Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has provided the following answer to the honourable senator's question:

(1) As of June 2010, the manufacturing industry employed approximately 950,000 people (ABS 8155.0: Australian Industry, 2009-10).

(2) Businesses across all manufacturing sectors will be eligible to apply for assistance under either the Jobs and Competitiveness Program (JCP) or the Clean Technology Program (CTP).

The JCP will provide assistance to manufacturers that generate over 80 per cent of the manufacturing sectors emissions. Further information on eligible activities is available at http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/jobs-competitiveness-program.aspx

The Government's CTP, amounting to $1.2 billion over the forward estimates, has been developed to provide support to manufacturing industries not eligible for assistance under the JCP. The CTP includes three components:

(3) A comparison of the number of workers in industries shielded from a carbon price is not an appropriate measure of the effectiveness of a scheme in preventing carbon leakage and providing transitional assistance. The JCP targets assistance to industries that are particularly emissions-intensive and therefore most exposed to the impact of the carbon price. The targeted nature of the JCP means that it will provide assistance to manufacturers that generate over 80 per cent of manufacturing sector emissions.

The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is likely to provide far less assistance to the more emissions-intensive sectors under phase III of the EU ETS than proposed under the JCP. This is because under the EU ETS:

In addition, the EU ETS has less tightly targeted assistance than the JCP. In the EU ETS, assistance is provided to a wider range of sectors, some of which are trade-exposed but not very emissions-intensive. Given that the total pool of permits available to industry is capped, increasing the number of sectors that are eligible for assistance potentially reduces the assistance provided to any given sector.