A carbon tax is coming and Australia won't have a say on it

The European Parliament has just voted to endorse the principle of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Legislation from the European Commission is expected in June.

This should come as no surprise. Firstly, such a proposition has been discussed for a long time. Second, the EU has never seen a protectionist measure it didn't like.

The most useless meetings I ever had as trade minister were those with the EU. I would put our objections to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The EU commissioner would either defend the CAP or indicate that his (they were all men) hands were tied. Sometimes they did both.

This dialogue of the deaf continued until Kevin Rudd put the issue in perspective in 2007. He recognised that while Australia could not and should not abandon its arguments about the shocking market distortions contained within the CAP it should not be allowed to define our whole relationship with the EU.

We now have a much more nuanced and positive relationship with the EU. However, many of the countries of the EU retain their affection for protectionist measures to this day.

The Australian government must have known for years that a failure to take domestic action on the reduction of carbon emissions would run the grave risk of Australian exporters to Europe, and possibly also the United States, would face a quasi-tariff wall as a consequence.

Yet it has remained tied in internal knots that have rendered it unable, or unwilling, to act. It appears that those chickens are about to come home to roost.

In February, Cristina Talacko, a Director of the Export Council of Australia (ECA), made it clear in a paper published on the ECA website that problems with our climate change response, if not corrected, could result in "...limiting our scope to do deals and in the worst-case scenario, exposing us to sanctions or tariffs."

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She went on to point to some worrying signs that we should not ignore: "Europe is likely to impose a carbon border, putting a carbon price on imported goods as an extension of the EU's carbon price policy as a necessary step to ensure a level playing field between EU industries and foreign competitors" and "President Biden also supports carbon adjustment fees against countries that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations ..."

This potential problem for our exporters has been obvious for years. I can see no sign that the Australian government has taken this into account in its efforts to reconcile internal conflicts about climate change policy responses.

Should there be a continuing failure to respond our exporters will pay a high price.