This Sunday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard will conclude what ABC journalist Annabel Crabb has described as its policy striptease over pricing carbon. After months of acrimonious public debate in which even scientists and economists copped stray punches, the Federal Government will finally detail the carbon scheme formulated by the multiparty climate change committee.
At this stage, the legislation is expected to pass both houses of Parliament. So why is Gillard taking the unusual step of making a statement on national television this weekend, followed by a five-week sales pitch during the parliamentary winter break?
Well, why wouldn't she? This is the fight of her political life.
No Greek tragedian could have written such a delicious twist. After reportedly convincing Kevin Rudd to defer the (flawed) Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, then stating at the 2010 election that she would not introduce a carbon tax, Gillard is now staking her government on a climate change policy that few completely understand and many resent.
She needs to successfully prosecute it if her government is to withstand further assaults from the Opposition regarding its 'mandate'. She also needs to insulate the public from the pro-industry ad campaigns that will surely hit television screens soon.
The carbon tax is a complicated sell. The main question people are asking, 'Will I be worse off?', does not have a brief, reassuring answer. Any emissions reduction scheme worth implementing is bound to hurt. It is no surprise that public discourse has focused on exemptions and compensations.
This is appropriate to a degree. The cost of any economic reform must be justified when its benefits are unclear in the public mind. People are likely to see initial price increases, before emissions-based price differentiation starts shifting them toward cheaper products that happen to be less-polluting.
With Treasury anticipating a blowout in the first couple of years of implementation before the scheme becomes budget neutral, it is not voter-friendly policy.
What gets obscured in all this is the idea that there is scientific and economic consensus around carbon reduction as a legitimate response to climate change. Markets around carbon credit are already being created in Europe and Asia. Gillard has had to contend with a sideshow debate on anthropogenic climate change that other world leaders have not.
In fact there is nothing radical about fixing a carbon price as the precursor to an emissions trading scheme. It provides a concrete, stable base from which a market can be built. (It is ironic that traditionally pro-market Liberals would be so resistant to a market-based mechanism for addressing this problem.)
An emissions trading scheme is all but inevitable anyway. In case anyone has forgotten, Australia is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, which specifies this as one of the mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases.
The first commitment period for this international agreement will expire next year. While our politicians and pundits quibble over the carbon price package, the rest of the world is already operationalising its commitments. For instance, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is now in its second trading period since its 2005 launch.
Embarrassingly, while the EU made a pre-Copenhagen commitment of a 20 per cent cut on 1990 levels by the year 2020, the Australian Government insists that it will not raise its 5 per cent cut on 2000 levels until it is satisfied with the credibility of 'both the specific targets of advanced economies and the verifiable emissions reduction actions of China and India.'
Yet the Clean Development Mechanism, another Kyoto Protocol instrument, is being taken up significantly by these very countries. Once used as examples of inaction, China and India account for the largest proportion of CDM-registered emissions reduction projects, through which they earn certified emission reduction (CER) credits that can be traded and sold.
In other words, Gillard's greatest challenge in selling the carbon scheme is in normalising it in the public mind. She needs to overcome the island mentality that is hijacking debate on this policy.
Market-based climate action is not at all radical or catastrophic when seen in the light of movements in the international community. We need to be part of this broader shift. Otherwise, we may be facing a new wave of 'cultural cringe'.
Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based writer. She tweets.