Gerard's "carbon pricing" jihad

The increasingly tedious Gerard Henderson has taken to task journalists who have written or said that Julia Gillard qualified her "no carbon tax" promise by saying she would put a price on carbon.  "Prove it!" he says, "she never did".

Curiously, there is a post by Brian on the old Larvatus Prodeo blog (which, in truth, was often nearly as boring and tedious to read as Henderson) which deals with this very same issue, and concludes that there are claims she specifically said she would "price carbon" on a Channel 7 video, but the station claimed copyright and the video is nowhere available.

Brian is somewhat skeptical of that, and concludes "we just don't know".

But read on.   In the comments to Brian's post, Jules usefully points out that the debate seems rather academic when you note that someone at The Australian thought that Gillard had not ruled out "pricing" carbon, because the election eve report on her interview with Paul Kelly  reads:

Julia Gillard says she is prepared to legislate a carbon price in the next term.

This was their reading of her statement to Kelly:  "I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism. I rule out a carbon tax."

I wouldn't mind betting here that Gerard Henderson has not understood that an Emissions Trading Scheme is a way of pricing carbon.  

The Australian understood Gillard's promise to mean she could still legislate an ETS, and that this would involve a "carbon price".   Why has Gerard not got his y fronts in a tangle about how The Australian reported this?

As for Gillard's support for carbon pricing, from her first speech as PM in Parliament:

I believe human beings contribute to climate change and it is most disappointing to me, as it is to millions of Australians, that we do not have a price on carbon, and in the future we will need one. If elected as Prime Minister, I will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad.

Of course you can argue that she she broke a promise by introducing her scheme during her term of government before getting the silly "community consensus"; but it remains abundantly clear that she never ruled out "pricing carbon", and personally had always supported it.

She had much more consistency on this and other issues than the flaky professional windvane of a Prime Minister we presently have.