Coalition Government has 'tamed' the CCA

It was baseball great Yogi Berra who said:
 "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!

Australia’s Coalition government discovered that it could not dismantle the Climate Change Authority created by its Labor predecessors, what with its bothersome analyses that Australia needed to do more on climate action, but it has found that it could be tamed.

The reconstituted CCA – containing a majority of board members appointed by the Coalition and sympathetic to its policy stance (including the architect of its own Direct Action policy), and with a much reduced staff – delivered its long-awaited and long-delayed report on climate policy options on Wednesday.

And it looks remarkably like something that the Coalition would have chosen to write itself. Or at least its moderate faction.

It is similar to what the proponents of Direct Action had always imagined their policy would become, once the Coalition fessed up to the fact that climate targets it signed to in Paris will not be reached with only wishful thinking, half-baked plans such as the emissions reduction fund, and without some sort of biting policy.

But the policy “toolkit” that the CCA recommends also looks a lot like the climate policy that Labor brought to the election campaign. That’s why the Coalition was relieved that CCA chose to delay its report until now, leaving the conservatives free to brand Labor’s idea as an economy-killer and putting off what will be an intense internal debate.

Read Giles Parkinson’s story on RenewEconomy - “Tamed CCA gives Coalition breathing space, but no path to Paris targets.”