Australia’s proposed carbon tax will exempt gasoline, prime minister Julia Gillard announced today, as she seeks to make the plan more popular among voters.
“Petrol prices will not be touched by carbon pricing,” Gillard said in an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. television today. “Families, tradies, small business people do not have to worry about a petrol price increase.”
Gillard is seeking to garner support for an emissions trading system in the world’s biggest coal exporter, where the number of Australians who say the nation should take action to fight climate change has slipped to a record low 41 per cent, according to a Lowy Institute poll published on June 27.
Gillard needs the agreement of the Greens Party and three independent lawmakers to pass the plan through parliament. The Multiparty Climate Change Committee of lawmakers is deciding how to compensate Australian households and companies, including coal miners, and on investing in clean energy.
Opposition Liberal-National coalition leader Tony Abbott, who has said he will repeal the plan if he becomes prime minister, pledged on June 25 to deliver tax cuts without a levy on carbon.
‘HELL-BENT’
“The carbon tax is the biggest single institutional change outside of wartime that this country has ever contemplated,” Abbott said yesterday. “This prime minister is hell-bent on foisting this bad and unnecessary tax on our country.”
Today’s announcement of the gasoline exemption “debunked a major part of the scare campaign,” Treasurer Wayne Swan said in an e-mailed statement today. “Introducing a major reform is never easy.”
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The exemption won’t apply to large businesses, who may pay extra through a fuel-credit system, the Sunday Telegraph reported today, without saying where it got the information.
Each liter of gasoline used in a motor vehicle releases 2.3 kilograms (5.1 pounds) of carbon dioxide, according to information on the government’s website. The Australian transport industry accounts for about 13.5 per cent of Australia’s total net greenhouse gas emissions, the website states.
There were 721.1 motor vehicles per 1,000 residents in Australia as of March 31 last year, according to the statistics bureau.
The government is seeking to “do the right thing by Australian families struggling with cost of living pressures,” Gillard told ABC today.
“The design of this scheme is that petrol will be out now and out for the future.”