The accounting lesson has been learned from Australia

Don’t tell anyone. But New Zealand’s Labour coalition is tooling up for the world’s first successful climate change election which means winning it.

The lesson has been learned from Australia’s all-party attempts to do the same thing.

The lesson learned is this.

Do not price the components costs of a single-issue climate change election because if you do this then the central policy of climate change will be lost in a welter of arguments mainly about the cost to the taxpayers.

Australia recently emerged from its most recent and fourth climate change general election and the proponent, on this occasion Labour, lost its sure-fire projected win doused and extinguished as it was in a tsunami of costings.

In New Zealand, in contrast, next year’s climate change general election, will steer clear of clogging and distracting accounting minutiae and instead will rely either implicitly or explicitly, it is still too early to tell, on the constellation of other issues attendant upon it.

The oil and gas embargo in New Zealand’s most prosperous province, Taranaki, emboldened the Labour-led coalition.

Ruthlessly and suddenly imposed on the heels of its general election win, the coalition in its bid to lock in its Green Party component, can justifiably hug itself and say to itself “we got away with it!”

Acquiescent and quiescent the newspaper chains have happily published glowing articles from government agencies to the effect that things like craft breweries and pastry shops will fill the vacuum in Taranaki left by the energy industry, oil and gas version.

Climate change in Australia has consistently as an election clincher failed because its proponents with names such as Gillard, Rudd, Turnbull, and Shorten allowed their talisman to dissolve into accounting disarray.

The real-life debits gave the electorate the impression of exceeding the more abstract credits.

Premier Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated that devotion and singularity of purpose are not enough to bring about a successful climate change election.

In various recent times he lost a general election in this belief and also the leadership of the Australian Liberal Party.

If devotion, singularity of purpose and even sincerity cannot swing a successful climate change election then what will?

In Australia cooler heads suggest that the nation use its gigantic reserves of uranium to create nuclear energy.

In New Zealand with its still untapped reserves of hydro power, it is suggested that more dams are constructed.

To the climatists this kind of argument has as much appeal as a cup of baby’s blood.

So the Labour coalition knows that it needs to stick relentlessly to the central policy, the climate change branding, which in being branded needs no explanation and certainly no apologies.

The Labour-led coalition has been allowed to walk away from its operational policies such as the mass house construction scheme and also the capital gains tax plan.

It correctly sees its strength now as a moral one blended with empathy with an overlay of UN-style global conscience, all of which anyway sound rather phony emanating from anyone in the National Party.

A climate change election with all its virtuous subsidiary policies over for example transport, and nutrition will consistently keep the Labour coalition on the moral high ground.

The aim is to keep the National Party on the dark and nasty boggy ground below.

Here, the planning goes, the National opposition, not exactly brimming with charisma in the first place, will tie itself in knots and public disdain over the spoiling what-will-it-all-cost numbers?

And as a concurrent and especially unprofitable diversionary sideline, the decimal points and fractions of the computer-modelled climate change narrative. `

This pending climate change election will tell us that there is no Plan B.

Removing the opposition’s Plan B, the accounting one, features the simplicity so essential to success.