First published in Eureka Street on 29 September 2010.
If the Gillard Government manages to serve a full term — if it survives the random risks of MP health and mortality, and Tony Abbott's determined wrecking program — there is a good chance that Parliament will pass a well-designed, effective national carbon pricing policy into law in 2012.
Such an achievement would be a major policy success that Gillard could legitimately boast of, going into a 2013 full-term election.
Certainly the new Cabinet climate change advisory committee (announced on Monday) is unusually well-conceived, in terms of both mandate and membership.
It starts with the premise that some form of national carbon pricing is needed soon, in order that Australia not fall behind its international trading partners and competitors. This premise cuts the ground from under the feet of climate change deniers, making their arguments irrelevant.
Second, it breaks the destructive 'the best is the enemy of the good' Labor-Greens disputes of the Rudd years. The Greens are firmly in the tent, effectively co-chairing this committee. They have had to give up something important: the committee's mandate is to advise on the best method of carbon pricing — a carbon tax, or emissions trading scheme — not on what national emissions reduction targets to aim for.
But Labor has had to give up something important too. In opting under Rudd for an ETS, and discarding a carbon tax as politically impractical, Labor went a long way down the road of making politically necessary but painful compromises with industry special interests, in order to build broad industry support for their ETS approach (thereby losing the Greens).
All that hard-won achievement is now back in the melting pot. Business will be loath to lose the concessions and profit opportunities it had won under the Rudd ETS.
But Greg Combet made clear that the new committee is going back to the drawing board on whether an ETS or a carbon tax is the best way to go. In the post-Copenhagen international environment, all policy bets are open. Though the influential insider publication Climate Spectator opines that the ETS is likely to prevail, I am not so sure of this. It will be a real policy argument