Gillard's Citizen Assembly To Consider Carbon Tax

by Mary Swire, Tax-News.com, Hong Kong

26 July 2010

The Australian government has announced that a 150-strong Citizens’ Assembly will be appointed to examine the evidence on climate change, the case for action and the policy choices between a carbon tax, emissions trading scheme (ETS), or another approach to reducing pollution.

The government, in the person of the then Labor Party Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced in April this year that it had postponed the previously-proposed ETS until at least 2012. During the first days of the current election campaign, the Liberal Party opposition leader, Tony Abbott, confirmed that, as far as he was concerned, a coalition government would never introduce what he has called the “carbon tax” represented by the ETS, and that he would not revisit the coalition’s climate change policy before 2015.

Julia Gillard, the current Prime Minister, has now decided that her government needs to build community support for action on climate change through a 12-month process that directly involves a representative group of ordinary Australians through a so-called Citizens’ Assembly.

Its role will be “to provide an indicator to the nation of the progress of community consensus” with respect to a climate change policy. The Assembly’s work will be supported by evidence, analysis and access to views and positions from a wide range of sources, while the government will also establish a Climate Change Commission to inform the climate change debate further.

In reply to the idea of such an Assembly, Tony Abbott is particularly doubtful of its usefulness. He assumes that it is a “camouflage” to further the Labor Party’s wish for an ETS and their allies, the Greens, push for an interim carbon tax.

As he said in an interview, a Labor government, after the election, “will actually get something done (on climate change), and what that something will be is a carbon tax.” He added that, as far as the Citizens’ Assembly is concerned, he did not know why one is required when “we’ve got 150 people elected by the people in the Parliament. I mean, this is a camouflage for the coming carbon tax.”

With regard to the opposition’s climate change policy, he re-confirmed that he was “against hitting consumers with big new taxes”. He believes that the opposition’s strategy of direct action to reduce emissions, particularly on soil carbons, and of an emissions reduction fund to support CO2 emissions reduction activity by business and industry, is the better policy.

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