A report by Australia’s Productivity Commission into carbon pricing among the country’s major trade partners said on Thursday that a price-based mechanism would be the cheapest, most effective way for Australia to cut pollution, boosting the government’s plan to price carbon.
“The consistent finding from this study is that much lower cost abatement could be achieved through broad, explicitly carbon pricing approaches, irrespective of the policy settings in competitor economies,” the Productivity Commission report said.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s minority Labor government asked the independent commission to assess how nine major economies were taking climate change action to deflect political opposition to its own plan to price carbon from 2012.
Gillard’s Labor wants to set a carbon tax on 1,000 of the biggest polluting companies from July next year in order to fight global warming, with a move to an emissions trading scheme three to five years later.
