Kevin Rudd has won deserved praise for admitting that he made a mistake in ditching his plans to put a price on carbon before the last election. But his real mistake ran far deeper and started much earlier.

In Bali at the UNFCCC meeting in December 2007, Mr Rudd received a standing ovation as the world welcomed Australia's decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. With that applause still ringing in his ears, he came home and decided to work with the Coalition to deliver policy and not the Greens, the only political party in the parliament who had consistently argued for strong action on climate change. His failure to leave all his options open was the beginning of the end.

Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Elizabeth Farrelly recently hit the nail on the head when asking why we are happy to play gastronomic Russian Roulette by eating without question any morsel offered us on a plate.
She was questioning why many of us blissfully indulge in healthy looking meals without any thought for the chemistry set that lies within, and was dismayed that a recent government-commissioned review of food labelling was happy for this to continue unabated.
In his much-anticipated report on food labelling, former Federal Health Minister, Neil Blewett, made 61 recommendations, including improved country of origin labelling, and the adoption of a Greens' traffic light labelling system, meaning shoppers will know immediately if their food is healthy, or not.
But hidden among the recommendations is a gaping black hole giving a green light for genetic modification and extraneous chemical additives without a requirement to fully disclose this on the label.

Senator Milne's press conference on Friday lasted a 30 mins, covered a great deal of detail on the carbon price statement, how the process works, the level of a carbon price, the level and design of compensation, offsets, green carbon, nuclear power, how agriculture will be counted, what Christine might personally do to change her behaviour after a carbon price is introduced and more.

21 minutes and 14 seconds into the press conference, transport is first mentioned in response to a direct question from a journalist.

The floods that have devastated Queensland and parts of NSW, Victoria and Tasmania have taken a terrible toll with lives lost, homes, businesses and crops destroyed and whole communities faced with the overwhelming task of rebuilding and starting again. The Australian Greens, like all Australians want to do everything in our power to reach out to those affected, to offer them our support and to help in whatever way we can.

We support the immediate payments of flood relief and we know that people will be worrying about whether their home and business insurance will cover the damages and how they will cope beginning again. We know that community leaders will be seeking financial support from the state and federal governments to replace critical infrastructure like bridges, roads, water and sewerage treatment plants. The Treasurer Wayne Swan has already said that the financial costs will make it hard to meet the Government's aim to be back in surplus by 2013 without cutting other areas of the budget.

So to ensure that the federal government has sufficient funds to meet the costs of reconstruction without cutting other areas such as health and education, Senator Brown called for the federal government to restore the full Super Profits tax as it applies to coal mining companies.

Many people have been asking about the Greens position on reform of the National Electricity Market - the NEM.

While this is not a topic that is of much interest to mainstream media, it is hugely important because the design and regulation of NEM fails to create any incentive to improve energy efficiency - in fact it creates barriers to energy efficiency and peak demand reductions, as well as both large renewable energy generators and small distributed co-generation systems.

This is a problem because electricity prices, which have already jumped significantly in recent years, are expected to rise by up to 42 per cent over the next few years (even before the imposition of carbon pricing). This is because the monopolies that manage the electricity grid are planning to spend more than $40 billion on expanding and augmenting the network.

Rather than spending billions on more generators and expanding the electricity grid to meet increasing demand, what we should be doing is investing in energy efficiency to avoid the need for new generators and grid augmentation in the first place. From the broader economy point of view, this is the much cheaper option.

As TV programs from Masterchef to Food Safari show, we Australians love our food. But many of us, including our governments, are complacent about where it is grown and who produces it.

While people discuss the threat of obesity in the suburbs and in the seat of power, nobody talks about the threat of global food scarcity. No one in Government seems worried about where the world will source its food or the consequences of shortages. Few are concerned about land being bought by overseas interests, about farmers being driven from the land by low farm gate prices and trade rules which discriminate against Australian growers. In fact, the Labor government in its 2010-11 budget cut programmes for natural resource management and land stewardship in the face of climate change and peak oil.

In the next month, Kevin Rudd faces a bleak choice - will he backflip on a commitment he made to his favourite global body, the G20 or will he open up a new front in the pitched battle with the mining industry?

The only comfort for the Prime Minister is that the dilemma is over an issue that, while very important in policy terms, has never managed to get much public traction: subsidies to fossil fuels.

In the debate around carbon pricing, both here in Australia and globally, one of the elephants in the room has long been the fact that, currently, the playing field is skewed dramatically in the direction of 'carbon discounting', with a multi-billion dollar array of fuel tax credits, exploration subsidies, fringe benefits tax concessions, accelerated depreciation, research grants and much more.

Every Australian knows that, if you have two credits cards, it is very bad management to pay off your debt on one of them by racking it up on the other.

Last night's Budget pulled down the national economic debt, but it continued the process of racking up our ecological debt.

Once again, the funds allocated to renewable energy, public transport and energy efficiency pale into insignificance next to the tens of billions to roads and the military.

On December 2 last year, after being blind-sided by the unexpected elevation of Tony Abbott to the Liberal Party leadership, the Rudd government made a hasty announcement that they may well come to regret - that they would bring back their twice-defeated emissions trading bill a third time as soon as Parliament resumed in February.

With the date swiftly approaching, blind Freddy could tell you that the opposition will not support the bills and the government is still making no attempt to negotiate amendments with the cross-bench. The whole exercise is looking like a fruitless, time-wasting political stunt.

This deadlock helps no-one. The community is denied action on the climate crisis, the business community is denied the investment certainty they crave, the government looks increasingly impotent and the opposition looks like spoilers.

There is a solution to this deadlock