Ai Group’s National Executive met today in Canberra to consider its response to the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).
The National Executive reiterated its support for a market-based approach to reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. It nevertheless warned against the risks of inflicting substantial damage to businesses and their employees by moving too far ahead of countries against which we compete in the global economy.
Ai Group National President Trevor Carroll said in seeking to help lead other countries to adopt carbon constraints, Australia should be wary of rewarding them for not acting.
“Ai Group recognises that developing a genuinely global response is the key to meeting two central objectives — protecting the world’s environment and ensuring Australian living standards are not damaged,” Carroll said.
“The Australian CPRS must have a gentle start. The emissions cap should be reduced slowly at first and there should be a low price cap.
“Adopting a gradual approach in the initial years will allow business and the Government to iron out the bugs in the scheme while encouraging the important long-term investments that need to be made as we shift to a carbon-constrained economy.”
The industry group stresses that Australia’s export and import businesses may incur additional domestic production costs and that these “threats” should “not be underestimated”.
“The measures for trade exposed businesses need to be thoroughly tested and in particular the question of how these businesses can grow in Australia needs to be resolved,” he said.
Carrol went on to say that appropriate measures should be put in place for emissions intensive trade exposed businesses and said the Ai Group will ask the Government to seek further input from business and other stakeholders once the Treasury modelling has been released.
Ai Group also raised concerns about the impact of an emissions trading scheme on some electricity generators and said it is vital that any regulatory burden is minimised.