Amid Australia’s chaotic climate politics, the rooftop solar boom is an unlikely triumph

‘With home ownership increasingly out of reach for many, Australia needs to consider innovative ways to make the benefits of solar available to renters and people in social housing.’ Photograph: Raoul Wegat/AAP

Australia was a different place in 2011. Julia Gillard’s Labor government, the Greens and a couple of country independents were rewriting the country’s climate policies, including introducing a world-leading carbon pricing system and creating three agencies to back it up.

Those organisations – the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Climate Change Authority – have survived and help shape the investment and policy landscape. The carbon pricing system – falsely described as a tax – famously didn’t.