Coalition humiliation is complete:
The Albanese government will cap the carbon price at $75 a tonne for miners and other big industrial emitters, in a bid to shield business from the risk of future cost spikes and provide certainty under Labor’s decarbonisation plan.
The price cap is part of a package of reforms announced by Energy and Climate Minister Chris Bowen on Tuesday, in the first major federal regulation of emissions since the Gillard government’s carbon price was axed by Tony Abbott in 2014.
Right now, Anthony Albanese could declare the moon made of cheese and Australians would cheer. This is some reflection of Labor policymaking with successes in wage bargaining, energy price relief, and now carbon mitigation.
But, I put it to you, it is just as much to do with a lost Coalition. Today’s carbon price is a historic humiliation for a party that purports to promote liberal policy but is more like the plaything of oligarchs.
Let’s recall this magic moment in Australian politics:
There they are, the market-friendly dream team of Australian politics, cheering as they scrap a carbon price that charged big polluters for cleaning up their mess while costing punters nothing, and replacing it with a policy that charged consumers to do fake mitigation by paying big polluters with higher taxes for punters!
Since this ignominious moment in 2014, the Coalition has sunk ever lower into a cult-like state of religious nutters, fossil fuel fanatics, and social troglodytes. Most recently this has been expressed via a triptych commitment to the suicidal policy platforms of demonising the harmless Voice, demanding much higher immigration than the extremes already reached, and backing the China-beholden, foreign-owned, gas cartel which would come with 10% mortgage rates and an unprecedented destruction of household wealth.
What these three self-destructive policy positions share is that they are sponsored by large vested interests, and one in particular. Extractive industries don’t want any more indigenous power. Nor did they want a carbon price. Obviously, the gas cartel and coal oligarchs want to end energy fuel price caps as soon as possible. All big business wants to crush wages with cheap foreign labour.
If you think you have seen these ideas before, that is because you have. This is “businessomics”. That Murdochian trickledown ideology so adored by The Australian and the Australian Financial Review, which is run by Murdoch alumni.
It is now entirely out of step with the dominant ideology of the day. That just these policies only served to make the rich richer, hollow out the middle class, rort working people, destroy the planet, and that social progress is just as important as economic.
Peter Dutton is not so much a placeholder opposition leader as he is the captain of its doom.
