Magic Pudding Solution

The Australian Prime Minister’s ironic nickname for solutions to climate change that rely on magically self-replenishing funds.

“Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd warned there was no ‘magic pudding’ solution to climate change on Thursday as he lashed out over the defeat of his flagship carbon-trading scheme,” Talek Harris reported for Agence France-Presse.

Rudd mocked the opposition Liberal Party’s reported plan to slash pollution with energy efficiency measures as a “bit of fairy dust” and called for “wiser heads” to pass the bill at the third attempt. …

“For the Liberals now to say that there is a magic pudding solutionon climate change, that somehow if you throw a bit of fairy dust at it and say that bang, it all happens, without any adjustment challenges, I don’t think that’s being fair dinkum,” he told reporters.

Mr. Rudd has repeatedly used the magic pudding analogy to parody the opposition’s climate change proposals as as both fanciful and unfunded. As Peter Hartcher explained in The Sydney Morning Herald:

The money would have to come from the magic pudding of Norman Lindsay’s children’s tale, the pudding that never ran out, the “cut and come again” feast.