Gillard boldly reignites Australia's climate debate

by David Hetherington, 18 April 2011

By announcing a tax on CO2 emmissions, Julia Gillard's Australian Labor Party has taken on the fight of its political life

Finally, the battlelines are drawn, and the contours of the political debate in Australia in 2011 are clear. It’s not an overstatement to say that Julia Gillard’s Labor government has embarked on the fight of its political life. The outcome will determine whether Gillard ends up a one-term Prime Minister or a reformist leader in the spirit of Labor heroes Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

The battle centres on carbon pricing. Against the wishes of business leaders, the labour movement and a majority of the electorate, the Gillard government has announced that it will place a tax on CO2 emissions from July 2012. This has lit the fuse on the most heated policy debate since the introduction of a consumption tax 12 years ago.

To understand the emotions this proposal has aroused, it’s helpful to reprise Australia’s schizophrenic relationship with emission reduction policy. Australia has vast, high quality reserves of coal which have underpinned the country’s economic development by providing cheap electricity. It is one of the world’s largest coal exporters. The flipside, of course, is that Australia is the world’s largest emitter of CO2 per head.

Given this, emission reduction policies were always going to be contested. Although a healthy minority of the public supported action on climate change, the conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol and for a decade chose not to attempt emissions reduction.

Then the public mood began to shift around Howard. Australia endured its worst drought in a century, which many associated with climate change, and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth helped join the dots. The Labor Opposition was promising to act on emissions, and voter support was swinging behind them. In response, Howard committed to introduce an emissions trading scheme (ETS). This meant that both sides of politics went to the 2007 election on a promise to introduce an ETS.

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