Christine Milne, leader of the Green Party in Australia, has been talking about the serious environmental issues that are affecting politics today. She claims that even if labour were re-elected, they would need the support of the coalition in order to make changes to the carbon pricing scheme, and the leader has warned against the idea of creating uncertainty about the pricing of carbon.
Whilst Rudd has claimed that he would ‘dump’ the carbon tax (the fixed price period on Australia’s carbon pricing scheme), others have claimed that this would be a much harder task to actually carry out.
The Gillard government actually examined the possibility of this option in some detail at one point, and then decided that it was against general wellness and wellbeing, as well as viability, to do so.
For a start, this move would require legislation to be in place. This legislation will not happen before an election is carried out because the parliament has risen, and Christine Milne has asserted that she would not support such a move.
If a Rudd government was to be elected, then, they would have to seek support from the Coalition if they were to change the legislation around carbon pricing. The fact that Tony Abbott has put so much time and effort into promising a repeal of the tax means that they would be forced to move forward with this, but the coalition would not necessarily offer the support that they seek.
In order to change the legislation, an annual cap on pollution has to be placed, so this issue would need to be concentrated on first, meaning that it would probably be at least July 2014 before any changes were due to be made, and this doesn’t make any sense as the price is due to change in July 2015 anyway.
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