OPINION: Eight years after Liberal MP Greg Hunt pushed through the “safeguard mechanism” under prime minister Tony Abbott, the Albanese government is proposing to use it to slash the emissions of our largest polluters.
It is ironic that the advent of rational thinking in Australia’s chaotic and drawn-out carbon reduction policymaking means the utilisation of a safeguard mechanism introduced by the government of climate sceptic prime minister Tony Abbott.
The reform, which allows companies to have significant flexibility in the strategies they use to tackle carbon reduction, is the last meaningful piece of the country’s carbon emission reduction puzzle. This draws out another ironic twist in the chaotic and meandering evolution of Australia’s hotchpotch of carbon reduction system legislation.Hunt, the same environment minister who introduced the safeguard mechanism, also kept in place the Carbon Farming Initiative, which creates the ACCUs that are regulated by the Clean Energy Regulator and sold into the Emissions Reductions Fund.
Treasury Secretary Stephen Kennedy told a seminar at Sydney University last year that Labor’s emissions trading scheme, which was abandoned by Abbott, was the most efficient means to reduce carbon. “But, ultimately, that will be an economic argument. So, if I am a large corporate like BlueScope and it costs me $200 a tonne of CO2 to reduce my emissions by changing the energy in my boilers, and an offset costs $30 a tonne, then I’m going to buy the offset.“It all comes down to economics. And so, then it comes down to the carbon price of those offsets, which drives behaviour.
Emma Herd, climate change and sustainability partner at EY, says business lobby groups such as the Business Council of Australia and the AI Group, welcome the proposed reforms because regulation of carbon emissions provides certainty.
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