Just keep the scheme

Ross Garnaut has made the point that just keeping the carbon pricing scheme (even with moving to a floating price, I think) pretty much achieves the same in terms of budget repair that the Coalition wants to achieve with its vast number of controversial changes.

Professor Garnaut, the architect of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ climate policies, argues that keeping carbon pricing and abandoning the $2.55 billion emissions reduction fund would reduce the budget deficit by between $12 billion and $19 billion over the next four years, depending on the European carbon price.

On Tuesday night, he told an audience at the University of Melbourne that is about the same as the $12 billion to $18 billion in budgetary savings that the Greens and Labor have pledged to oppose in Parliament.

“Retention of carbon pricing would more or less precisely fill the gap from Senate rejection of some budget measures,” Professor Garnaut said.

“To put it another way, Australia can stay within the boundaries of fiscal responsibility defined by the government in this year’s budget by retaining carbon pricing, rather than the array of changes that are at risk in the Senate.”

But of course, because the Coalition fed the public the line that the Labor carbon scheme would be an economic disaster (based on the support of the handful of economists associated with the IPA, pretty much) for so long, they cannot back down on that now, despite the lack of evidence that it is actually causing any great economic mayhem.

As everyone says, the problem with the budget is with its priorities as to how to go about the "repair" it wants to achieve.  And the problem comes back to the Coalition running policies on ideologically justified lines, regardless of evidence.