Yahoo!7 Finance, On Tuesday 8 November 2011.
The Gillard Government has passed the final hurdle in making the carbon tax a reality with the controversial bill passing through the Senate.
The government and the Greens used their numbers in the upper house to vote in favor of the ‘Clean Energy Bill 2011’.
The government’s mechanism to price carbon will begin on July 1, 2012, with a $23-per-tonne carbon tax on the 500 biggest polluters. The tax will then move towards a market-driven emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2015.
The carbon tax aims to cut Australia’s emissions by 5% from year 2000 levels by the year 2020, and bring emissions down 80% by 2050.
More Information: Understanding Our Carbon Tax
Before the bill passed, Treasurer Wayne Swan labelled the vote as historic, claiming the reform would be a “victory for the optimists and it will be a defeat for the deniers.”
Mr Swan continued, “What’s important about today is the government has done the hard yards putting in place the important long-term reforms, which will ensure our future prosperity. Nothing could be more important to our nation.”
Meanwhile, champagne would be flowing in the Greens party room after Bob Brown said this morning that he would “lift the prohibition on bubbly in the party room today.”
Since John Howard launched the idea of an ETS in 2007, the carbon tax question has been fiercely debated by politicians, manufacturing and business groups. Both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull lost the leadership of their parties over the issue with their successors, Gillard and Abbott, continuing to focus the political debate on the controversial new tax.