Abbott was right: Swan's budget a DUD

15 May, 2011 by

Swan's budget

And the electorate agrees with that assessment. More good news for Labor, as the public response to the budget is examined:

THE Federal Budget has crashed and appears to have done more damage to Labor’s credibility than help revive its political fortunes.

The first poll to measure the national mood following the May 10 Budget – conducted by The Daily Telegraph –Galaxy – revealed fewer than a third of Australians believed it was good for the economy.

Two of the Budget’s key “spend and save” measures were soundly rejected.

Support for the $300 million digital set-top box scheme for pensioners was lowest among those it sought to benefit, with more than 60 per cent of older Australians saying they didn’t want it.

Cuts to family tax payments for 40,000 families also struck a raw nerve, with 47 per cent of Australians rejecting the idea that families earning $150,000 were rich.

According to the results of a poll, conducted on May 11 and May 12, just 28 per cent of voters thought the Budget would be good for the Australian economy, with 39 per cent saying it would be bad.

Only 11 per cent said the Budget confirmed Labor as a sound economic manager.

The negative assessment marked a dramatic shift from last year, when 43 per cent of voters rated the 2010 Budget as good for the economy. Even among Labor voters, only 47 per cent believed this Budget was positive.

The results will come as [a] blow to Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s hopes the Budget would inject life back into the Government, as Tony Abbott ramps up the case for a fresh election on the basis there is no mandate for a carbon tax.

“Wayne Swan’s fourth Budget has failed to impress voters and done little to bolster Labor’s economic credentials,” Galaxy CEO David Briggs said.

“It’s not just the Budget – it goes beyond that. It is a reflection that Labor are on the nose and it doesn’t matter what they do.

“It suggests a growing disenchantment with a Government that has failed to inspire confidence and is looking increasingly like an administration trying to muddle through as best it can.”

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Comment: Australia needs an election – now

14 May, 2011 by

Paul Kelly, writing in The Australian, correctly states that an election is the only way to resolve the political mess that we find ourselves in. If Julia Gillard had said on the eve of the election that Australia would have a carbon tax by 2012, the Coalition would have won comfortably. But as it is, she said precisely the opposite, and then went back on her word to appease the Greens and keep Labor in power. The government is built on a bare-faced lie.

Inevitably, comparisons are drawn with John Howard’s position on the GST, but with one very important difference: Howard put his change of heart to the people at an election. Gillard hasn’t the political integrity, nor the guts, to do that because she knows she would lose in a landslide. So she hangs on, sinking deeper into crisis every day, crippled by her deal with the Greens. I guess the only benefit to all this is that the level of simmering anger in the population will just continue to rise between now and 2013, so that when the election is finally held, Labor will be annihilated, and will be in opposition for a generation (with a bit of luck).

So Tony Abbott should continue to push the line: this is an illegitimate government. Only an election will give Australia what it needs, a strong, majority government with the legitimacy we deserve.

Filed Under: Climate

Coal industry talks on carbon tax end in "deadlock"

13 May, 2011 by

Open cast mines in the Hunter Valley

Should we have expected anything else? The carbon tax is a direct attack on the coal industry, and no amount of “compensation” will change that. The government is sinking yet further into the mire.

TALKS between the coal industry and the government have ended in deadlock, with key coal representatives telling the government they cannot accept the industry compensation package on the table and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet sticking to his position.

In the meeting in Canberra yesterday, the coal industry argued for a phased-in approach to the auctioning of emissions permits and the staged inclusion of so-called fugitive emissions (the release of greenhouse gasses during the mining process).

In a submission to the government, the Australian Coal Association argued: “It is perplexing that the government has arrived at variations on its old proposals previously shown to deter investment, reduce Australian competitiveness and destroy Australian jobs in favour of enhanced opportunities for overseas competitors for no environmental gain.” (source)

How many of Australia’s key industry sectors does this government intend to alienate in its attempts to appease Bob Brown, I wonder?

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

"We will oppose the carbon tax in opposition, and repeal it in government"

12 May, 2011 by

PM in waiting

Tony Abbott’s fighting talk in his Budget reply. Those few words should be all the Australian public needs to hear to vote out this illegitimate government at the next election. Gillard had no mandate for a carbon tax, expressly ruled it out on the eve of the 2010 election, and cynically backflipped to appease the Greens in February. If it hadn’t been for those hopeless, grovelling, sycophantic, lily-livered, pathetic excuses for MPs, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, we would never be in this right royal mess.

Here are some key (climate-related) extracts from his reply:

Then there’s the carbon tax that the Prime Minister said would never happen that will just make cost of living pressures so much worse.

A $26 a tonne carbon tax would add 25 per cent more to electricity bills and 6.5 cents a litre more to fuel bills that are already skyrocketing – and that’s before it starts automatically increasing by at least four per cent every single year.

A $26 a tonne carbon tax means 16 coal mines closed, 23,000 mining jobs lost, and 45,000 jobs lost in industries like steel, aluminium, cement, glass, chemicals and motor cars. The Prime Minister talks about compensation but there’s no compensation for people who have lost their jobs.

So let me make this crystal clear: the Coalition will oppose the carbon tax in opposition and repeal it in government. The Coalition will oppose the mining tax in opposition and repeal it in government.

…

The Prime Minister can leave the carbon tax out of the budget but she can’t hide the damage it will do to struggling families’ cost of living, the havoc it will wreak on jobs in manufacturing industry exposed to cut-throat competition, and the fact that it will make no real difference to the environment in the absence of comparable action overseas.

The Prime Minister can’t hide the truth: that this is a tax for which she has no mandate. In fact, she has a mandate not to introduce it. The declaration, “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”, will haunt this government every day until it faces up to this betrayal.

Does anyone think that the Prime Minister would now be in the Lodge had she admitted truthfully, six days out from last year’s election that, yes, “there will be a carbon tax under a government I lead”? This is the cancer that’s eroding the Prime Minister’s standing and sapping the government’s authority.

As things stand, we have a parliament that can’t make decisions people respect, a Prime Minister who looks like she’s not up to the job and a minority government that’s increasingly seen as an experiment that’s failed. If Australia goes on like this for another two and a half years, what is currently a great country with a lousy government could slide into a morass of indecision and paralysis.

Read it all here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Labor denies carbon tax ad blitz

12 May, 2011 by

Carbon tax advertising

Which means we can expect it to start next week.

THE federal government has rejected Coalition claims it ”squirrelled away” $13.7 million in the budget to fund an advertising campaign to promote its proposed carbon tax.

The budget papers make clear that Labor set aside money for a ”climate change foundation campaign” in this financial year and 2011-12.

But the Finance Minister, Penny Wong, told Parliament yesterday the $13.7 million was not new but rather a ”transfer of already announced funds between years”.

The money was only to be used to increase understanding of climate change, she said. [Let’s hope Penny isn’t writing it – Ed]

”It does not include, on my advice, paid advertising. No decision has been taken by the government on any climate change advertising campaign.”

The Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, said yesterday the money for 2011-12 would be used for activities such as website development and the printing of information brochures. [That’s OK then – Ed]

The opposition climate action spokesman, Greg Hunt, said the government was preparing to begin a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz. ”It will mean taxpayers paying for carbon tax ads on the TV, radio and newspapers.” (source)

Given Labor’s track record with telling the truth, I think we’d all better be prepared for a bombardment of climate nonsense to prop up the ailing the carbon tax.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

ABC bias exposed… yet again

11 May, 2011 by

Bias in its genes

Bias is in its genes. It is part of what makes the ABC what it is. A shameless pro-left wing editorial stance is standard fare for national broadcasters it seems – just look at the truly awful BBC. We often report on the ABC’s blatant bias towards climate alarmism (see here for a selection), helped by a staff of science writers who are fully paid up warmists (think Robyn Williams and Bernie Hobbs to name but two).

Now Gavin Atkins takes their gruesome snake pit of lefty thinking, The Drum, to task in The Australian:

The ABC opinion website is not compelled by editorial policies to demonstrate any form of balance but merely to provide a “range of subjects from a diversity of perspectives”.

At The Drum, one conservative opinion is all it requires to legitimise a dozen from the Left.

Take, for example, the death of Osama bin Laden. Since his death, Drum readers have been provided with pretty much the same opinion every day from a total of nine writers: it was an extrajudiciary killing; the US was working outside the rule of law; celebrations of his death were disgraceful.

One of these writers, Greg Barns, went so far as to appear on The Drum’s television show to express doubt that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.

Two contributors were eventually published wishing good riddance to bad rubbish, enough for the ABC to claim it has provided a diversity of perspectives, and publish another brace of tales from the hand-wringers.

But it is ridiculous to assert, as the ABC’s chief executive Mark Scott did following the launch of the ABC’s editorial policies in 2006, that this fulfils an expectation that “audiences must not be able to reasonably conclude that the ABC has taken an editorial stand on matters of contention and public debate”.

The real measure of bias at The Drum is not the range of opinion, it’s the frequency. Until the end of last month, 98 writers had been published eight or more times at The Drum, producing a total of 1880 articles. Only eight of these contributors (one in 12) would pass muster as being on the right of the political spectrum: Glenn Milne, David Barnett, Chris Berg, Kevin Donnelly, Tom Switzer, John Hewson, Niki Savva and Sinclair Davidson.

Of these, Milne is first and foremost a journalist rather than an opinion writer, Hewson rarely expresses any conservative viewpoint, and others are specialists in areas such as education or economics rather than political issues of the day.

This means, for example, that of all the writers who are given a regular platform on the ABC website, I could find only four articles that were in some way supportive of Israel and none in favour of the war in Afghanistan.

By comparison, there are dozens of anti-Israel and anti-Afghan war pieces on the taxpayer-funded website, most of them accusatory and damning. For example, there are at least nine anti-Israel articles by Antony Loewenstein alone, 12 anti-Afghanistan war rants by Kellie Tranter, and many more from Labor Party speechwriter Bob Ellis scattered among his 110 contributions. (source)

Also check out Gavin’s article on Asian Correspondent for more.

Utterly shameful for a taxpayer funded national broadcaster to be guilty of such blatant pro-Left bias. But one thing is certain, nothing will change in a hurry.

Filed Under: ABC Bias Tagged With: ,

Failed climate gimmicks axed in budget

11 May, 2011 by

Gimmicks axed

Because anything Australia does unilaterally to “tackle climate change” is nothing more than a pointless gimmick, wasting money that could be spent on schools, medical research, housing – anything, in fact, rather than climate change.

WAYNE Swan has taken the razor to a raft of green programs, particularly those aimed at cutting emissions from coal consumption, and mopped up a string of failed green programs in a budget that, as expected, makes little mention of the impending carbon tax.

While carbon capture and storage have borne the brunt of the cuts, the government has moved to wind up failed programs such as Green Loans, the Home Insulation Safety Program and Green Start.

The cutback to the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships program has been slated to provide $420 million of the $22 billion in savings measures announced in the budget. Of this, $260m has been deferred beyond the forward estimates.

The government has also delivered on its election promise, cutting funding for the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, one of former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s pet climate change programs [my hear. The cuts to the CCS Institute, which was charged with promoting the technology internationally, yield savings of $45m over two years from the next financial year.

Also cut was $12.8m over five years from the National Low Emissions Coal Initiative, which was designed to support the development and deployment of technologies to reduce emissions from coal use.

But it’s not all good news, as some of these savings will be wasted yet again:

But some of the savings from the cuts to the CCS Flagships program have been used to create a $60.9m National CO2 Infrastructure Plan, which will fund exploration of geological basins for long-term storage hubs and the acquisition of CO2 storage data in basins in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia.

The CO2 Infrastructure Plan will also help fund a National CO2 drilling rig deployment strategy and a national CO2 storage and transport infrastructure assessment.

What a relief. The world can sleep soundly knowing Australia now has a CO2 Infrastructure Plan…

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

BHP confused on carbon price

10 May, 2011 by

Confusion

BHP is tying itself in knots. Back in September 2010, it’s chief executive, Marius Kloppers, signed BHP’s own death warrant in Australia by backing a carbon price. Now, however, when a carbon tax is just around the corner, surprise surprise, they’re having second thoughts. Relying on the usual weasel words, its chairman thinks that Australia should take action on climate, as long as it doesn’t include BHP. In other words, I’m alright Jack, the rest of the country can go down the pan. How thoughtful.

But at least he makes the obvious point (obvious to everyone except the Gillard government, that is), that the rest of the world won’t follow Australia’s suicidal example:

BHP Billiton chairman Jacques Nasser has turned up the pressure on Julia Gillard to abandon plans for a carbon tax, calling for a “go-slow” approach to tackling climate change and warning that the rest of the world is unlikely to follow Australia’s lead.

Speaking in Melbourne yesterday, the chairman of Australia’s biggest company and the world’s biggest miner added to recent calls by his chief executive, Marius Kloppers, for a sector-specific approach to dealing with carbon pollution [harmless trace gas carbon dioxide – Ed] that did not hurt businesses that had global competitors.

…

Mr Nasser yesterday told a Melbourne Mining Club lunch that BHP Billiton still supported Australia moving early on climate change, but questioned the government’s plans and stressed the nation needed to remain competitive with other countries.

“In terms of a carbon tax, most countries around the world have decided to go in some other direction,” the BHP chairman said.

“Particularly in the larger economies, there’s been a trend towards regulation, rather than changing behaviour through taxation or policy changes.

“We’ve got to be careful we don’t get into the trap of really believing our behaviour is going to influence other countries; I don’t think that will be the case.” (source)

Will the government listen? Of course not. Their eyes and ears have been closed for years.

And a bonus item for you: the Greens, in the form of Bob Brown, have shown themselves once again to be utterly unfit to take part in a modern democratic government, by describing skilled migrants, skilled migrants, to Australia as “queue jumpers“. What does that make the illegal boat arrivals, Bob? Clearly rather than migrants who will add to Australia’s economy and prosperity, Brown and his idiot colleagues would rather have a bunch of unskilled Afghans arriving on a rickety fishing boat, who think they don’t have to go through the proper migration process like everyone else, and who will drain our economy by spongeing off taxpayer-funded benefits for the rest of their lives… but nothing the Greens say, no matter how ridiculous, surprises me anymore. What is surprising is that anyone takes them seriously.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Delusional: Swan thinks "tide will turn" for carbon tax

9 May, 2011 by

Get his face off my monitor

In his dreams. The more people find out about the tax, and the fact that it will increase the price of everything for no benefit to the climate whatsoever, whether locally or globally, the more people will harden their opposition to it. But apparently not Wayne Swan, who believes (as usual) that it’s only a matter of time before the unwashed electorate come round to the political elite’s way of thinking:

Yesterday, as the Opposition Leader continued to attack the carbon tax, Mr Swan said he expected Labor’s stock to improve once the details of the tax were finalised in coming months.

“At the end of the day our job – we deal with some very tough economic and political issues,” he said in an interview with The Australian.

“There’s no way but just to keep going and get them done and wear it in the interim.”

He said there was “no other way” to deliver a carbon tax than that being pursued.

“We understand that we’ll cop stuff along the way because of that,” the Treasurer said.

“But there’s no alternative to it. The alternative to it is to do nothing. That’s terribly contrary to the country’s interests in the long term.” (source)

It’s actually quite funny (or it would be if it wasn’t so serious) to watch a politician twisting in the wind, trying to justify the unjustifiable. Maybe the big emitters will get together and agree a global deal in five or ten years time, in which case, Australia can join in then. There is nothing about the carbon tax that is in the country’s interests, whether short term or long term, unless there is global action. However, the longer that global action is delayed, the weaker the case for action will be, as temperatures and sea levels fail to rise as predicted, and people start asking “Is this Y2K all over again?”

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Lefty heads pop as Bolt Report airs on Ten

8 May, 2011 by

Andrew Bolt

Yes, laydeez and gennlemen, that is the sound of heads popping at the ABC and Fairfax as Andrew Bolt’s new show, The Bolt Report, premiered on Channel 10 a few minutes ago. In the first show, Andrew exposed Gillard’s hypocritical boat people policy, interviewed Tony Abbott, discussed Gillard’s future with Mark Latham and gave a Free Speech Award to Paul Keating for his description of Clover Moore’s supporters as “sandal wearing, muesli-chewing, bike riding pedestrians”. LOL! Although a “bike riding pedestrian” is a bit of an oxymoron…

Bolt asked Abbott how much his direct action climate policy would reduce the global temperature. Abbott didn’t answer… (because it’s square root of bugger all).

The show also revealed that the brainless lemmings at GetUp! paid $16,000 to give a refugee (helpfully wearing a GetUp! t-shirt) a surfing lesson with Tony Abbott. They really do have more money than sense.

Obviously, it was refreshing to have a current affairs show which wasn’t leaning so far to the Left that it was falling off the edge. A promising start, and congratulations on the new show.

Filed Under: Climate
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