Here’s one of the key sections of the interview – though, unsurprisingly given the interview panel of Kelly, Shanahan, Ackerman, and an Onselen, they kept on coming back to this and the awful threat of the Greens to all that is free-tradey and laissez-faire:

Paul Kelly: One of the big features of the global trade debate is the argument particularly coming from Europe that there should be trade retaliation against those countries that aren’t prepared to price carbon. To what extent do you think this is likely to materialise in coming years? And what’s your response to this sort of threat?

Dr. Craig Emerson: It is an emerging threat, there’s no doubt about it. There are early signs of this already happening. We won’t cop governments cloaking protectionism in this sort of green cloak of respectability, where it’s just old protectionism. It’s just designed in fact to protect their own domestic industries and they say now “but this is all so that we can have a cleaner environment”. Let’s understand what this is and what motivates is. What it actually is is all those old protectionist instincts coming out, and we will use whatever trading rules there are through the WTO to fight against the use of these devices to protect industries in Europe or anywhere else against competition.

Paul Kelly: Is this a serious threat to Australia?

Dr. Craig Emerson: It’s an emerging threat and we are watching it very carefully and we are obviously campaigning against it. You’ve got Martin Ferguson, the Resources, Energy and Tourism Minister, who’s onto this. We will use whatever capacity we have under the World Trade Organisation rules to rail against this, to work against this. Of course we are committed to putting a price on carbon, but let’s not believe that this is all about climate change. There is a very clear European old protectionist instinct under this green cloak of respectability, and we won’t cop it.

I don’t whether it’s true, as the Bolter believes, that Emerson really is a climate change skeptic. But Emerson has a) a long history of outspoken defence of free trade, and b) a long history of deep skepticism towards environmentalism. It is also true that Europe does have a history of sneaking protectionism in through other means – as indeed Australia does through our food quarantine laws. And if you accept that free trade is generally a good idea, it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of anyone proposing new grounds for restricting it.

However, with Emerson, you do rather get the sense that free trade is an end in itself, not a means to a better world. If climate change mitigation gets in the way of free trade, he seems to be perfectly content to discard mitigation.

And that’s been Labor’s problem all along. Whenever climate change mitigation has run into competing policy or political goals, they’ve been happy to ditch mitigation. And not only has that been a bad thing for the climate, it’s been a terrible thing for Labor.

The argument about consumer benefit was always spurious – the purported reduction in prices would have been small (and well run public libraries exist precisely to stock books for those for whom marginal prices are a real impact), and the effect would have been to reduce the range of titles available – both because it would have enabled large retailers to further dominate the market and because of its impact on local publishers.

Nevertheless, Guy Rundle is right to say that the interests of authors and publishers are separable, and to highlight the fact that it’s the provisions in the US-Australia free trade agreement preventing particular support for Australian literary production which are the real – but largely ignored – issue.

However, it should be very pleasing to see that governments are not so prone to accepting all free market ideological arguments on trust. And to see the Labor backbench able to influence government policy.

It also might be an appropriate moment to consider what good the Productivity Commission actually serves.

Update: Spike.

Emerson’s media release claims that it wouldn’t work, because supermarkets change their pricing information too often to keep such a website accurate.

It doesn’t make sense to me. The supermarkets have to keep their price databases updated as soon as they change the price, to allow their cash registers to charge customers the current price of every item. If that information is in a database at the store level, in principle there’s little difference in the difficulty of transferring that information to GroceryChoice on a daily or weekly basis, or do it live or semi-live.

The alternative theory is that Woolworths and Coles wanted it killed. But that doesn’t make a huge amount of sense either – they’ve got the lowest costs of any of the full-range supermarkets, and their IT systems are most likely to be the easiest to set up to provide the pricing information wanted by GroceryChoice. It’s the independents who probably had most to lose, with the highest costs to provide the information and the likelihood that their prices would be the highest.

So we’re back to the original question? On whose behest, and why, was GroceryChoice quietly killed off on a day where Michael Jackson’s death wiped most other things off the media agenda?

UPDATE: Thanks to Addo in comments, the SMH has more info. It seems clear from the story that Woolies and Coles wanted it killed. I still reckon their reasons why don’t stack up.