Saying goodbye to carbon folly

LABOR’S leader must learn from his predecessors’ mistakes.

NOT only is Bill Shorten in a muddle when it comes to border protection, the Labor leader is lost in a fog of CO2 on climate change policy. Labor is again on the wrong side of a major issue, having learned nothing from its heavy election defeat last September. The Opposition Leader is hugging close to the Greens, hanging on to the blighted carbon tax for dear life. Is Mr Shorten really proposing to go to the next election on a platform that includes a carbon tax, which has had a devastating effect on big industries — such as aluminium and carmaking — and pushed up the cost of electricity bills for households and business, without any change in the carbon intensity of that energy supply? Apparently, yes, even though the rest of the world is moving slowly on pricing carbon and Australia emits a mere 1.5 per cent of global CO2 emissions.

The Abbott government’s attempt to gag further debate on its carbon tax repeal was defeated in the Senate yesterday by Labor, Greens and three crossbench senators. Still, it appears the repeal of the tax will go through today. Had it not been for Labor’s political mismanagement, Greens’ bastardry and Julia Gillard’s carbon tax surprise switcheroo, Australia might have had a workable emissions trading scheme with a carbon price of about $6 a tonne, in line with other markets around the world, instead of a carbon price benchmark four times that rate. To add hypocrisy to Labor’s sins, like the Greens, this supposedly planet-sensitive outfit is also opposed to the re-indexation of fuel excise in the budget. Such a measure would not only repair the revenue base, it also would discourage, at the margin, vehicle use and reduce carbon pollution. Go figure.

Just like asylum-seeker policy, the carbon tax has broken the back of the ALP, leaving it way out of kilter with its traditional support base of manual workers and low to middle-income families from the suburbs. As a former secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Mr Shorten instinctively should be able to divine the interests of these voters. Yet here he is, leading Labor to another electoral dead end, trying to appeal to the narrow tastes and this week’s fads favoured by the Greens. That’s not how government, or policy respect, is won in this country.