Nine Principles

Rudd put up an Emissions Trading Scheme of sorts. Turnbull "held a telephone hook-up of his front bench yesterday and secured agreement to nine conditions." Penny Wong said that these weren't proper amendments and refused to consider them.
Leaving aside everything to do with the actual merits of Turnbull's nine conditions, it's surely worthy of note that no newspaper or TV show that I can see actually thought we needed to see them. The most we got was from the Australian, which said "If accepted by the government, the conditions would offer extra compensation to coalminers, electricity generators and possibly other heavy industries such as steel, aluminium and cement. And farmers would pay nothing but possibly make money from their emission reduction efforts."

The principles ran to 420 words, not an impossible burden - less if cut. That's apparently though to be too much for us. All that was reported was the political events - dispute, proposal, rejection. All gladiatorial, nothing contemplating that policy could in itself be important.

That said, and maintaining a lack of consideration of the merits, Turnbull's principles were really crap as interventions into the debate. No hint of a connecting narrative, no overarching principles of which these specific points were examples, just a random walk through industry demands with absolutely no persuasive effect at all. I'd call it a wasted opportunity if it wasn't also true that Turnbull obviously picked the operations mode of the Australian media a lot better than I would have. I would have wasted my time trying to get something readable; he knew nobody would have a chance to read it and that all that counted was to be seen to be acting out a role.

The statement isn't even given any special prominence on the Liberal party website.

And of course yes, I would disagree with most of them as being too indulgent to large polluters, but I also disagree with much of the government bill for the same reasons, so I'm not sure how much difference it would make.