Australia’s opposition Labor Party has said it is “impossible” to cost the impact of its climate policy because it is a pollution limit, not a carbon price, flatly rejected one of the conservative Liberal-National government’s most persistent attack lines of the current campaign for the May 18 election.
At a press conference in Perth, Labor leader Bill Shorten and climate spokesman, Mark Butler, rejected the Liberal-National attacks on Labor’s climate change plans
Earlier Mr Shorten defended Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target in the first leaders’ debate by arguing Australia could not afford inaction on climate change.
Mr Shorten continued the offensive later, accusing Liberal-National Prime Minister Scott Morrison of using “every excuse in the book not to take action on climate change”.
He noted climate change was estimated to cause $18 billion of damage a year through natural disasters and more extreme weather events.
“This government is going down every rabbit hole, down every burrow, on every sideshow to avoid one fact, they don’t have a climate policy, do they?”
Mr Butler said that Labor had adopted the safeguards mechanism introduced by the Liberal-National government to limit pollution and the Parliamentary Budget Office “would not have modelled” the cost of it, the same as it could not for the Liberal-National’s under former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull or Mr Morrison.
“But if I can go to the point about the cost impact of the policy we’ve announced, it is impossible to cost this, because a Labor government would not be imposing a direct carbon price on businesses,” he said.
“If businesses are able to stick to their limit, then they won’t hear from the government any more and there is no price impact at all.
“And if they’re not able to stick to their limit, in the same way that they’re not under the safeguards mechanism as it operates now, they’ll have the broadest possible range of offsets.”
Since Labor confirmed it would allow international offsets, Mr Morrison has ridiculed the opposition for allowing carbon credits from Kazakhstan.
Business leaders have defended the use of international credits to mitigate climate change in a cost-effective way.
The Liberal-National government has relied on BAEconomics modelling, which does not estimate the benefit of avoiding climate change to claim Labor’s policy would harm the economy.
Mr Butler said that how businesses reduce emissions “won’t be dictated by Canberra, so it can’t be costed by Canberra”.
“It will be a matter for them,” he said.
“And that is what business unanimously has asked the Labor Party to adopt as our policy.”
Mr Butler said that Citibank had found Labor’s policy would have an “immaterial” economy-wide impact”.
“The impact on the economy would be exactly the same, which would be that the economy over the course of the decade would grow in real terms by about 23 per cent.”
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