The world's first climate change election

The Australian federal election of 2007 has been described by political commentators and political scientists internationally as ‘the world's first climate change election'. This paper assesses this claim with an analysis of the significance of climate change as an issue in the 2007 election. It traces the increasing importance of climate change as a public issue during 2006, with the release of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth and the publication of The Stern Review by Nicholas Stern, a former Chief Economist of the World Bank and the Advisor to the UK Government on Economics and Development. It considers too the growing anger on the part of many Australians about the environmental record of the Howard governments, which was manifested in the proliferation of grassroots Climate Action Groups from around 2003 onwards. It describes the contending parties' policies on climate change at the election and considers the extent to which these policies indicate responsiveness to public opinion polls that indicated serious levels of concern about climate change. This examination of the importance of the climate change issue at the election and the balance of forces in relation to the issue will be used to establish a framework in which to assess the extent to which people's expectations about climate change policy initiatives are currently being met-or not-by the Rudd Government