A powerful triumvirate campaigned against the law: mining companies, the conservative coalition parties and Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. A study found that 82 percent of articles on the carbon tax in News Corporation’s Australian papers were negative.

Ms. Gillard now believes she made a crucial error in framing. After losing office in June 2013, she wrote: “I erred by not contesting the label ‘tax’ for the fixed price period of the emissions trading scheme I introduced. I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word ‘tax.”’

George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed that “was a disaster.” It wasn’t just the T-word; even the term “carbon price” was a problem, too abstract and technical: “It does not evoke in the minds of the public the real human horrors and economic costs of climate disasters.”

“I made the wrong choice,” Ms. Gillard conceded, “and, politically, it hurt me terribly.” With Labor plummeting in the polls, her leadership was challenged and she lost the vote to the party’s previous leader, Kevin Rudd. (Mr. Rudd’s victory was shortlived; less than three months later, he was defeated general election by Mr. Abbott.)

Opposition to the carbon tax trailed away after Ms. Gillard’s ouster, and public concern about climate change has only grown. A recent poll found that almost two-thirds of Australians believe there should be carbon pricing for major emitters, but 42 percent agreed with the repeal of the tax (against 36 percent who did not). We did, after all, elect a government that promised to ax it. So we’re a hot mess of contradictions.

Mr. Abbott’s claim that households will be better off by 550 Australian dollars, or $520, a year following the repeal has been greeted with skepticism. Electricity prices did go up after carbon pricing came in, but this was mostly because of investment in infrastructure. Consumers are likely to see no effect now — unless they’re paying less simply by using less electricity. An Australian National University study reported that carbon emissions from the power generation sector had been cut by 1 to 2 percent as a result of the tax.

If carbon pricing was working, you might well ask why the law was repealed. The result is that Australia has no clear climate policy, though Mr. Abbott says he now believes climate change is occurring and he takes it “very seriously.”