The current legislated interim target is 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 (on the way to net zero by 2050).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/albanese-government-2035-climate-emissions-target/105771566
In the year to March this year 2025, Australia's emissions totalled 440 million tonnes — 28 per cent less than in 2005.
On the current trajectory, emissions will be about 36 per cent lower than 2005 by 2030, 43 per cent lower by 2035, and 86 per cent lower by 2050 (not 100 per cent as legislated).
The Climate Change Authority (CCA) in its draft consultation, in which it decreed that 65-75 per cent below 2005 levels was achievable.
At the risk of over-simplifying and pre-empting the CCA's sophisticated, detailed modelling: 65 per cent or less means no carbon tax, 75 per cent or more means carbon tax.
First, Australia's wealth rests to a large extent on fossil fuel exports and the government keeps approving new fossil fuel projects, including last Friday's approval of Woodside's massive North West Shelf gas project.
And second,
many farmers are very unhappy about new transmission lines and wind turbines going on or near their land, which are needed because wind and solar farms are not going where the old coal-fired power stations are.
The approval for the Woodside project is conditional on the North West Shelf operations becoming net zero by 2050, which will mean a huge extra demand for carbon offsets, or Australian Carbon Credit Units.
In fact, if the government announces an ambitious 2035 target this week while maintaining and expanding the nation's fossil fuel infrastructure, the only way there will be enough offsets to achieve it will be if there's also a carbon tax to pay for them.
Economist Ross Garnaut and public policy expert Rod Sims, founders of renewable energy think tank The Superpower Institute, have suggested that a carbon tax be applied to exports as well as domestic use, but Friday's approval of the Woodside project makes it clear that won't happen.
As for the full electrification of the electricity grid needed to achieve net zero by 2050, it will likely either have to be done despite protesting farmers, or through the near-universal adoption of household and business rooftop solar with batteries … or with nuclear power.
