Two years after Australia’s carbon price passed parliament and almost 18 months after the initial fixed-price carbon “tax” took effect – with a one off 0.4% increase in the cost of living and almost no impact on economic growth – the House of Representatives has voted to repeal it.

The environment minister, Greg Hunt, called on Labor to “listen to the will of the Australian people at the recent election” and agree to repeal its own carbon pricing scheme, but Labor and the Greens opposed the repeal.

“This is a debate, this is a vote about keeping your word. We said the election would be a referendum on the carbon tax and it was,” Hunt told parliament. “This is about honour and dignity and the sovereign will of the Australian people.”

He argued against Labor’s alternative proposal, to bring forward by 12 months the planned shift to a lower floating carbon price, saying it amounted to “Julia Gillard’s carbon tax lock stock and barrel, but with a name change and a 12-month discount”.

In the end the Speaker, Bronwyn Bishop, refused to allow Labor to put its amendment to bring forward the floating price, though it faced certain defeat in the House of Representatives anyway.

Bishop justified her controversial ruling – which resulted in a fierce tactical battle on the floor of the house and an unsuccessful motion of dissent in the Speaker’s ruling from the opposition – on the grounds that Labor’s plan might conceivably have resulted in a tax or charge being increased, something only a government minister can propose. (The fixed price is $23. At current market levels, the floating price would be less than $7.)

Labor’s climate change spokesman, Mark Butler, said the Coalition was repealing an effective scheme and intended to replace it with Direct Action, which he described as a “stinking dead albatross” of a policy which no independent modeller or economist believed would work.

Labor’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, had made it clear the ALP would not support the 11 carbon tax repeal bills.

“We introduced an emissions trading scheme that was working, it was cutting dirty power generation and increasing clean energy generation,” Plibersek said. “Now the new government want to scrap that scheme without describing in any detail what will replace it. They claim that they can drop pollution with their new scheme but they don’t say how. They also say that if it costs more than expected then we’ll just skip our pollution target,” she said.

The fate of the carbon price repeal – with the associated industry assistance and bodies such as the independent climate change authority – now rests with the Senate.

A vote is expected during the final two sitting weeks of the year next month. A rapid Senate inquiry will report by 2 December, with a further inquiry into the effectiveness of Direct Action likely to hold hearings over the summer.

The Greens leader, Christine Milne, said that just as it had been Tony Abbott’s first order of parliamentary business to try to repeal the carbon tax, it was her party’s first item of business to vote the repeal bills down, in the interests of future generations.

The government has insisted the repeal will take effect from July, regardless of whether it has been legislated by then.

If, as expected, Labor and the Greens combine to defeat the repeal in the Senate, the coalition will have a choice of returning the repeal bills for a second rejection early next year – satisfying the criteria for a double dissolution – or waiting until the newly elected Senators take their seats from July.

The fate of the repeal bills is then likely to rest with the two or three Palmer United Party candidates, whose position remains unclear. It is also unclear whether the new Senate will agree to the coalition’s Direct Action alternative, although Hunt has said its key elements, including the emissions reduction fund, could be implemented without specific legislation.

Independent modelling of Direct Action has found it has not been allocated enough money to meet even Australia’s minimum greenhouse gas reduction goal of 5% on 2000 levels by 2020, and could not meet higher targets the coalition had previously agreed to, under certain conditions.

Since the coalition won the September election it has walked away from that commitment to higher targets. Abbott has said no more money will be added to the $3.2bn emissions reduction fund. Treasury officials told Senate estimates this week that no official modelling had been conducted for Direct Action.

The new government has also decreed it will not contribute anything further to international climate change funds, with Abbott claiming they were in effect "socialism masquerading as environmentalism".

Observers at the United Nations climate summit in Warsaw, to which Australia refused to send a ministerial representative, have accused the Australian delegation of deliberately blocking progress on a new fund to help developing countries cope with “loss and damage” from climate change.

“In Warsaw Australia is damaging relationships with key diplomatic allies which risks undermining the negotiations,” said WWF’s climate change policy manager, Will McGoldrick.