The federal government has rubbished an opposition claim that councils haven’t been given enough time to prepare for the impact of the carbon tax on their landfill sites.
Tips that generate more than 25,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year will have to pay the tax from mid-2013 - 12 months after the carbon price regime starts on July 1.
The Clean Energy Regulator (CER) has written to 104 local councils it thinks could be operating landfills that will be above the threshold.
It expects 70 of them will end up paying the carbon tax. A small number are already are on the list of known “liable entities” published earlier this month.
But opposition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt says it’s not good enough that most councils still don’t know for sure if they’ll be slugged.
“Nobody knows if they are going to have to hike their rates and whether or not they are going to have to hike tip charges,” Mr Hunt told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.
“The carbon tax is in complete chaos and confusion.”
Acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan dismissed the opposition’s criticism.
He noted that all landfill sites would be deemed to have zero emissions in the first year of the carbon price regime.
“There will be no liability for the whole of 2012/13,” Mr Swan told parliament, adding the majority of landfills were small enough to avoid liability forever.
The government suggests councils with populations of less than 20,000 will generally be exempt.
Mr Swan said the CER was engaged directly with councils to determine if they were liable or not.
A spokeswoman for junior climate change minister Mark Dreyfus later told AAP large councils had time to work out how they were going to deal with their landfill emissions.
If they had done their sums already they could increase rates and fees from July 1 because landfill emissions were released over 40 years, she said.
The climate change department estimates the impact of the carbon price on an average household’s waste will between 13 and 47 cents per week.
