Carbon tax goes up in smoke

Julia's carbon tax?

That’s according to Dennis Shanahan in The Australian this morning:

LET’S hope for Labor’s sake Julia Gillard has a plan B for handling the introduction of a fixed carbon price because plan A has gone to hell in a hand basket.

Labor’s plans to introduce a carbon price from next July are in free fall, and the government is losing the political debate dreadfully. Its messages are confused, the tone is totally negative and the only certainty for business is an early start date it doesn’t want.

Apart from the date there’s no other detail. The Greens continue to appear to control the agenda; Labor is losing support to both the Coalition and the Greens and most importantly six years of public goodwill over fighting global warming has been lost.

Publicly Labor is clinging to delusional claims of success and hoping a relentless campaign against Tony Abbott for being a negative wrecker will turn the politics back to the government.

There are real misgivings about the timing and presentation of the carbon tax, and fears that when Kristina Keneally, who has embraced it in the NSW election, is thumped at the polls she can claim it was made worse by Gillard’s tax.

A disastrous Newspoll this week, showing Labor’s primary vote at a record low of 30 per cent and a reversal since December of popular support to 53 per cent against and 42 per cent for a carbon price to combat global warming by pushing up energy prices, is making Labor MPs even more nervous.

Labor’s defence that it’s damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t present detail on a new tax because of the damaging experience of the failed resources super profits tax is a spurious argument. It ignores that there is a perfect template for introducing a new tax: the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax of the Hawke era.

Analogies with John Howard’s strategy on the introduction of the GST are equally spurious and are about ministers reassuring backbenchers that a government can recover from a record low primary vote and win the next election. (source)

In other carbon tax news, grocery association chief states the obvious – prices at the supermarket will go up if electricity prices go up. Colour me amazed:

INDEPENDENT grocers are warning that prices in their stores will have to rise if Julia Gillard’s carbon pricing plan pushes up the cost of electricity.

John Cummings, chairman of the National Association of Retail Grocers of Australia, said based on a $26-a-tonne carbon price, independent supermarket operators could face extra electricity charges of between $500 and $1000 a week.

Mr Cummings said the extra charges would be passed on to consumers through higher prices because the industry operated on low margins and had no capacity to absorb the higher costs. (source)

And former NSW Labor premier Nathan Rees has joined the party dissing the tax:

FORMER NSW premier Nathan Rees has exposed a rift between Julia Gillard and the NSW Right over a carbon price, saying the proposed tax was crippling Labor in the lead-up to this month’s state election.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, Mr Rees, who is in danger of losing his seat of Toongabbie in the traditional Labor heartland of Sydney’s western suburbs, said there was “no question at all” the Prime Minister’s proposed carbon tax was hurting NSW Labor in the polls.

“I’ve never seen an issue sink in so quickly,” Mr Rees told The Australian.

“Julia announced it on the Thursday and by the time I was door-knocking on the Saturday every second person was talking about it.” (source)

All the while, the Fairfax press and the ABC have their fingers in their ears shouting “la, la, la” and are pumping Garnaut’s latest nonsense for all its worth.