which the government's strategy of pursuing bipartisan agreement was not a miscalculation, but rather a reasonable course of action based on institutional norms and precedent. Here, I respond to two replies to that original article. I attempt to set my argument in the context of the current (2022) political environment, in which Labor has returned to government with a narrow majority, flanked by an increasingly popular Green Party.