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Indeed, it did. But it was no accident.

Gillard’s apparent slip of the tongue was, in fact, the culmination of months of merciless political campaigning by the Coalition to rebrand Labor’s emissions trading scheme a “tax”.

“It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know,” Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, would later confess on Sky News in 2017. “It was many other things in nomenclature terms, but we made it a carbon tax.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that market-based mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions – while the preferred policy tool of economists – are not easy to explain.

I’m not sure at what point we stopped talking about not spewing dirty pollution into the sky, and started talking in more measured tones about reducing “carbon emissions”, but I don’t think it’s helped us. There should be no sugar-coating the truth that preventing climate change means pumping out far less pollution, in net terms, than we have.

Counter to the liberal philosophy, the Coalition favours achieving this by channelling billions of taxpayer dollars into handpicked projects to mop up pollution once it’s already out there.

Labor has picked its own winners, including electric cars, but it also officially supports – as we learnt last week – beefing up an existing “safeguard mechanism” to reduce overall pollution output. It has the backing of both the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group. But what is it?

Well, after the Coalition’s 2013 election victory, then environment minister Greg Hunt had the unenviable task of implementing Abbott’s direct action policies. He realised there would need to be some tether applied to large-emitting facilities to ensure any good work achieved was not simply undone by rising emissions from existing facilities.

In 2016, the so-called “safeguard mechanism” was established, setting “baseline” emissions levels for all facilities in Australia emitting more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 each year. Today, just over 200 facilities are covered.

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The biggest-emitting facility, according to 2019-20 data, is Woodside Energy’s North West Shelf Project in Western Australia, which produced almost 6.9 million tonnes of “covered” emissions – well within its baseline limit of 7.6 million. (“Covered” simply means emissions of the type covered by the mechanism, which has multiple exclusions.)

Next on the list is Bluescope Steel’s Port Kembla Steelworks in NSW, with covered emission of 6.1 million, even more comfortably within its baseline allowance of 11 million.

It’s not clear how Labor intends to alter this mechanism to lower emissions, or indeed, how much this would contribute to its target to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030. The regulator could simply be instructed to start imposing lower overall baselines over time – or, at least, to be less generous with its current process for reviewing baselines for individual projects, which leaves many facilities with plenty of headway to emit.

The Business Council of Australia proposes a lower threshold be set for inclusion in the scheme to capture more emitters.

Whatever it is, it’s still not a carbon tax. Never was. Never will be.

Now pass the gravy, Aunt Flo.

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