''The Australian public voted to terminate the carbon tax,'' Mr Hunt told reporters. ''The test for the ALP caucus today is whether or not they will listen to the Australian people or whether they will just continue to thumb their nose at the people of Australia who voted [to scrap the tax]. ''We will not stop until the carbon tax is repealed.'' Mr Hunt told reporters that when it came to repealing the tax, ''all options are on the table''. When pressed specifically on whether this included a double dissolution election, Mr Hunt repeated: ''All options are on the table.''

The Environment Minister added that the Coalition did not want to ''invoke other mechanisms'' to get rid of carbon pricing, explaining ''we want to get this done now''. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has previously said that the Coalition would do what was necessary to get rid of the tax, including using ''constitutional options''. On Monday morning, new Labor leader Bill Shorten said he did not have to support Mr Abbott's campaign to dump the carbon tax. ''He has a mandate to form a government of Australia, but there is nothing in Australian democracy that says that Labor has to be a rubber stamp for every Coalition proposition,'' he told Fairfax Radio. We will not stop until the carbon tax is repealed.

Mr Shorten said he would consult with the caucus before making a big policy statement but noted he backed a price on carbon pollution. ''I don't support the Coalition putting off until tomorrow and next week and next year tackling issues of climate change and carbon pollution and leaving this issue for our kids to solve.'' On Monday afternoon, Mr Abbott also put pressure on the new Labor leader to back his carbon tax plan. The Prime Minister said he had called Mr Shorten on Sunday night to congratulate him on his new job. "The difficulty is, [Labor] might have a new leader but they’ve got all the old policies, which caused them to be rejected by the people. They’re still in denial about the election result," he told reporters in Canberra.

When asked if a double dissolution was still on the table, Mr Abbott replied that if Mr Shorten was "fair dinkum about democratic politics" he would accept that the 2013 election had been a referendum on the carbon tax. Mr Shorten has already come under pressure from the Greens to hold his ground on carbon pricing. In a statement, Greens leader Christine Milne said the ''the writing is on the wall'' regarding climate change, with extreme fires, floods, droughts and heatwaves. ''Tony Abbott may have a mandate to lead the government of the nation, but he doesn't have one to stand by and watch it swelter and burn,'' she said. Under the constitution, if the Senate rejects the same bill from the House twice within the space of three months, the Governor-General can dissolve both houses simultaneously, bringing on full elections for both houses to resolve the matter.

Loading The move is considered an extremely drastic one - there have only been six double dissolutions since 1914, with the most recent one in 1987. With AAP