WHEN asked how he had persuaded Britain's senior doctors to withdraw their vociferous objections to a National Health Service in the 1940s, Aneurin Bevan, the NHS's founding minister, replied: “I stuffed their mouths with gold.” Australia's prime minister, Julia Gillard, born like Bevan in south Wales (the old one), this week took a leaf out of his book with her proposal for a carbon price (see article). It came groaning under the burden of generous golden giveaways to Australian consumers and businesses.

Unsurprisingly, this newspaper dislikes the amount of cash going to Australia's dirtier industries; the plan does nothing to limit emissions from coal exporters; and there is also a muddle-headed attempt to pick winning renewable schemes. Against that, some gold probably had to be offered to win support. And Ms Gillard deserves credit not just for putting a price on carbon—still the best way to discourage its use—but also for selling it as a way to shift taxation, not raise new revenues. Thus some of the cash which the plan generates will pay for tax cuts that will offset increases in electricity bills. It is better to tax pollution than work or saving.

The scheme is not particularly ambitious: quite a lot of the reductions it seeks, especially in the early years, will be bought from developing countries, using carbon permits generated by the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism. All the same, governments in other places planning carbon pricing, such as South Korea and some Chinese provinces, will watch what unfolds in Australia with interest.

They may also watch what is going on in Britain, but as a cautionary tale. This week the government produced a white paper on its ideas for reforming the electricity market. The idea is to provide both security of supply and a reduction in carbon emissions, an area where Britain's ambitions go well beyond anything that might be expected from the carbon price provided by the European Union's emissions trading scheme. Unfortunately the enterprise is deformed by the government's over-ambitious promises on renewable energy.

Into the wind

Renewable energy is a means to many worthwhile ends. As a carbon-free resource immune to fuel-price increases and capable of being deployed in relatively small stages, it is a good thing, worthy of research and development spending, some targeted encouragement and the benefits of a carbon price. But too often it becomes an end in itself—as it has in Britain.

In the last months of his premiership, Tony Blair acceded to a European directive on renewables that requires Britain to generate 15% of its energy from renewables by 2020, an almost eightfold rise. It is hard to imagine the target being achieved; it is, alas, easy to imagine a lot being spent in failing to meet it. Offshore wind, many gigawatts of which the government wants to subsidise, is one of the costliest ways known to man of getting carbon out of the energy system. It will get cheaper; but not soon. If Britain wants to achieve its decarbonisation targets, it can do so—but by switching more of its energy generation from burning coal to burning gas. Trying to get there by a pell-mell fielding of the costliest renewables is pointless.

The supposedly left-wing Ms Gillard, even allowing for her handouts, is making price signals central to Australia's carbon plans. If only Britain's supposedly free-market government would do the same.