Careful what you wish for. From the AFR:
A key business organisation, the Australian Industry Group (AIG), said the entire business community was frustrated at the prospect of yet another policy vacuum on climate change, saying it would only increase business uncertainty, create a perception of risk, and affect investment decisions.
“Everyone in the business community just wants the issue to go away and be resolved,’’ said Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox, who supports a scheme trading in cheap overseas carbon permits. “We’ve gone through seven years of this now and, still, there’s no policy certainty.’’
…The government believes it can implement direct action through a combination of appropriating the money and using regulation but would prefer the security of legislation.
As we know, Clive Palmer is insisting on an idled ETS to scrap the carbon price. He’s now shifted to supporting Direct Action if there’s an idled ETS. But the article quotes a Government source stating no way, ever will it support a carbon price. Even if squeezed through somehow, Direct Action isn’t a policy, either. It is grossly underfunded. Then there is the attack on Renewable Energy Target.
To fill the vacuum, other parts of business want:
Mining giant BHP Billiton still lists as its policy preference a low-cost market based scheme to price carbon…The Business Council of Australia supports the purchase of foreign permits to augment direct action.
It’s hilarious in a black sort of way. The AIG was a prominent supporter of the carbon price. Now it wants it scrapped and the issue to “go away”. Well, a little consistency might have helped achieve that. Big business has clearly cheered the rise of the Abbott Government, yet it’s come to power on an anti-climate change agenda so utterly hostile to its own principles of market-based solutions that it can’t begin to contemplate carbon trading in any form, including business’s preferred outcome of buying permits offshore.
Meanwhile, Clive Palmer and the movable feast in the senate use all proposed policies to their own ends.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the climate and or the nation. It is one giant scab grab.
