The Government will be hoping that the convoluted and dense reckoning of professor Ross Garnaut will counter the slick and glib one-liners of Tony Abbott.
The Opposition has successfully been telling the public that a “carbon tax” - or on occasion the “toxic tax” - will wreck household budgets already flattened by other cost-increasing factors.
The proposed carbon price has been depicted as a financial horror which would dwarf those already-punishing family expenses.
The Government has been silent on this apart from saying more than 50 per cent of revenue from a carbon price would go to those families to cover the cost rises caused by industries passing on their pollution penalties.
But it has been gagged from saying more because it has locked itself into negotiations with the Greens and independents on the final shape of a carbon emissions pricing scheme.
Garnaut isn’t gagged. Far from it. He likes having a chat and today packed some detail onto that skeletal promise of a big chunk of revenue going to families.
It would arrive in the form of billions of dollars worth of tax cuts and welfare increases, he said in a a report released at the National Press Club.
Ross Garnaut is an economist who has never pretended to be a climate expert, but who has accepted the advice of those who are tops in that field and have warned that the globe is getting dangerously hotter because of carbon emissions.
He probably has never claimed to be an exciting luncheon speaker. Today he told an opening anecdote which went on for roughly as long as it took for primeval vegetation to be compressed into coal.
The punchline was that Prime Minister Julia Gillard agree with him: “We’re against the extinction of the species.”
Having cleared that up, Garnaut used his speech to confront some of the arguments against action on carbon emissions by setting a price and after three to five years allowing the market to decide that price.
And he did so with his usual academic honesty. He sneered at any idea of a quick fix, but didn’t downplay the seriousness of the issue.
“The benefits of reducing damage from climate change will come later - many of them to later generations of Australians,” he told the National Press Club.
“In fact there will be more and more benefits for later and later generations.”
He took a shot at sectoral interests who opposed carbon pricing: “Parts of big business have taken on the role of spoiler.”
He took a club to the current debate: “There is no reason why carbon pricing should continue to be a matter of partisan political division in Australia.
“In much of the world - perhaps everywhere except Australia and the United States - concern for global warming is a conservative as much as a social democratic issue.”
And he took to those claiming our efforts would be pointless with total derision: “This is an argument that Australia is a pissant country.
“Well, I do not accept that Australia is a pissant country. All the evidence is against it. Australia matters.
“We matter even though our emissions are only 1.5 per cent of the world’s, just like the UK matters with its 1.7 per cent.”
More important for the Government, Garnaut laid out a process for compensating low and middle-income families for the prices pushed up by a carbon price. It might not be the final version, but it is likely to be very similar.
And the key was that some $6 billion would go to increasing family benefits and lowering taxes, with lots of argument and data to back up the proposal..
Even this Government, which has appeared hobbled on the issue it raised as critical to the nation - and its own fate - should be able to use that.
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