Many Australian businesses involved in clean energy and other sectors are benefiting from the price on carbon dioxide emissions, which will move to an emissions trading scheme in 2015. Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has said a coalition government would compensate businesses affected by the abolition of the carbon tax on a case-by-case basis. Now, as the Opposition prepares to take government, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey admits he is planning to compensate renewable energy firms for scrapping the carbon price: In the end some form of compensation was necessary to prevent a destabilsing pace of change. In my view they went so far as to actually compromise the efficiency of the price effects but that’s a matter of opinion.
This was a direct cost to the people of Australia to guarantee smooth implementation of the price. These industries – power and manufacturing mostly – were gifted free permits and rebates. In creating it, the Labor government had to ensure that those legacy industries that were most effected by the price changes were compensated. It is a relative pricing mechanism that makes greenhouse gas intensive energy more expensive and less-polluting energy less expensive. The Labor government has installed a carbon price. Both parties are committed to addressing this issue. Nobody in Canberra any longer disputes the balance of probabilities argument about human-induced climate change.
The idiocy of this is on display in several stories this morning that should make the blood boil for anyone committed to efficiency in public spending. Yet the Opposition, which is going to win the election in a doddle (if Newspoll has anything to say about it), has committed to dismantling both despite being in clear practical and philosophical agreement with the principles that drive the two policies. On the contrary, its two best policies are visionary in an economic and nation-building sense, these are the carbon price and the NBN. But that does not mean that all of its policies are bad and should be scrapped.
It was an abomination from birth, conceived in a deal with miners that was a breathtaking betrayal of the Australian public. Regular readers will know that I am no fan of the Gillard government.
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