Abbott taunts Rudd over Ross Garnaut's push for interim carbon tax

TONY Abbott has seized on a push by Professor Ross Garnaut to embrace a new carbon tax to predict a humiliating backdown.

TONY Abbott has seized on a push by Kevin Rudd's former chief climate change adviser to embrace a new carbon tax if an emissions trading scheme cannot secure support, predicting the Prime Minister is on the verge of a humiliating backdown.

Mr Rudd has a deadline to declare by the end of this weekend whether Australia will lift an unconditional 5 per cent target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as result of the Copenhagen talks.

But to get there he needs a plan to deliver greenhouse gas emissions reductions with an emissions trading scheme stalled in the Senate and likely to be rejected again when Parliament resumes.

The Prime Minister's former chief climate change minister Ross Garnaut is urging the government to act by setting a fixed $20 a tonne price, an effective carbon tax.

The Opposition Leader said today it was “very significant that Professor Garnaut has urged the government to dump its emissions trading scheme”.

“Of course climate change, the Prime Minister kept telling us on numerous occasions last year, was the greatest moral challenge of our time. He tried to bully the parliament into passing that legislation before Christmas,” Mr Abbott said.

“He has threatened to bring it back now in the new year. I notice that it was not on the parliamentary notice paper that was published this week and I call on the Prime Minister to come clean and tell us exactly what his intentions are in respect of the emissions trading legislation, and I suspect that we are on the verge of a humiliating backdown by Prime Minister Rudd who I suspect will not bring this legislation back because he fears its failure yet again, particularly in the new climate created by Copenhagen.”

Professor Garnaut said today he still backed an ETS, but believed Australia needed to act to set an example to the world.

“Well, I am advocating passing of the ETS, but starting with a fixed price, which can remain fixed until such time as a satisfactory international basis for setting firm, quantitative targets,” Professor Garnaut told ABC Radio today.

“While you have a fixed price you wouldn't have fluctuations, you'd move to a floating price once you had the international context for trade in permits.”

It's a scheme advocated by the Greens recently as an interim measure. But Professor Garnaut has also taken a swipe at Mr Abbott's push to reduce emissions by regulation and “practical” measures.

“Undoubtedly you can reduce emissions through regulation and you could reduce them a lot through regulation it's just that it is much more expensive,” Professor Garnaut said today. “Bureaucrats are not as good at finding the cheap ways of doing things as a market.”

Some countries are already backpedalling on the agreement reached at Copenhagen for countries to name a figure, with the UN's chief climate change official conceding it is a “soft deadline” and some countries can opt out of the deadline but opt in to the Copenhagen Accord earler.

Rudd government sources maintain the Prime Minister will honour his pledge to name the target by January 31.

Professor Garnaut has suggested Mr Rudd double the unconditional target of 5 per cent to 10 per cent with a conditional target of up to 18 per cent that could be adjusted upwards or downwards depending on world action.