Labor's plan to spare motorists from rising fuel costs under emissions trading is very different to the opposition's petrol policy, Treasurer Wayne Swan says.
Under the government plan, transport will be included in the roll-out of a national emissions trading scheme (ETS), but petrol excise will be cut to compensate for any ETS-related price rise cent-for-cent.
The excise will be cut for three years and then the policy will be reviewed.
Federal opposition leader Brendan Nelson proposed cutting the excise by five cents a litre in his budget reply speech earlier this year.
"They attacked us bitterly for proposing it, now they have half adopted it for a sufficient period of time to get them through an election," opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said last week.
But today Mr Swan said the plan was very different to the coalition's policy to cut the fuel excise by five cents a litre.
"There's a huge difference between the position that we are putting in the (climate change) green paper and what Brendan Nelson said in his budget reply," Mr Swan told the Ten Network.
"We have got a long-term economic reform here which is terribly important, he (Nelson) had an un-costed, unfunded thought bubble."
