AN old lesson all governments have to learn anew is that it is the election promises you keep that are likeliest to get you into trouble. It is a lesson Kevin Rudd is learning the hard way, with his ignominious retreat from his (always delusional) ambition to make Australia a world leader in its response to global warming.

It has been obvious for months that rushing ahead with a clearly flawed carbon trading scheme, one that would have serious adverse consequences for jobs and economic activity in the midst of what Rudd and Wayne Swan refer to, correctly, as the worst global recession since the Depression of the 1930s, was an act of national irresponsibility. However, the Rudd Government appeared to be living in a parallel universe.

The Treasurer likes to say that the world changed in September last year, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a near meltdown in global financial markets and a precipitate decline in economic activity.

Yet in December last year, when the escalation of the crisis was frightening governments and central banks across the world, Rudd and his Climate Change Minister Penny Wong were telling us it would be reckless and irresponsible for our economy and environment to delay the introduction of an emissions trading scheme.

So, what changed? Or as Rudd was asked at his press conference on Monday: “Why isn’t today’s decision reckless and irresponsible?” His reply was unusually short, perhaps indicating irritation at this impertinence.

“Well, what we’ve had is a deepening of the global financial crisis, which has now become a global economic crisis and the worst recession in three quarters of a century. That’s what happened.” Oh, really?

Delaying the introduction of an ETS is a sensible decision but it should have been made months ago. Presumably it has been made now because the political risks of pushing ahead have become unacceptable. There has been a rising chorus of complaint from business and Labor’s legislation faced certain defeat in the Senate.

The Government has resorted to heavy political spin and artful manipulation of interest groups to minimise the damage. At his press conference, Rudd helpfully identified the groups the Government spent a lot of time massaging ahead of its announcement, to give it political cover for its embarrassing backflip.

These were, in order, the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group, the Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF, the Climate Institute, the ACTU and the Australian Council of Social Service.

The last five are obvious allies of the Government on climate change, if now somewhat disillusioned ones. But you may have thought the BCA and the AIG would have seen the opportunity to take a much harder line on the threat the Government’s scheme posed for many of their members. But no, both rushed forth to compliment the Government on its decision and urge support for its proposal to push its (amended) legislation through parliament as quickly as possible.

A few months ago John Roskam, executive director of conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, posed some interesting questions: What are business organisations for? Do they exist so their chief executives can sit on government advisory boards and have afternoon tea at the Lodge? Or is their purpose to represent the interests of enterprises and employers?

Not the latter, it would seem. As Roskam also has observed, business is to blame for allowing the ETS juggernaut to progress as far as it has: “There’s not a single significant business association in the country that has opposed the notion that Australia should have an ETS.”

They will protest, of course, that they have succeeded in winning delay and cash handouts, and that their objective is to provide certainty for business about future investment plans. But there is no certainty in the Rudd Government’s plans. Nor can there be, as the outcomes that really matter are out of its hands and have to be determined internationally.

To be fair, some business organisations have expressed considerable scepticism about the ETS, notably the Minerals Council of Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as have leading companies. The MCA, for example, recognises the promised certainty as an illusion, “a temporary stay of execution for thousands of mining jobs and billions of dollars in investment”.

None has gone so far as the IPA in calling for the ETS to be scrapped in the absence of a comprehensive international agreement to reduce carbon emissions, and realistically there is not much chance of that.

But the Rudd Government’s backdown gives the lie to all the hysterical claims by it and others that immediate action is needed to save the planet. Instead Australia should take the opportunity to have a comprehensive, independent, review of the Government’s emissions trading plans, the alternatives, the Government’s modelling of the economic effects, and challenges to the so-called scientific consensus on global warming.

The report on the Government’s ETS by economist David Pearce of the Centre for International Economics for the federal Opposition exposes a range of serious problems and risks with the present scheme. In particular, the scheme fails to offer any rigorous assessment of the transitional costs of moving to a low carbon future.

These transitional costs for an economy such as Australia’s – with its abundant carbon-based energy resources, its energy-intensive industry structure, coal-based electricity generation industry and its coal and gas exports – are potentially large and the associated risks considerable.

Pearce suggests the Productivity Commission should be asked to examine the Government’s scheme and alternatives, a suggestion taken up by Malcolm Turnbull and which industry should get behind.

The terms of reference for such an inquiry should let the commission start with a clean slate and not have its hands tied by government-imposed policy assumptions. And no pre-emptive legislation should be passed ahead of the international climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of the year.

If that conference fails to come up with a comprehensive agreement on emissions control that includes India and China, as seems likely, then it’s back to the drawing board and the commission’s inquiry can inform a new course for policy here.

VERY few people have ever seen Australia’s extremely rare Eastern Ground Parrot, noted for its beauty. They are found only in dense thickets of bush on a few patches of heath country along the eastern seaboard.

Shy and secretive, making their tunnels and nests in the undergrowth, Ground Parrots are almost impossible to find.

Until now. Traditionally the only way to find a ground parrot or to monitor their density has been to listen at dusk for their calls or have a line of a dozen or more people beating through the scrub to flush them out. Even then, they only fly briefly before scurrying back into their hiding places. They would much rather walk than fly.

But Australian scientists are forging the use of new technology which will allow them to map the numbers and whereabouts of some of Australia’s most threatened wildlife _ referred to as “cryptic” species because they are so hard to see and so little is known about them.

The Barren Grounds Nature Reserve on the Illawarra escarpment south of Sydney is one of the only places where the Eastern Ground Parrots, which resemble giant green budgerigars with black and yellow flecking and a red bar on their forehead, are found in any significant numbers. Even then visitors and bird enthusiasts are very hard put to find them.

Dr Elizabeth Tasker from the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change is pioneering the use of a new machine known as the Song Meter, sophisticated listening devices which can be left in the bush for months at a time and pre-programmed to record at specific times of the day. The machines can be programmed to automatically adjust to the shifting seasons, so at Barren Grounds for instance, the Song Meter will record for about an hour at sunset.

The project, known as the Automated Acoustic Monitoring of Threatened Fauna study, is being funded by the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife. It builds on a previous study with the UNSW, University of Wollongong and Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment Management Authority.

The Song Meters were developed in the US and have only begun to be used around the world over the past year. Australian scientists are among the first to use it as a monitoring tool for rare and endangered species.

The key advance on previous audio monitoring is that the new equipment is compact and lightweight and the call recognition software is easily adaptable to identify new species.

By placing several of the Song Meters in an area, the data received can be triangulated to identify exactly where the birds are and their likely numbers. Software being developed at the University of Wollongong will allow signals from multiple stations to be combined to help locate the animals.

Ultimately the technology could have many different uses; including expanding the hunt for the mysterious Night Parrot of Central Australia, closely related to the Eastern Ground Parrot but feared extinct. Like the Ground Parrot, its rarity and shy and secretive behaviour in remote areas has until now made it extremely expensive to research. “Ornithologists have been searching for the Night Parrot for years, but it is just so rare the chance of being in the right place at the right time is very small,” Dr Tasker said. “It may turn out not to be extinct; and these units are our best chance to find out whether it has survived.”

Disputes between conservationists and developers over whether threatened species exist on a particular site could also be resolved through its use.

Dr Tasker said if the Ground Parrot study proved successful, the technology had great potential to be used across a range of species, particularly birds and frogs because of their distinctive calls. The even rarer Eastern Bristlebird, said to look and behave more like a bush rat than a bird, is likely to be next.

But all that is in the future. The Ground Parrots at Barren Grounds, where their calls can be heard at dawn and dusk, are the first species to be monitored in this manner.

Dr Tasker said the power of the power of this tool is that it greatly broadened their ability to study rare and cryptic species. “In studying rare animals you are really limited to where and how often you can get access, so surveys tend to be along roads,” she said. “But a lot of habitats, such as for the Ground Parrot, have no ready access.

“Another beauty of the technology is you can leave these passive listening devices out for weeks or months. The software can sift through months of recordings in minutes, giving you a much better idea of how many birds are there.”

The old fashioned method of counting Ground Parrots by flushing them out or by listening for them has already indicated there has been a steady decline in numbers since the last fires swept through Barren Grounds in 1983. The birds are fire sensitive, increasing rapidly in number after a fire because of the diversity of vegetation that thrives after a burn.

It was Dr Tasker’s work as a fire ecologist which led to her interest in Ground Parrots. She said knowing the fire thresholds for threatened species was essential for their management and survival, with the relationship of many frogs to fires being particularly poorly known.

“There are a whole bunch of these cryptic species threatened by fire; either they need fire for maintenance of diversity of vegetation, or they are easily damaged by it. How often bushland is burnt makes a real difference to what species survive.

“This research can help us determine, for instance, when conducting a controlled burn how much of an area should be burnt at any one time.”

Research assistant Jessica Bryant, who did her Honours degree in science on the impacts of walking dogs on birds, said there had been very little work done on the impact of fire on Australian animals. “The only way we can determine the appropriate fire regime is to know more about the populations. There is a big gap in our knowledge of threatened species.

“Traditional techniques were very labour intensive.”

Funder of the project, Leonie Gale, CEO of the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife, said the project could revolutionise the way threatened species were monitored, located and protected.

“There is really very little money around for scientific research and remarkably little is known about Australias rarest critters,” she said. “Government will often not fund these sorts of projects because they are high risk, they aren’t proven and might not work. We fund the iffy stuff, the catalysing projects. I was inspired by the credentials of those proposing the project. This is a real first. It is not being done anywhere else in the world.

“Other organisations set aside land for these species that they fence off to keep the animals safe and study them in what resembles their original native environment, but rather than looking at animals like specimens in a petri dish our focus is on learning about the animals in the wild, where they have to cope with many threats and changed habitats.

“By using acoustic monitoring we can find out where these animals are without intrusion and can work out how many are present in any particular location.

“Australia will lose many species in the next 30 years; this is a remote management tool for threatened species which could help stop that happening.”