April 24, 1994 – a carbon tax for Australia?

On April 24 1994, the Australian environment minister John Faulkner starts to fly a kite, as they say in the politics business.. The kite have a small carbon tax to help Australia stabilise its emissions, and have some sort of diplomatic cover when the UNFCCC started its meetings.

This is the opening of a policy stream or the continuation of a politics stream depending on which bit of John Kingdon you care to follow

Less than a year later, the effort was defeated. Australia never gets an effective long-term price on carbon dioxide and therefore (but not only for this), the emissions basically keep climbing

{Not the the carbon tax would have on its own being a solution. 

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that policy proposals that are relatively innocuous and minor will be treated as an existential threat by specific industries who will then respond accordingly and effectively.

And here we are. With the atmospheric concentrations climbing, human emissions climbing, temperatures, climbing, death rates going to climb. we had a slender chance to fix this – or at least give our wisdom a chance to catch up with our technologies.. Now it’s too late. And everything is fucked. 

What happened next?

The tax proposal got shot down in February 1995.  The idea of a tax was replaced with an emissions trading scheme, and that got shot down on multiple occasions. Finally became law in 2012, then repealed in 2014 by Tony Abbott.