A Friendly Reminder That Environment Minister Greg Hunt Wrote His Uni Thesis On Why A Carbon Tax Would Be A Great Idea

Greg Hunt is the current Member for Flinders in Victoria and Minister for the Environment. His signature achievement thus far has been the repeal of Australia’s carbon tax, even if he hasn’t quite gotten around to replacing it with anything else.

It’s worth remembering at this juncture that Hunt, the dude apparently responsible for repealing Australia’s price on carbon, spent an entire year of his life doing in-depth research on why a price on carbon would be a really, really good idea:

The full thesis, which you can read here, argues that “the market system is a preferable regime” to control pollution because “it better ensures that the polluter bears full responsibility for the cost of his or her conduct”.

Old mate Greg put a lot of work into this thing; the thesis cites Greenpeace, the Victorian Environmental Protection Authority and the Business Council of Australia, and features interviews with former Labor Senator and Minister for Industry John Button, then-NSW Environment Minister Tim Moore, and then-leader of the Australian Democrats Janet Powell.

After all this exhaustive analysis, Greg and his co-author concluded the following:

Shit, Greg. That kind of seems like the exact thing you just worked so hard to get rid of, Greg. Seems you could’ve recalled all this hard work when you were checking Wikipedia to determine whether or not climate change causes bushfires, Greg.