Australia came very close to having a federal election in March. It would have been a double dissolution election, only the seventh since Federation. The Senate had rejected Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme on December 2. It was the second time.
Rudd now had his trigger and his cause. For the Prime Minister, dealing with climate change was a mandate issue. His resolve was firming.
Election preparations gathered momentum. Major blocs of TV ad space were booked for a campaign in February and March, according to word in the industry.
Labor's poll figures were strong. In the Newspoll in the first week of December, immediately after Tony Abbott took the Liberal leadership on a specific mission to block the emissions trading scheme, Labor had a tremendous lead.
Kevin Rudd was preferred to Tony Abbott as prime minister by an overwhelming 60 per cent to 23 per cent. On the count that matters most, the one that decides elections, Labor had 56 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote to the Coalition's 44 per cent. On these numbers, Labor could have expected to increase its majority in the Parliament by as many as a dozen seats.
Rudd's stated view about parliamentary terms was the same as John Howard's - that governments should serve, as closely as possible, their full three years. But this was an exceptional circumstance.
Rudd had long asserted that climate change was ''the great economic and moral challenge of our time''. And he had made clear that it was not just another policy. It was personal: ''We had deeply held views within our family. Therese and the kids have a deep conviction and view about the need to act.''
He had earlier told political intimates that he had been careful to hoard his popularity for two great causes. Although he had been criticised for avoiding tough decisions merely to retain his popularity, he had explained privately that he was husbanding his poll strength for the really big issues. And they were? One was climate change. The other was tax reform.
Here was crunch time for the first of those. The clash with the Senate over the emissions trading scheme was the test of the very purpose and point of Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister.
For the same reason, he threw himself into the international negotiations over a new carbon-cutting treaty in Copenhagen. He spent months working the issue in late-night phone calls with presidents and prime ministers. Rudd's determination so impressed other leaders that he was named one of two ''friends of the chair'' to help broker a deal at Copenhagen.
So what happened? The Copenhagen conference of 190 governments collapsed in what Sweden's Environment Minister, Andreas Carlgren, called a ''great failure''.
Nations agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, but would not agree on binding carbon-cutting targets to meet that commitment.
The failure set off recriminations between the world's great powers - the Europeans blamed the Americans and Chinese, the Americans blamed the Chinese, and the Chinese blamed the Europeans and the Americans and all the countries of the rich world - and repercussions everywhere.
In Australia, Tony Abbott's opposition crowed that it had been right to block Rudd from unilaterally committing to cutting carbon output by 5 per cent by 2020 in the absence of a global treaty. This helped solidify a fractured Coalition behind Abbott's leadership.
By going from an acclaimed conference of ''Hopenhagen'' to a dismal outcome of ''Nopenhagen'', this failure of global political will dealt the Rudd plan a serious blow. It was a bitter personal disappointment to Rudd and it gave him pause.
But, by itself, this was still not enough to deter Rudd from pursuing a double dissolution election on the issue. He would have fought the election on climate change, but also on Abbott's lack of economic credentials and erraticism, Abbott as a risk.
In the meantime, the Liberal Party heard about the Labor TV ad bookings. Abbott made sure to stay on the airwaves through the Christmas holidays and, apart from a few days at the beach, kept working in the expectation of a possible early election. He intensified his campaign against Rudd's ''great big new tax,'' as he called the emissions trading scheme.
Events continued to conspire against Rudd's plan for the scheme. Controversy over the credibility of some climate change research gathered momentum. The climate change sceptics went into a frenzy over the leaking of emails from an important centre of research, Britain's East Anglia University, suggesting that evidence might have been falsified, the so-called ''Climategate''.
A House of Commons inquiry would later find that there was no evidence of scientific malpractice or fraud, but that didn't happen until the end of March.
The disclosure in January of planned increases in NSW electricity prices was another blow against the Rudd plan. The news that EnergyAustralia customers would be paying up an extra $727 a year by 2013, those of Integral Energy an extra $554 and Country Energy $893 was seized by climate sceptics to scare voters.
The main reason for the proposed increases was not the ETS, which would account for about a third of the rise, but the need to build huge amounts of new power infrastructure in a long-neglected industry. But the anti-ETS lobby deliberately and misleadingly conflated the two.
The energy and persistence of the ant-ETS lobby seemed to overwhelm the government.
By January, Rudd was starting to doubt he could fight and win an election on the ETS. As the difficulties mounted, the Labor Party secretariat urged the Prime Minister to dump the plan.
The ''retail politics'' of fighting off a scare campaign on electricity prices and the cost of living were too hard. Too many seats would be vulnerable, in the outer-western suburbs of Sydney, but also the coal and electricity industry-affected seats in NSW, Queensland and Victoria. Labor would lose power with the loss of eight seats. In three of its tightest marginal seats - Dawson, Robertson and Bass - the incumbent Labor members are standing down and the party is extra-vulnerable.
In any case, even a victory in a double dissolution election would not guarantee Rudd a majority in the Senate. In all likelihood, the Greens would be the biggest winners in the upper house, and they were implacably opposed to the ETS.
Debate raged inside the government and Rudd hesitated. The conspiracy of events and counsel of pragmatism overpowered Rudd's own sense of political purpose. His confidence in his own ability to run a successful campaign in the face of a big scare wavered. January drew to a close and the option of an early election died with it.
Once the option of an early double dissolution election was dead, Rudd's agenda changed. The next election would no longer be fought principally on climate change. As with almost all federal elections, the principal issue would be economic management. Rudd decided that health and hospitals reform would be the second dominant theme in his campaign for re-election.
The general assumption of the political class was that Rudd would add the ETS to the slate of campaign issues and fight for it in the next Parliament, but within the inner circle of the government there was agitation to get it out of the election altogether. Its fate remained in limbo until the government needed to decide how to treat it in the federal budget.
The Herald's Lenore Taylor disclosed on April 27 that Rudd's kitchen cabinet - Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner - had decided to defer any further action on the ETS until the end of 2012 at the earliest.
This decision has turned out to be the most important event in the life of the Rudd government. It has galvanised the fastest collapse of support for a prime minister in the 20-year history of Newspoll and one of the two sharpest recoils from a prime minister in the 40 years of the Nielsen poll.
He had hoarded popularity to wage a fight on a big issue, but, ironically, he has lost his popularity by failing to attempt the fight.
The electorate wants a leader with the courage of his, or her, convictions. Rudd instead allowed one of his deepest commitments to become immersed in the counsels of political pragmatism. He will probably survive, but it is the most excruciating lesson of his political life.
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