A pretty good assessment, Chris. Though I think you're too kind to Rudd and his incompetent ministers.His good ministers were tainted by association.

There is a fallacy known in logic as "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" - "after this, therefore because of this" - the incorrect assumption that because something happens after something else it was caused by that first event. Thus the wrongly assumed causal connection between the ETS backdown and popularity.

The Left just can't admit it was a very bad policy in the first place, so they have to pretend everybody thought a great big tax on everything for zero impact on the climate was an excellent idea and were disappointed that Rudd had slunk away from it.

More likely the change in public opinion came at the end of almost two and a half years of over-hyped under achievements and outright catastrophes. People finally just woke up to the fact that they'd been conned. At very great expense. The economic stimulus package, for example, probably did more to stimulate the Chinese economy than ours. And we're still to find out the true cost of the NBN.

Rudd's long, boring, blubbering and embarrassing farewell speech claimed to list his "achievements". It was actually just a list of his press releases, most of which promised things that didn't actually happen. Shows how out of touch he was.

KenH,

We all know what a 'post hoc' fallacy is,however we can't be sure that the correlation between abandonment of the ETS and the fall in Rudd's popularity is not significant without surveying the reasons voters changed their opinions.So your claim of a post hoc error is premature.
How could Australia's economic stimulus package stimulate the Chinese economy? Are you under the mistaken impression that mining is a major part of our economy?