The removal of the Carbon Tax will see minimal impact on the consumers. However, the environmental impact will be horrendous.
Major companies including Qantas, Virgin Australia and Woolworths have refused to reduce prices on repealing of the carbon pricing.
Qantas will scrap the carbon surcharge but is refusing to drop prices, while the supermarkets are claiming very few prices actually rose or will not guarantee any drops in price. Families also will have to wait months to receive carbon price refunds as energy companies adjusting their billing systems Prior to the removal of the Carbon Tax saw lots of argy bargy between the Liberal Party and the Palmer United Party (PUP).
First, the PUP agreed to repeal the tax and later reneged the agreement claiming to have been duded by the Abbott government in drafting of the repealing legislation.
Instead of applauding Clive Palmer for not voting for the repeal of the Carbon Tax the media branded him as a wrecking ball. Palmer should have been applauded for holding out till there were safe guards that sees the consumers get these cuts upon its repeal.
There was also some fear of business fines for not passing the reductions as a result of repealing of the Carbon Tax these same businesses would pass on the costs to consumers.
These fears were false as the consumers would switch to the businesses who would have passed the reduction rather than pay extra to the businesses who were fined for not passing the extra costs.
However there was another flip by the PUP. It decided to drop all the conditions for fines for not passing the reduction to the consumers and restricted the fines only to the electrical generating companies and to the electricity distributors.
In the run up to the repealing of the Labor Party’s Carbon Tax, Abbott claimed that many nations were winding back this emission tax.
Fact check by the ABC shows that according to a June 2013 report by the Parliamentary Library, there were emissions trading schemes in place across Europe, in parts of the United States and Canada, and in New Zealand, Australia, Japan and legislated in South Korea – where a full scheme is scheduled to commence in 2015.
Recently President Barack Obama bypassed Congress to enforce a cut of their electricity emissions through EPA regulation. The goal – an overall 30 per cent cut below 2005 levels by 2030 – sounds bigger than it is, but is significant in that it is likely to prompt several more states to join the 10 that currently have carbon trading schemes.
China was the “most notable” country proposing new schemes, with a network of seven pilot schemes in the design and planning stages, the report said. A national scheme is to be introduced before the decade is out.
The European scheme includes 28 European Union countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
According to The World Bank’s May 2014 report, “about 40 countries and over 20 sub-national jurisdictions are putting a price on carbon.” It further states that the reach of carbon pricing is “steadily increasing.”
Figures from the government’s website for the year to March 2013 also shows almost no change in emissions. They edged 0.1 per cent lower to 557 million tonnes over that period.
The June quarter, though, saw a cut of 11.1 million tonnes on an annual basis, or about 2 per cent, from that March total.
Luckily due to the Senate’s intervention, Australia is likely to be left with a handful of clean energy policies designed to promote new technologies, but will not be enough to drive emissions cuts. This will fall well below the target of promised 5 per cent cut below 2000 levels by 2020. Tony Abbott would like to get rid of most of them.
Abbott government’s policy of using tax payer’s money to pay companies to deliver alternate direct action will have very little impact in reduction of carbon emissions.
Abbot who famously said “the argument [behind climate change] is absolute crap” is leading to a path where the consumer will see very little benefit in terms of cost reduction being passed on and the environment will suffer as the taxpayers will have to fork out money to the companies to reduce carbon emission on an unproved direct action plan.