In case you haven't noticed, Australia's carbon reduction policy is ... actually, I don't know what it is. Neither does anyone else.
And that's damaging Australian business investment at a time when it's already being damaged enough by other factors beyond our control.
The botched, patched, compromised and sure-to-be-further-compromised thing that Penny Wong is dragging around the Senate isn't fooling anyone. It's tempting to think that any policy opposed by the Nationals as being too tough and the Greens as being not tough enough might be about right - but it's not.
Which is why the following couple of paragraphs from an Economist magazine editorial last month makes a lot of sense:
"The weakening of this bill illustrates one of the central problems with cap-and-trade systems. They are complex, obscure and therefore susceptible to horse-trading. A chuck of allowances can be handed out to one lobby, a sliver to another, and soon the system's effectiveness has been sliced away. The corresponding attraction of a carbon tax, which this newspaper has always supported, is its simplicity. The government sets the rate. Everybody can see what it is. Voters get transparency. Businesses get certainty. And the government gets a large chunk of revenue - not to be sniffed at in these difficult times.
"This is an important moment. Thanks to much effort on the part of many well-intentioned people, Australia is prepared to legislate to control carbon. The country needs to seize this opportunity and introduce a simple carbon tax. Sceptics will howl about the initial cost, but it will be transparent and far, far cheaper than the impact of serious climate change."
OK, I've changed one word in the above. "Australia" was "America" in the original as the Economist targeted the problems the US is having with its version of carbon trading legislation. The problems and lessons, though, are remarkably similar.
Senator Wong's cap-and-trade scheme suffers from the same series of compromises as the Americans' - coal comes out as the protected pollutant of choice, chased by self-interest groups of every shape and size also pleading "I'm special". Yes, each of us is unique, just like everybody else.
The further horse trading that will be required for the Senate to pass something in time for the next federal election is only likely to make a bad bill worse. At some stage, it would be nice to think micro-manager Rudd would call "enough" and go for the much simpler, neater and transparent carbon-tax alternative.
But there's a one major problem with a carbon tax: the second word in its name. After what the Opposition has been able to achieve with the relatively innocuous words "deficit" and "debt", imagine the capital they'd make out of "new tax".
Whoever the opposition leader might be at the next election, the battle cry would be the same: "We told you not to trust Labor - we told you they'd drive us into deficit and massive debt and now they're introducing new taxes to bleed you dry and next they'll sell your first born for body parts etc etc".
A smarter, braver government might look beyond that to the opportunity a justifiable and for-a-good-green-cause tax represents. For a start, it could be sold as revenue neutral - no new tax burden at all. It could be a means of scrapping the worst of the remaining taxes, payroll tax for example, while also cushioning the genuinely needy in our society from the cost impact of pricing carbon.
Heavens, if you wanted to really grab some political headlines, you could replace the GST with a CT. Just a thought.
Imagine the fun Ken Henry's tax review could have if it was really given room to roam outside the politically-acceptable square. As it stands, Henry was neutered before he started by the Nambour High boys excluding both GST and superannuation. No wonder the poor treasury secretary has been reduced to pondering if charities should be taxed and hairy-nosed wombats made deductible.
But we've had rational appraisal of a carbon tax here before. The Productivity Commission's 2007 submission to the Howard government's emissions trading taskforce found a carbon tax had merit, albeit as a transitional mechanism.
"In an interim situation, before an international agreement occurs, a tax has some advantages because it's so much simpler to introduce," said the commission's chair, Gary Banks.
"It doesn't have all the kind of complexities of gaming and positioning that we've observed in Europe and other places where they've introduced quotas and tradeable emissions."
Well, we certainly have an interim situation, both domestically and internationally. If we were serious about carbon reduction, we could slip one in now while waiting for the US to sort out its mess and China to come to the aid of the party.
Instead, we're reduced to a government scraping around the odds-and-sods in the Senate, looking to do a deal, another compromise on a half-planned compromise.
And there's Senator Steve Fielding, just back from a quick jaunt to the US in the hope of learning about ETS and greenhouse and stuff. Maybe he met a good fundamentalist scientist who explained that it's all foretold in the Good Book and we shouldn't worry about it. There are bound to be a good few of those.
Or we could try being rational instead. Go on, Kev, be brave for once instead of just talking about being brave - give us a nice, shiny new tax and let Ken Henry's review really go at it.
* Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor and an extravagant carbon emitter.
Email a friend