The plan consists of 18 separate bills that when passed will ensure a price on pollution that will move Australia towards a clean energy future.
These bills represent the culmination of lengthy and comprehensive Parliamentary scrutiny. Australia's strategy to tackle climate change has been debated at length since 1994 under Paul Keating's government when the House of Representatives undertook a review of the efficiency audit of the Implementation of an Interim Greenhouse Response. Climate change has been the topic of no less than 34 separate parliamentary inquiries since that time, spanning 17 years.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the government's plan for a clean energy future, it followed months of consultation with business, with the voluntary sector, indigenous groups and community organisations.
This process built on the extensive consultation and debate around the development of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and before that, major public consultations in every year since 2006 on the development of an emissions trading scheme. And now as we introduce these 18 bills to Parliament, we do so after having consulted on the draft legislation and considered more than 300 submissions from business and community groups.
Over the years that Australia has debated this issue, there has been overwhelming support for pricing carbon from both major political parties. This policy has been backed by every leader of the Liberal Party since John Howard, who took an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to the 2007 election. In the last parliament, the government reached agreement with the then leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, on the design of an emissions trading scheme. The current Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, said on ABC's Lateline in 2009: ''We don't want to play games with the planet, so we are taking this issue seriously and we would like to see an ETS.'' Read the full report here.
Source: Mark Dreyfus, Sydney Morning Herald.
