Let's not blow our big chance for progress on climate change

Our attitudes to climate change are becoming like our attitude to death: we know we must face up to it one day, but right now we'd prefer to think about something else.

This may explain why the media's coverage of a potentially breakthrough report from the government's Climate Change Authority focused on environmentalists' criticisms of it rather than its actual content.

Similarly, why focus on the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, using the G20 meeting in Hangzhou to ratify the Paris climate change agreement – thus encouraging other countries to do likewise and raising hope the deal will come into effect this year – when you can speculate about conflict over the South China Sea and foreign investment?

Forgive me, but I'd never make a card-carrying greenie, righteously condemning any proposal to act on climate change that's less than heroic – as both the Paris agreement and the climate authority's report on the policies we need to ensure we deliver on our commitment, most certainly are.

I've never believed that if you can't have it all, you're better off having nothing. Nor that if you make a less than perfect start, this precludes you from getting better over time.

Our commitment – reached when Tony Abbott was still in charge – is to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide by 26 to 28 per cent on their level in 2005 by 2030.

This is less demanding than many other countries' commitments and, in any case, all the commitments aren't enough to achieve the stated goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees.

Although the climate authority was established by Julia Gillard, the Coalition has replaced most of its members with people not known for their deep commitment to environmentalism.

It's chaired by a former director of the National Farmers Federation, joined by, among others, a former Liberal chief minister and boss of a top industry lobby, and a former National Party minister.

When Abbott abolished Gillard's euphemistically named "price on carbon" – it was an emissions trading scheme, but initially with the price set by the government at $23 a tonne of carbon dioxide – he replaced it with a "direct action plan" consisting of a taxpayer-funded emissions reduction fund used to pay farmers and others to reduce their emissions.

This was combined with a "safeguard mechanism" designed to prevent gains from the purchased reductions being undone by increases in emissions elsewhere in the economy.

Under the safeguard, about 140 large businesses that each have plants with direct emissions of more than 100,000 tonnes a year have been given an emissions "baseline" they must not exceed.

Many experts have criticised direct action as inadequate to achieve our new commitments, especially considering the government's budget pressures.

The greenie evangelists are calling on the government to confess the error of its ways, repent its manifold sins, scrap its evil direct action plan and replace it with measures so politically painful as to prove it is truly born again.

The climate authority's proposals are a little more conscious of politicians' aversion to losing face. They thus have a good chance of being accepted.

Whatever it says, the government must know its present arrangements are insufficient to meet its international commitments without hugely increased cost to taxpayers.

That's particularly true since, as the authority points out, the Paris agreement itself requires countries to review and improve their commitments over time.

The authority avoids the trap of proposing the government scrap what it's doing and start again from scratch. Rather, it shows how the government can build on its existing policies to strengthen its efforts.

Rather than proposing restoration of an emissions trading scheme, or the imposition of some economy-wide carbon tax, the authority takes the less economically virtuous but more practical approach of choosing between price-based and regulation-based measures, depending on the circumstances of particular industries.

That's why its report is titled Towards a Climate Policy Toolkit.

Since electricity generation is by far the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases, the authority proposes that the industry's present baseline under the safeguard mechanism be replaced with an "emissions intensity scheme", whose baseline would be reduced to zero between 2018 and "well before 2050".

In practice, this would require fossil fuel-based generators to subsidise renewable generators, eventually causing almost all generation to be from renewables. It would raise retail electricity prices somewhat, but by far less than under the Gillard scheme.

For other industries covered by the safeguard mechanism, their emissions baselines should decline in line with our Paris commitments.

Elsewhere, the authority wants the government to impose emissions reduction standards on new vehicles, continue and strengthen household appliance standards and building codes, and tighten regulation of emissions from landfill waste.

This toolkit approach minimises the risk of hip-pocket opposition from consumers. Building on existing arrangements rather than starting again is attractive to business groups.

The proposals not only build a bridge for the government to move to policies more adequate to the challenge we face, they build a bridge to a bipartisan climate change policy because the authority's proposals fit well with those Labor took to the election.

And bipartisan policy provides just the certainty needed for business to stop arguing the toss and accept that, since our move to a decarbonised economy is now inevitable, it should get on with adjusting.

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Morrison's unplanned plan to fix the budget

Scott Morrison can use scare tactics in seeking greater support for his task of getting the budget back on track, but he'll do better by spreading the needed sacrifice more fairly. That means holding the line on his superannuation reforms against his own backbenchers.

Morrison isn't alone in fearing that our completion of 25 years of continuous economic growth has left many of us complacent, unaware of the tough measures we needed to put up with to make this success possible and, equally, the further discomfort needed to keep it going.

There's truth to this, no doubt. But I doubt that scare tactics are the way to puncture that complacency and win wider acceptance that we all need to take some pain for the greater good.

Morrison's claim in his latest speech that, given a host of dire but unstated assumptions, federal gross debt could reach a trillion dollars in a decade, is an easy way to get a headline but is unlikely to make anyone more amenable to unpopular budget measures.

Does the man not realise that, after decades of dishonest dealing with voters by both sides of politics, no politician has the credibility to have such extreme claims believed – or even remembered?

More fundamentally, do Morrison and his Treasury advisers not realise that their practice of exaggerating the budget deficit by refusing to distinguish between capital and recurrent spending – by, in effect, claiming that failing to pay for long-lived public infrastructure fully in the year of construction is financially irresponsible – is wearing thin and robbing them of support from the more economically literate?

The truth, if the budget papers are to be believed, is that the recurrent budget is already close to balance – which is not to say we shouldn't now aim for a period of recurrent surpluses so as to liquidate the part of our accumulated debt arising from earlier recurrent deficits.

No, a better way to win public acceptance of unpleasant budget measures is to demonstrate that the burden of restraint is being spread fairly between the bottom, middle and top income-earners.

The biggest single reason the Coalition has, from the beginning, met such resistance to budget repair from the public – and, therefore, the Senate – is its blatant lack of concern for fairness.

Remembering our tightly means-tested welfare system, to start from the premise that the budget has a spending problem, but not a revenue problem, is to pre-ordain that your savings measures will focus on spending programs benefiting the bottom and middle, while ignoring the "tax expenditures" favouring the top.

The Coalition's first term is testament to the truth that making budget repair conditional on achieving smaller government – lower government spending without any increase in taxation – is a recipe for failure on both.

Ostensibly, Morrison's talk of "the taxed and taxed-not" and repetition of his mendacious claim that "you don't encourage growth by taxing it more" suggest he's learnt nothing about the compromises he himself must make if he's to succeed in repairing the budget.

But things have changed, as witness Morrison's weasel-word acceptance of the need for measures to "protect the integrity of our tax base".

This year's (still unpassed) budget was aimed not at budget repair but at tax reform. To this end it nicked Labor's plan for further huge increases in tobacco tax, introduced convincing measures to greatly increase taxes paid by multinationals and cut back and redistributed superannuation tax breaks for high-income earners.

Even its $6-a-week tax cut for the top quarter of taxpayers is insufficient to prevent income tax increasing through continuing bracket creep, let alone give back proceeds from the creep that occurred under the Coalition's previous two budgets.

These tax increases were made to help cover the initial costs of the 10-year phase-down in the rate of company tax, of course. Over its life, however, the tax package looked to be "budget negative".

But here's the trick: Morrison looks a lot more likely to get his various tax increases through the new Senate than his cut in company tax.

If so, he'll end up doing a lot to improve the budget balance, and doing it in a much fairer way than all the collected penny-pinching in his $6 billion "omnibus bill", as revealed by Jessica Irvine.

But the perception of greater fairness, as well as the saving to the budget – both initially and in subsequent build-up – will be hit hard should the revolt by a few government backbenchers over the super changes succeed in letting a handful of rich Liberal supporters off the hook.

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