Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she will exempt gasoline from a proposed carbon tax as she battles to reverse record-low public support for her climate change legislation.
“Petrol prices will not be touched by carbon pricing,” Gillard said in an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. television yesterday. The government is seeking to “do the right thing by Australian families struggling with cost-of- living pressures.”
Gillard is seeking to garner support for an emissions trading system in the world’s biggest coal exporter, where the number of Australians who say the nation should take action to fight climate change has slipped to a record low 41 percent, according to a Lowy Institute poll published on June 27.
Gillard needs the agreement of the Greens Party and three independent lawmakers to pass the plan through parliament. The Multiparty Climate Change Committee of lawmakers is deciding how to compensate Australian households and companies, including coal miners, and on investing in clean energy.
Opposition Liberal-National coalition leader Tony Abbott, who has said he will repeal the plan if he becomes prime minister, pledged on June 25 to deliver tax cuts without a levy on carbon.
“The carbon tax is the biggest single institutional change outside of wartime that this country has ever contemplated,” Abbott said July 2. “This prime minister is hell-bent on foisting this bad and unnecessary tax on our country.”
‘Scare Campaign’
The announcement of the gasoline exemption “debunked a major part of the scare campaign,” Treasurer Wayne Swan said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. “Introducing a major reform is never easy.”
The exemption won’t apply to large businesses that may pay extra through a fuel-credit system, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported yesterday, without saying where it got the information.
Each liter of gasoline used in a motor vehicle releases 2.3 kilograms (5.1 pounds) of carbon dioxide, according to information on the government’s website. The Australian transport industry accounts for about 13.5 percent of Australia’s total net greenhouse gas emissions, the website states.
“The Greens believe that fuel should have been in a carbon price mechanism,” Christine Milne, deputy leader of the Greens party, said at a press conference yesterday. “However, that was not the view” of the multiparty committee.
There were 721.1 motor vehicles per 1,000 residents in Australia as of March 31 last year, according to the statistics bureau.
Permanent Exemption
The gasoline exemption will be permanent, Gillard told ABC yesterday. “The design of this scheme is that petrol will be out now and out for the future.”
The government will offset entirely for nine out of 10 households the cost of a carbon price through tax cuts, extra payments to couples with children, and increased pensions, Gillard said on June 27. The assistance will go to about 7 million Australians, she said.
Australia’s trading system would be the world’s third after the European Union and New Zealand. Without a price on carbon, Australia’s emissions are forecast to reach more than 1 billion metric tons by 2050 from about 580 million tons last year, according to Swan’s statement.
Nuclear Power Unpopular
Some 39 percent of Australians polled by the Lowy Institute between March 30 and April 14 said they aren’t prepared to pay anything extra on their electricity bills to help solve climate change. The poll also showed 62 percent were against Australia building nuclear-power plants to cut emissions. The poll of 1,002 people had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Opponents of the carbon plan include the Minerals Council of Australia, which says it would destroy 126,000 jobs and threaten company investment. The Australian Coal Association says 18 coal mines may close in the next decade if the system is introduced and that it will be harder to attract investment.
