The Australian Carbon Dividend Plan

Our carbon dividend approach bridges the left-right divide on climate policy. It is at once conservative and progressive and provides a workable solution that will appeal to all sides of the political spectrum. The key to our proposal is that it not only provides strong market-based incentives to reduce our carbon emissions, it addresses the economic well-being of low-income Australians.

Richard Holden

The Australian Carbon Dividend Plan (ACDP) is a comprehensive market-based approach to making energy in Australia more affordable, more reliable, and ensuring that the social cost of energy use is taken into account.

The ACDP involves a tax of CO2 emissions on electricity, direct combustion, transport, fugitive emissions, and industrial processes - the revenue generated would then be returned, evenly, to every voting-age Australian citizen. 

The plan would leave more than three-quarters of Australians better off financially, even if they did not change their current consumption or energy use. Lower-income households would receive a particularly large benefit relative to their existing incomes and expenditures. 

The ACDP was authored by the co-leads of the Grand Challenge on Inequality, Professors Richard Holden and Rosalind Dixon. It was launched by the federal member for Wentworth, Professor Kerryn Phelps AM MP.

Download the plan.

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