Interpac Business and Migration Solutions Melbourne Australia

(June.8)

Australian federal government's proposed carbon tax will have a negligible impact on household wealth, and the economy will continue to grow strongly, Treasurer Wayne Swan said on Tuesday.

Swan revealed a new Treasury modeling that shows national income growing strongly under a carbon price, at an average rate of about 1.1 percent until 2050.

As a result, per capita national income would be 16 percent higher than current levels by 2020, and about 56 percent by 2050, or more than US$32,148.

Swan said this is before taking into account the long-term benefits of pricing carbon, such as protecting the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu, or the agricultural wealth of the Murray-Darling Basin.

"I refuse to let this country become an old-world, high- polluting technological backwater," he told the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday.

"There is no excuse for this as a forward-looking country in the most dynamic region in the world."

He also said employment would continue to grow once Australia put a price on pollution.

"Today I can say that the modeling shows aggregate employment is approximately the same with or without a carbon price," he said.

"By 2020, national employment is projected to increase by 1.6 million jobs, while at the same time growth in domestically produced pollution slows.

"For a government obsessed with jobs, this conclusion is crucial."

Swan described putting a price on pollution as the "next crucial frontier" in economic reform that will be viewed by future generations in the same terms as the big reforms of the 1980s and '90s.

He noted that most of Australia's important reforms were once described as a potential disaster for its economy, adding that " but in time, they reaped big dividends for the country, helping secure two decades of uninterrupted economic growth."

The Australian federal government plans to finalize details of its carbon pricing scheme in early July, ahead of legislation being introduced to the Parliament by September and a fixed carbon price starting on July 1, 2012.

Source from Chinadaily