Abstract
Following the defeat of the Howard Government some consensus has emerged between the coalition and the incoming Rudd Government on the need to address climate change. The interim Garnaut Report found that climate change was occurring more rapidly than previously understood. Devising policy in response to climate change is a huge challenge for the new Rudd Government and one that is made much more difficult by the lack of substantive action from the previous government over a number of years despite increasingly clear warnings that the problem required urgent action. There are many models of the public policy process that describe or prescribe the way policy should be made. Despite the limitations of such models they do give some guidance to policymakers. One weakness is that they often fail to identify the central role of politics in the policy making process and the intersection between technical notions of good policy and partisan political imperatives. This paper will examine the policy process of the Howard Government on climate change and argue that at almost every stage political calculation trumped what would normally be regarded as good policy practice. It will also suggest that, ironically, the Howard Government's policy on climate change also failed the test of good politics.