KEY POINTS:
As Australia's warring politicians scramble to take the economic high ground after the latest interest rate rise, Labor will today try to shift focus on to the environment and green votes that will play a central role in the November 24 election.
Former rock star, long-time conservation activist and Labor environment spokesman Peter Garrett will go head-to-head with Environment and Water Resources Minister Malcolm Turnbull in a nationally televised debate.
Both are coming from behind, having been forced to support decisions and policies to which they were opposed - especially Turnbull, whose approval of a new pulp mill in Tasmania has unleashed a campaign that may cost him his marginal Sydney seat of Wentworth.
Labor has gained one important advantage in the deal to swap preferences with the Greens, and the natural inclination of most Greens supporters to give their second preference to the Opposition in their listing of favoured candidates.
Under Australia's preferential voting system, this in effect passes the vote to Labor, helping to boost the two-party preferred vote that decides the outcome of elections.
But a Newspoll in the Australian newspaper suggests that the ramparts of Labor's traditional environmental stronghold may be crumbling.
It found that in the past month perceptions of Labor as the nation's best environmental manager have dived 10 percentage points to an 18-month low of 29 per cent, only six percentage points ahead of the Government.
A substantial part of the blame for this lies with Garrett, recruited specifically to bolster Labor's Green credentials.
The former Midnight Oil lead singer and Australian Conservation Foundation president has made a series of highly embarrassing and politically damaging gaffes that have undermined his stature.
His support for Turnbull's approval of a new wood pulp mill in the marginal northern Tasmanian seat of Bass - a decision Garrett personally opposed - infuriated environmentalists and cost him the friendship of Greens leader Senator Bob Brown.
Labor backed the mill because of bitter experience in the last election, when former leader Mark Latham's Greens-friendly forests policy outraged loggers, pushed unions into Howard's camp, and cost the Opposition Bass and the neighbouring seat of Braddon.
More was to come. Discussing prospects for a new global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, Garrett committed a Labor Government to signing up for new reduction targets regardless of whether major polluters India and China joined.
While most Australians oppose Howard's refusal to ratify the existing Kyoto protocols on climate change and their targets and support Labor's promise to ratify, any suggestion that Australia's coal-heavy economy would be placed at a serious competitive disadvantage is politically dangerous.
Within hours, Rudd had forced Garrett to dump the idea.
Later, Garrett told a radio broadcaster in an airport lounge that once in power, Labor would dump its moderate policies and unveil its real agenda - akin to handing a stick of dynamite to Howard. An ABC gardening host said he had been told the same thing.
A sheepish Garrett apologised to Rudd and told the nation he had just been joking.
But on the other side of today's debating table, Turnbull has been having his own problems.
He was reported to have said in a private conversation that he "hated" the Tasmanian mill proposal he had publicly supported.
Further headlines came with claims that he had split Cabinet with an argument for ratification of the Kyoto protocols, on the basis that the Government had nothing to lose because Australia was on track to meet its targets anyway.
Turnbull was also accused of leaking the news himself, in a bid to shore up support in Wentworth.
Today, both Turnbull and Garrett will be desperately fighting to regain the initiative and the nation's green votes.
