The plan to introduce a carbon pricing scheme in Australia has focused attention on the future relevance and necessity of using other policy instruments to reduce carbon emissions. Significant reports, including the Wilkins Review and reports by the Productivity Commission, have argued using the standard neoclassical economics framework that once a carbon price is established, it should be (almost) the only instrument needed to tackle climate change mitigation in Australia. With a small number of exceptions for complementary instruments to address some market failures, the use of other climate policy instruments, it is argued, will result only in unnecessary duplication and potential distortions. The aim of this article is to show that there are, in fact, a significant number of rationales for implementing several climate policy instruments in combination with a carbon price, and we should not be too quick to dismiss certain climate policy instrument combinations.

There has been much debate about the role of carbon prices in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. However there has been far less attention paid to the evaluation of complementary and other non-price policies designed to accompany the carbon price. The purpose of this article is to develop a framework for considering the case for, and effectiveness of, the wide range of existing and proposed complementary policies that are designed to accompany the carbon price in the effort to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The article concludes that an effective evaluation of complementary policies should include identifying the market failure the policy is aimed at correcting. The complementary policy should work in conjunction with, not opposition to, other polices aimed at reducing emissions. It should be complementary with the policies of other levels of government and it should also consider issues of efficiency, equity, accountability and adaptability.

Australia’s carbon pricing scheme protects the profits of polluters and, as a consequence, has a negligible impact on the carbon emissions emanating from Australian industries. I concentrate on the assistance given to emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries and use a post Keynesian approach to explain that, despite the rhetoric, industries and firms will not move offshore under a carbon price and industry assistance is unnecessary. When assistance is given, profits are protected and could increase in certain industries, which occurred in the comparable European emissions trading scheme. In orthodox economic theory, despite this negligible impact on profits, any method of pricing carbon causes a reduction in emissions because firms seek to adjust technology and factor inputs at the margin and abate until marginal abatement costs equal the carbon price. However, from a post Keynesian perspective, the government’s prediction of a transformed economy and clean energy future will not occur unless the carbon pricing policy reduces the corporate profits of emitting firms. Thus, complementary policies are required to take the burden of reducing emissions off the more symbolic carbon market established. I further argue that a carbon tax without any industry assistance is a preferred approach and that where plant shutdown does occur, carbon emissions around the world will fall and workers could be compensated at a far smaller cost than the adjustment assistance given to industries in the policy’s current form.

The Australian Government has produced a CO2-equivalent tax proposal with a difference: it is a short prelude to an emission trading scheme that will allow the increasing rate of emissions to continue, while being a net cost to the Treasury. That cost extends to allowing major emitters to make guaranteed windfall profits from pollution permits. The emission trading scheme suffers numerous problems, but the issues raised in this article show that taxes can also be watered down and made ineffectual through concessions. Taxpayers will get no assets from the billions of dollars to be spent buying-off the coal generators or other polluters. The scheme seeks to stimulate private investors to create an additional 12 per cent in renewable electricity generation by 2020. A really serious emissions reducing alternative would need to create a nationalised electricity sector with 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade. We explore the limitations of Australia’s carbon tax plan which has now passed into law.

In recent years, ‘environmental economics’ has provided the dominant logic underpinning policies for ‘sustainable development’ in the form of government managed price-based and rights-based mechanisms. The advocacy of property rights in environmental management is taken further in the libertarian ‘free market’ approach and this ‘privatisation’ perspective is reflected in the growing use of property rights instruments in climate change policy. This article examines the efficacy of using economic instruments in the environmental context where ‘market ecology’ promotes the commodification of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ and their management by market forces. It argues that the pricing of ‘nature’ or its useful properties is a crude abstraction that implies ecological values can be alienated, but this is incompatible with the material and relational qualities of such values. The limits of this conceptualisation are further demonstrated through an examination of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a price and property rights instrument which enables private project developers in developing countries to produce carbon credits in order to offset greenhouse gas pollution in developed countries. The evident negative social and environmental effects flowing from implementation of the CDM reinforce the limitations of economic logic in the environmental context.

Climate change both reflects and transforms global development. Asymmetries of responsibility, impact and capacity reflect historical and current development hierarchies. At the same time, the imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions perversely empowers high-emitting newly industrialising counties. As inter-state negotiations enter a new post-Kyoto paradigm involving emissions reductions for ‘all Parties’ to the UN climate change convention, relations between industrial and industrialising countries, and more broadly between North and South, are re-orientated. This article charts these relations through two decades of United Nations climate negotiations, arguing the need to secure emissions reductions across the industrialising world opens up new possibilities for climate justice.

This study explores employees’ perceptions of organisational support, commitment, job satisfaction and turnover intentions in Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT). Organisational support involves the provision of valued financial benefits along with employees’ perceptions of support from supervisors and co-workers, and procedural fairness in decision-making. We found strong evidence that high levels of organisational support lead to employee reciprocity via increased affective commitment and job satisfaction and reduced turnover intentions. We also found evidence, albeit weaker, of a positive relationship between economic exchange and continuance commitment, where employees may be dissatisfied but stay because they have too much invested in firm specific knowledge and skills. The firm provided above average compensation and benefits and with limited alternative job opportunities in the formal economy in Sri Lanka the costs of leaving the organisation are likely to have outweighed the costs of staying.

Neoliberal policies of industrial relations decentralisation and privatisation have transformed the economic landscape of Australia in the last 20 years. The primary objective of these policies has been to enhance wealth and prosperity by improving productivity and flexibility of the workforce and competition and accountability in the market. Yet the evidence suggests that precarious workers are not benefiting from this increased prosperity, indeed they suffer by comparison with all other workers. Cleaners are a subset of precarious workers who have been hard hit by the dual impacts of labour market decentralisation and privatisation. This study finds quantitative evidence of an increasing gap in earnings between cleaners and other workers in Australia since the onset of workplace relations decentralisation and the proliferation of privatisation in the mid 1990s. We locate our argument in recent debates about the nature of variegated neoliberalism, the emergence of the networked economy, and the implications of these developments for the nature of work and employment.

Imagine a country that is inward looking and rarely notices the world beyond its own borders. Imagine a country with double-digit inflation and unemployment and a poor record of economic growth. Workers and their bosses are at each other’s throats, the country leads the world for working days lost due to industrial disputes and productivity (and how to improve it) is rarely talked about. Industry shelters behind prohibitive tariff walls (thinking only of the domestic market), the exchange rate is fixed every morning by officials of the central bank and the Treasury and international trade is an afterthought. Shop hours are regulated, domestic monopolies run most industries, and foreign entrants (in areas such as banking) are prohibited. Tax is high (and therefore evaded and avoided); expenditure untargeted and budgets in deficit. There are few foreign tourists, or many foreign students on university campuses. There are few restaurants around and licensing laws are restrictive. This country is at the bottom of the global premiership table in terms of economic performance despite its bountiful wealth.