The carbon tax was imposed by former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard in the summer of 2012, and quickly became unpopular as businesses and households began to bear the costs of higher power bills and higher inflation.
Poor policy processes tend to lead to poor policy outcomes, wrote Dr. Alex Robson, an economist at Australias University of Brisbane, in a study prepared for the Institute for Energy Research, which opposes a carbon tax. Australias carbon tax experience provides a number of important lessons in how not to go about implementing sensible climate change policy.
After just one year, the carbon tax increased taxes on 2.2 million Australians, according to Robson, and has done nothing to decrease the countrys carbon emissions, which arent predicted to fall below current levels until 2043.
Robson also found that a year after being enacted, the carbon tax caused electricity prices to rise 15 percent. The countrys unemployment rate shot up by 10 percent after the carbon tax was implemented.
The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesnt do any good for the environment, Abbott told The Washington Post last year. Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australias domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and thats why its going to get abolished.
