Despite the strong support for tax reform at last month’s economic reform roundtable, perhaps the most important single reform hardly rated a mention: a carbon tax – or, in the economists’ preferred euphemism, “a price on carbon”.

I don’t doubt that virtually every economist attending the meeting would have agreed that a carbon price is needed.

So why was it unmentionable? Because Anthony Albanese and his faint-hearted troops have convinced themselves that the main reason the infighting-riddled Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor government was sent packing at the 2013 election was Julia Gillard’s introduction of a carbon price in 2012, which that great statesman Tony Abbott repealed in 2014. Yeah, sure.

Our present policies won’t allow us to meet our climate targets without further piecemeal, unpopular and “hideously costly” measures.Credit:

Add in Labor’s promise to make a minor change to “franking credits” at the 2019 election, the misrepresentation of which probably does most to explain why it lost, and you see why Labor’s brave warriors have concluded that any mention of tax changes brings instant political death.

But in a speech last week, Rod Sims, chair of Professor Ross Garnaut’s Superpower Institute and a former senior econocrat, decided to take his life in his hands and speak truth to power. He offered five reasons why a carbon price is both “necessary and urgent”.

For a start, our present policies won’t allow us to meet our climate targets without further piecemeal, unpopular and “hideously costly” measures. When Labor regained office in 2022, it cobbled together arrangements intended to........

© Brisbane Times