The ALP’s nervous decision to shun their electoral mandate for a strong climate policy in favour of an apathetic “wait and see” approach cost Kevin Rudd his job. Confident of winning the election and thus spared of the need to take dramatic action, they are now trying to avoid frightening the horses by announcing a range of half-measures rather than anything that can be painted as a “great big new tax”. First things first: the Coalition’s climate policy is even worse, which is understandable given their reticence about the underlying science. They’re not going to punish business for something they don’t fully accept is a real problem. But to directly pay polluters to reduce their emissions with taxpayers’ money, rather than put a price on carbon, is so much more like a “great big new tax” than any emissions trading scheme that I’m surprised Tony Abbott can deliver the line with a straight face. The Labor policy is imperfect but at least it doesn’t reward polluters for polluting.

Two key ingredients that have been announced in recent days are a “climate commission” to report on the science and a “citizens’ assembly”, a sort of oversized focus group of 150 random citizens. Presumably they will be demographically screened to include the appropriate number of Howard battlers and working families – perhaps these lauded groups will even be overrepresented given their propensity for living in marginal seats. The idea has been panned in a lot of the media as a smokescreen for inaction and although I tend to agree that it won’t achieve a lot, I think the two new bodies are interesting from a science communication viewpoint. Here are a few thoughts on what they’re going to be and what might be better for the government and the country.

The climate commission is supposed to synthesise climate science and present findings to the public to provide a reliable basis for public opinion. But I don’t see how it’s going to do a better job than the organisations that already exist to fulfil this function: CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and to a lesser extent the Australian Academy of Science. These are all well established as reliable and non-partisan, whereas any new commission will take time to achieve the same public respect.

The commission might be most effective if it acts as more of a media watchdog on climate science and economics than as another producer of earnest pamphlets parroting IPCC reports. What the climate debate needs is an injection of rigour. The media mindset of finding two opposing views, even if one is obscure and baseless, placing them in an article and declaring it accurate and balanced doesn’t work for scientific discussions. A climate commission could have a genuine role if it ran big ads fact-checking claims on topics like the apparent cooling since 1998 and hypothetical job losses in carbon-intensive industries. These are the issues that undermine the community consensus that Julia Gillard wants before acting, not the technical aspects of climate change.

The citizens’ assembly could be valuable in guiding that sort of work by the commission. As a kind of mini-Peoria capturing the general opinions and knowledge of the country, it would provide good feedback on what messages were cutting through, whether for or against action. For this to work, though, the assembly would have to be genuinely typical and I don’t know if that would be possible. Being appointed to an assembly on climate change would automatically make most people do more to learn about it and pay it more attention in the media. Most previous work on community engagement for science decision-making – such as the Nanodialogues in the UK about nanotechnology – has included some component of education for the focus group, to see how their attitudes change after being involved in discussions with experts. This seems to be the model for the assembly too. This ultimately reduces their suitability as a barometer for the general population, who aren’t receiving such attention and remain more vulnerable to misinformation.

I’m also not exactly sure what can be achieved from a large assembly that could not be done through the usual system of polling and focus groups – besides generating a campaign announcement. It’s very different to something like the 2020 Summit where the whole point is that the participants weren’t typical, they were exceptional. Maybe a summit like that would be more helpful in actually generating ideas rather than just rubber-stamping or rejecting current policies based on whether they incite a vote-repelling fear of taxation. The whole idea is a bit too egalitarian – as Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin once said, “There go the people: I must follow them, for I am their leader.”