Labor denies carbon tax talk as Abbott government seizes on leaked climate policy document

BRACE yourselves. A fresh row has erupted over Labor’s climate change policy — and this fight could be just as ugly as the last.

Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten visits a wind turbine manufacturer Vestas in Dandenong South, Victoria. Picture: Nicole Garmston

LABOR can expect more pain from a leaked internal document canvassing climate policy options which was ruthlessly lampooned as the carbon tax rising from the dead.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten dismissed reports of a new Labor carbon tax as “complete rubbish”.

But the government pounced on the leaked document, with Treasurer Joe Hockey saying someone obviously wanted to “kill Bill”.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Labor can’t be trusted not to introduce a “triple-whammy tax”.

“It shows Bill Shorten is in every respect a carbon copy of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard,” he said.

The document was leaked to the Daily Telegraph which devoted its front page to a caricature of Mr Shorten, Julia Gillard Kevin Rudd as zombies rising from the dead by a tombstone marked “RIP carbon tax 1.7.12 — 17.7.14.”

The report revealed the Labor opposition had produced a discussion paper proposing a two-pronged carbon tax on industry and households.

Mr Shorten leader said Labor was preparing a climate policy to take to the next election but denied it would involve a carbon tax.

“We believe in climate change, we don’t believe in passing the problems of pollution to future generations and our focus will be on renewable energy and there is going to be no carbon tax,” Mr Shorten said.

The leaked document has been described by Labor as a briefing paper, not a policy, which had not been discussed in shadow cabinet.

The paper includes proposals for vehicle emission standards, laws governing power plants and household energy efficiency targets.

Opposition spokesman Mark Butler said central to Labor’s policy would be an emissions trading scheme — placing a legal cap on pollution — and a commitment to ensure global warming does not exceed two degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrial levels.

Greg Combet, the former Climate Change minister in the Rudd-Gillard government, is now a climate change adviser to Bill Shorten and may have helped author the leaked document.

He denied Labor’s policy as a “tax”, but said it was time Australians understood the difference between a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme.

“I think it’s about time we got a bit more sophisticated,” Mr Combet told ABC’s Lateline.

“We obviously battled hard with this issue in government from 2010 to 2013 and the language of course is very important in the politics of it. But as a country I think we’ve got to have a bit more sophisticated discussion about this. And a tax is not an emissions trading scheme. They’re quite different things.

“A tax puts a fixed sort of dollar value on every tonne of pollution that’s produced and it’s levied like a tax. An emissions trading scheme is quite a different thing. It puts a cap on emissions in your economy.”

Labor Party leaders will debate climate policy at the ALP national conference in Melbourne later this month.

Either way, Labor now looks set to face a Coalition scare campaign.

Treasurer Joe Hockey said the leak showed internal division within Labor over carbon pricing and concerns about Mr Shorten’s flagging approval ratings.

“It would be madness for Bill Shorten to follow that path, but obviously someone wants to `kill Bill’ at the moment,” Mr Hockey told ABC TV.

Greg Combet says it is time Australia had a more sophisticated debate than last time.