Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard came out swinging on her contentious pollution tax yesterday, saying that the “freedom to pollute our skies” was over, ending 20 years of denial and delay.
Gillard used some of her strongest language yet on the plan to tax Australia’s top 500 polluters for their carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming, saying that the time for inaction had passed.
“No longer will the nation’s biggest polluters be able to pollute our atmosphere for free,” Gillard told a gathering of Labor party faithful. “From July 1 next year, the freedom to pollute our skies will cease.”
“Two decades of denial and delay will come to an end. Polluters will have to pay,” Gillard said.
Gillard is due to unveil the full details of her carbon tax package today, followed by a rare nationally televised address and two-week whistlestop tour of Australia to sell it to voters.
Australia is among the world’s worst per capita polluters because of its reliance on coal-fired power and mining exports.
The carbon tax is one of the biggest economic reforms in Australia for decades and Gillard is staking her ailing political fortunes on its success. Carbon dioxide emissions will be taxed at A$23 (US$24.70) per tonne according to widely published leaks, on a par with the EU’s emissions trading scheme, but lower than the level recommended by experts in Australia.
The tax would rise by about 3 percent or 4 percent every year, according to details leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, before giving way to an emissions trading scheme linked to global markets within three years.
High-emissions exporters such as producers of steel, cement and aluminum will receive 94.5 percent compensation in recognition of the strong Australian dollar, as well as government assistance to upgrade to cleaner technologies.
The burgeoning liquefied natural gas sector, expected to be a strong contributor to Australia’s future national income, will get 66 percent compensation in the form of free permits.
High methane or “gassy” coalmines will get US$1.275 billion in assistance, while electricity generators — the main driver of Australia’s pollution — would receive US$7.3 billion, while the dirtiest would be offered incentives to close.
Gasoline has been exempted from the tax in a bid to shield consumers and households will see the lion’s share of the A$10 billiont to A$11 billion raised in the first year returned through tax cuts, pension boosts and one-off payments.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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