After being exposed for persistently misleading the public about the impact of a carbon price on everything from Weet-Bix to nappies, the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is now blatantly misrepresenting Professor Ross Garnaut’s views on a carbon price.

In his blog this morning Tony Abbott wrote:

My position is the same as the govt’s. We both want to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. The difference is how to do it. They want to do it with a tax. I want to do it with direct action. It’s interesting that the latest iteration of Garnaut (I’m citing from memory here) shows that it’s the govt’s version of direct action and not its tax that will actually get emissions down.

Here is what Professor Garnaut actually said when asked about the Coalition’s sham Direct Action policy on the day he released his Climate Change Review Update Paper 6:

TONY JONES: Why are you so dismissive of the Opposition's direct action climate policy?

ROSS GARNAUT: Well the world, not just Australia - the world's had a lot of experience with regulatory ways of achieving economic policy outcomes and it's had a lot of experience of market-based ones. The carbon price is a market-based arrangement. You put incentives for saving on emissions right through the economy ... With a regulatory approach, it's the Government deciding you do this, you do that. Even if you put in place an auction or a narrow competitive process, it's being guided by the Government deciding where the emissions savings are. And we learnt in the great contest of economic ideas in the '50s and '60s and '70s and '80s that market approaches beat regulatory approaches.

This shows the danger of “citing from memory” when you can’t be bothered doing your homework because you are too busy trying to deceive the Australian public with a mobile scare campaign. Or is “citing from memory” Mr Abbott’s new formulation for statements which aren’t the gospel truth?

The truth about the carbon price is that it will charge less than 1,000 of the biggest polluters for every tonne of pollution they put into the atmosphere. Every cent of the revenue raised will then be used to assist households to meet any costs passed on, to support jobs and invest in clean energy.