Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) Share this | Hansard source

When we publish the details of the carbon price mechanism and the entirety of the package, the government will make available the financials in relation to the carbon price mechanism. We are working from a set of principles that have been made public and that have been agreed in the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. That included budget neutrality, or revenue neutrality, for the scheme for a number of the measures that were anticipated within it.

We have done an extraordinary amount of work over the last seven or eight months within the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee to devise a range of the measures that would operate for a carbon price. We published in February of this year the proposed framework for the carbon price mechanism. It is an emissions trading scheme that commences with a fixed price period of between three to five years.

There is in contemplation, within the principles that have been enunciated by the multiparty committee, the necessity for a number of things to occur. One of them is to ensure that households are assisted to meet the anticipated price impacts of a carbon price being introduced into the economy. The government from its standpoint has made clear, as I indicated in an earlier answer, that at least half of the revenue from the carbon price mechanism would be used to assist pensioners and low- and middle-income households with what we anticipate to be modest cost impacts.

In addition to that, a number of other measures generally—that I also adverted to in an earlier answer—are being contemplated within the broad description of support for jobs and competitiveness within the trade-exposed and emissions-intensive parts of the economy. This will be very important. The government for its part is contemplating a significant level of assistance for those industries that are in the emissions-intensive trade-exposed part of the economy. This will be important from the standpoint of supporting Australian jobs and it will be an important disposition of part of the revenue, as it were, of a carbon price mechanism. Further to that there will be measures, as we have generally described, to support further efforts to drive towards clean energy and other climate change programs.

All of these categories are the subject of detailed discussion within the multiparty committee context. It is not appropriate for me to go into them in greater detail at this point in time nor in relation to the financials of the carbon price package. We are yet to settle on key elements of it, including until there is a final agreement on what the starting carbon price will be. These are all matters that we are discussing within the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee at the moment. When we do settle on a package we will make available not just the detail of each of the measures but also the financial implications of the measures that are taken. That is the government's commitment. We will continue to do the work. We are aiming to finalise this in the not too distant future and make the material available for consideration by the community, which is again why it is important that the government does communicate the detail of these matters to the members of the community in the way that we have foreshadowed.

This is, at the end of the day, I think, the most significant environmental and economic reform that a government will have undertaken. It is extremely important for the country's future. It is an important investment in the country's future as well. It will operate by obliging the largest emitters of carbon pollution in our economy—they number less than a thousand entities—to pay a carbon price for each tonne of pollution that they generate. That is an important distinction from the way that it is being misrepresented by the opposition. They are the largest emitters of carbon pollution in our economy that would have a liability under the carbon price mechanism and it is the revenue that is generated by the payment of that obligation that would support the general categories that I have described: the household assistance, the support for jobs and competitiveness, and the drive towards a clean energy economy.

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