Tony Abbott's aggressive campaign against the carbon price appears to have worked: two-thirds of people say they will be worse off once it is introduced on July 1 - next Sunday.

A poll of 1000 people by the Climate Institute found 66 per cent of respondents thought they would be financially penalised, a concern for the Gillard government which has been selling its compensation package since the beginning of May.

''This reform has been caught up with more complex questions of mandate and trust as well as cost of living,'' the chief executive of the Climate Institute, John Connor, said.

''If anyone in government thinks that the technical fact that a lot of people are going to be compensated will restore support then they are kidding themselves … It will be hard yakka to rebuild people's interest in these issues [climate change].''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/the-abbott-effect-most-say-pollution-price-too-high-20120623-20uwa.html#ixzz1yelgbKam

In The Australian on May 26th, Chris Kenny argued in “Groupthink takes over at national broadcaster” that the ABC is in the thralls of the “alarmists”. He highlighted the feud between The Australian and ABC’s Media Watch over the way threatening emails to climate scientists at the Australian National University had been reported and portrayed as clear evidence of bias. Click here for Jonathan Holmes latest response, and a background on this exchange. But that aside, this piece will focus on Chris Kenny’s (and broadly the right wing media’s) key accusation that the ABC has a ‘left wing’ bias when it comes to climate change science.

First off, it should be stated that the proposition that promoting climate change science is somehow ‘left wing’ is, in itself, a fallacy. The science isn’t guided by a left or right dichotomy — it is based on the scientific method. The critique of left or right only comes into play when politicians are deciding on how they want to formulate their policy response to the science. For example: Labor’s Emissions Trading Scheme is a market based system that relies on price signals to allocate capital – a right wing approach – and the Coalition’s Direct Action Plan – where government would instead hand out taxpayers money to companies to reduce pollution – is a left wing approach. If the ABC advocated the Direct Action Plan policy every chance it got then the right wing commentariat would be correct in the ‘left wing’ accusations it makes. But the ABC does not do that. Curiously though, the pro-free market and pro-small government newspaper The Australian never writes about the horrors of the left wing Coalition policy, but will write disparagingly of Labor’s pro-market policy despite (one would assume) its natural predilection to embrace it (over the alternative).

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/business/media-2/how-the-abc-spreads-doubt-about-climate-change-science/