Swan: public "confused" by carbon tax

7 March, 2011 by

If it quacks like a duck… it's a tax

Ah, yes, the old excuses are the best. If anyone disagrees with your policy, just say the public are too ignorant to properly understand it, and that all that’s necessary is better “communication”. Such is the arrogance of Labor that is believes it is beyond criticism, so when the public go ape because their Prime Minister has lied to them about a carbon tax in order to get elected, they go into self-deluding rationalisation strategies – in other words, we’re right and the public are just a bunch of stupid bogans. Charming.

AUSTRALIANS are confused by the government’s carbon tax plan, Acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan admits.

Mr Swan has tried to downplay concerns about the proposal to cut pollution, saying the scheme would not operate like a “traditional tax”.

He said a “traditional tax” would take money from Australians’ pay packets, while the government’s scheme would take money from big businesses.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott was quick to match the Treasurer’s spin with his own, saying if it “acts like a tax … it is a tax”. (source)

Swan is desperately trying to spin the Labor government and himself out of trouble by claiming that this is a tax on “polluters” [what type of pollution is carbon dioxide again? – Ed], but carefully avoiding the fact that the “polluters” will pass on the tax to their consumers in the form of increased prices. Otherwise, why would there be a need for bewilderingly complex “compensation schemes” for individuals? Sorry Wayne, doesn’t wash.

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Ackerman and Devine on the carbon tax woes

6 March, 2011 by

Backroom deals

Two great reads for a Sunday morning. Firstly, Piers Ackerman in the Telegraph:

IT would be easy to dismiss New England independent Tony Windsor as a whining, whinging wimp and a rat, but he has now assumed national importance in the carbon tax debate.

He has had undeserved relevance thrust upon him.

Last week, Windsor earned the opprobrium of all sensible MPs and public figures around the nation when he connived with Channel 7’s Mark Riley to publicise a purported threat he claimed to have received.

In what was one of the more disgraceful media moments in a year already marred just two months in by Riley’s attempt to smear Opposition leader Tony Abbott with a false and innuendo-laden report on the death of a young Australian soldier, Windsor said on Tuesday he had received his first-ever death threat.

It didn’t help that Riley’s report added false claims about the shooting of a US congresswoman, dishonestly implying that the accused in that horror had been influenced by so-called shock-jocks and right-wing political commentators.

“You’re a f****** liar, a dog, a rat … I hope you die, you bastard,” a caller said, apparently in relation to Windsor’s role in assisting the Gillard Government develop its global-warming strategy as a member of its Multi Party Climate Change Committee. (source)

And then Miranda Devine in the Herald Sun:

YOU have to feel for Julia Gillard, the grand negotiator.

Saddled with a minority Government, she has to appease the Greens and accommodate the silky Bob Brown, while throwing a few bones to Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie and buttering up the turncoat independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, mopping their brows when the heat gets too much.

All the while she has to make sure she doesn’t venture so far into Left-loony land that her own MPs revolt.

Can you imagine what a nightmare for the Prime Minister those daily cups of tea with the Greens and independents have become? She must just feel like picking up the Earl Grey and smashing it against a wall.

No wonder Bob Brown looks pleased with himself, striding around Canberra like the Deadly Mantis, dispensing his wisdom to all and sundry. He can’t believe his luck, as Gillard cedes her power and authority. He smells total capitulation to his world view, with the shadowy shock troops of GetUp at his disposal.

It was his carbon tax that opened up the fault line Gillard is struggling to straddle now, as angry voters bombard Labor MPs’ offices with emails complaining about the Green colonisation of Labor’s soul.

They’re the people who really count — Labor’s authentic base, the working families in suburban seats, the aspirational classes for whom soaring electricity and fuel costs aren’t some theoretical exercise but a painful daily reality. Working people employed by BlueScope Steel are Labor’s base, not inner-city greenies with protected salaries.

And nothing will alienate them quicker than Green demands that petrol be included in the carbon tax, no matter how Brown tries to sugarcoat it. As Graham Richardson told Gillard: include petrol and you’re dead (memo to Tony Windsor: that’s not a death threat). (source)

 

 

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Is coal safe? Labor say yes, Greens say no

5 March, 2011 by

Milne: dangerous eco-fascist

So that would be a “no”, then. The Greens are in charge, so we cannot trust anything Labor or Gillard or Combet says. The Australian leads with the story that Greg Combet has stated that “coal is safe” under Labor’s carbon pricing scheme, but unfortunately it isn’t up to Combet to decide:

Speaking to The Weekend Australian, Mr Combet seized on Greens leader Bob Brown’s signal last week that his party was “open to looking at the impact on trade-exposed industries” as evidence it was prepared to negotiate on transitional assistance for sectors such as coal and aluminium.

But Senator Brown’s deputy, Christine Milne, yesterday renewed her attack on the coal industry, writing on The Punch website that “to prevent the climate crisis, we need to transform our economy away from the dead end of coal to the exciting opportunities of baseload solar and other renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies”.

The idiocy of this statement beggars belief… no it doesn’t, actually, it is after all the Greens talking…

“We need to redesign our cities around people instead of cars,” she wrote.

“We need to protect our magnificent forest carbon stores. All that activity will stimulate our economy. It will create jobs and investment in new industries, many of which need the same skills that people in the coal sector already have.”

NSW Greens MP Cate Faehrmann, who is also the party’s mining spokeswoman, yesterday praised a decision to refuse the Wallarah 2 coalmine expansion on the NSW central coast, but said “unfortunately” the refusal was an exception to the rule in the state and there were 17 major proposals for new mines or expansions being assessed. (source)

How many utterly ludicrous statements can one have in just three paragraphs? “People instead of cars”, “create fake subsidised Green jobs at the expense of real jobs”? The reality is the Greens hate coal with a passion and will do anything to see it completely wiped off the face of the earth. The fact that there’s nothing to replace it except useless fart power and equally useless sunbeams doesn’t bother the anti-human eco-fascists who don’t care that people will go without heat and light.

And don’t even bother to mention the only viable alternative to fossil fuel generation – nuclear. Despite the fact that we have the largest reserves of uranium on the planet, the Greens would rather punish humanity than take the best alternative option.

And these shit-for-brains Greens are now running the country? GOD HELP US.

Getting very angry… must stop and cool off…

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Australia is run by the Greens #2

4 March, 2011 by

Worth a thousand words, Julia

I predict this will be a recurring theme. A few days ago, I wrote that the Greens were running the country. Now it seems that this suspicion is spreading through government, industry and the public, and the consequences for the Gillard government will be disastrous.

The photo opportunity at the launch of the carbon price policy, with Gillard and Combet outnumbered and outflanked by eco-Nazis Brown and Milne, hapless “independents” Whining Windsor and weirdy-beardy Oaf-shott, and Gillard literally looking up to Brown with a look of admiration (see image), was a classic PR disaster. It was also the perfect illustration of who is really in charge – and for the avoidance of doubt, it ain’t Julia…

Dennis Shanahan in The Australian:

THE perception that Julia Gillard is giving too much to the Greens, that she’s ceding her authority to Bob Brown and giving precedence to briefing independent and Greens MPs ahead of her ALP colleagues, is taking hold among her vital constituencies: the public, business and her own parliamentary party.

From specific issues to broader concepts and fundamental policy, Labor’s pact with the Greens for their support in a minority government is having an increasingly corrosive effect on the Prime Minister’s authority and confidence that the government can deliver its own agenda.

There is evidence the public’s general confidence is being shaken by sudden policy shifts and uncertainty about a minority government; there is growing disquiet, even dismay, among business leaders that dealing with the government on the basis of compromise with a commercially viable outcome is being overtaken by ideological demands. Labor MPs are concerned they are being treated as second-rate representatives and the government is being outsmarted by Brown as the Australian Greens’ leader. (source)

The possibility of a split in the Labor government isn’t insignificant, with the right wing faction, sick of kowtowing to Bob Brown and his environmental Marxists, finally decides enough is enough. And that’s before we’ve even reached the substantive policy issues associated with the carbon tax: Labor wants 5% emissions reductions, Greens want 25%; Greens want petrol included, Labor doesn’t etc etc…

When those thorny issues are on the table, it will only get worse. And it’s not just climate policy, either:

JULIA Gillard has restated her absolute rejection of gay marriage and hotly disputed opposition claims the Australian Greens have hijacked Labor’s political agenda.

But her comments come amid division within Labor’s powerful Right faction, with Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes yesterday backing gay marriage, putting himself at odds with other key right-wing powerbrokers.

On Wednesday, the Prime Minister said she could overturn an earlier Labor decision, to back a bill put forward by Greens leader Bob Brown that would remove the ability of ministers to overturn territories’ laws.

Her comments followed anger from the Labor Right after Greens MPs in the ACT said that if the Brown bill were passed they would renew a push to legalise same-sex marriage.

Tony Abbott yesterday cited the gay marriage push as evidence that the Greens were running her government. But Ms Gillard last night stood by her view that “marriage is between a man and a woman”. (source)

So what happens when Julia doesn’t play ball and give the Greens what they want? Answers on a postcard.

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Stop whining, Windsor

3 March, 2011 by

Betrayed their electorates

Miranda Devine has little sympathy for Tony Windsor, and rightly so:

TONY Windsor and Rob Oakeshott are trying to play the victim now but the country independents are simply reaping the whirlwind of the betrayal of their deeply conservative electorates after the August election.

They sold out their constituents in return for flattery and back slapping in Canberra, and now they’re feigning shock when they get blowback. Give us a break.

Even though he tried to hide, everyone saw Windsor and his grinning, bearded mate Oakeshott standing there last week, with Julia Gillard, Bob Brown, Christine Milne and Greg Combet, at the press conference announcing the carbon tax that the Prime Minister expressly promised during the election campaign she would never impose.

And he’ll be hiding up the back of that sovereign sextet the next time they announce another of Brown’s pet policies – euthanasia, same-sex marriage and any number of wasteful crackpot green schemes that are anathema to conservatives.

Now Windsor is complaining about “shock jocks” and Coalition MPs and nefarious “others” who he claims are “involved in an orchestrated campaign” to inciting US-style violence against him. It’s just another smokescreen to hide from the consequences of his actions. (source)

In other carbon tax news, the Herald Sun reports that Labor heavies are telling Gillard to “put the bake on Greens”:

The right-wing delegation of Senator Farrell, and senior senators Steve Hutchins and John Hogg met the PM at 11.30am yesterday after the Greens claimed to have Government backing for a Bill to pave the way for gay marriage and legal euthanasia.

It is believed the PM said she had no knowledge of it and gave a commitment she would not back legal euthanasia.They had also confronted Treasurer Wayne Swan, who also claimed to be in the dark. [He usually is – Ed]

Senate Labor leader Chris Evans was later forced to apologise to a caucus of Labor senators at a 3pm meeting over what they claimed was a return to the Rudd-style lack of consultation and failure of government process.

…

Ms Gillard now faces a possible breakout of factional war with right-wing MPs accusing Labor left MPs – who support gay marriage and euthanasia – of conspiring with the Greens to deceive the Government. The issue was later resolved when the PM intervened to ensure Labor would vote with the Coalition in the Senate to delay the Bill by referring it to a committee.

MPs are also angry that the PM’s decision to introduce a carbon tax was not taken to the caucus.

Others told The Daily Telegraph they were receiving “virulent” emails complaining of a Labor “sell out” to the Greens, who combined with Ms Gillard to unveil the climate change pact. (source)

Paul Kelly in The Australian foreshadows an almighty crack down the middle of Labor, in a piece entitled “Brown leads ALP on a merry dance”:

The evidence, so far, is that Brown is outsmarting a divided Labor Party. Half the party is a willing conscript to the Green social agenda while the other half rejects this agenda on grounds of conviction and politics.

Brown sets the pace and Julia Gillard looks weak in responding to his social policy tactics.

Yet there is one impression Gillard cannot tolerate – and that is weakness. (source)

Interesting times ahead.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees

2 March, 2011 by

Closed for business…

The Science and Public Policy Institute undertakes the cost/benefit analysis of Australian climate mitigation policies that the Gillard government strangely doesn’t want to do.

Gillard and Combet are always banging on about a carbon tax being in the “national interest”, but the reality is that a tax with no benefit couldn’t be less in the national interest.

So, ladies and gentlemen, if we shut down Australia’s economy completely tomorrow, then by 2100, we would have slowed any man-made warming by:

0.01 degrees

So Julia, please explain why we are bothering with any kind of carbon price?

Read it here (PDF).

Thanks to Jo Nova, who did the wonderful graphic!

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Andrew Bolt on media bias

2 March, 2011 by

Andrew Bolt

Essential reading. The Left-wing media (read: the media) have been strangely silent on Julia’s “lie” about a carbon tax, and some have even attempted to portray it as the brave act of a strong leader! Compare and contrast that muted whisper with the cacophony of outrage that would have erupted had Tony Abbott been elected PM in August 2010, and then promptly introduced Work Choices again.

REMEMBER how so many journalists hated John Howard, who nevertheless won four elections in a row?

Remember how almost all the media backed a plan for a republic, only to have it rejected at the 1999 referendum?

How often have we seen this gulf in opinion between the mainstream media and the public they report to?

I suspect Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s lie may be the latest example.

It’s rare to see such overwhelming fury from a public at having been so brazenly deceived by a politician.

Before the election, as everyone now knows, Gillard repeatedly promised she would not introduce a tax on carbon dioxide emissions—in effect, a great green tax on electricity and petrol.

“There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,” she said.

But six months later Gillard says she will indeed give us that carbon tax, and from next year, without even going to another election for a mandate.

The reason? Just one of the 150 members of the House of Representatives, the Greens’ Adam Bandt, demanded this tax, as did his leader, Bob Brown, holding the balance of power in the Senate.

Everyone knows Gillard broke her solemn word. And a great many people hate politicians lying to them so flagrantly, which is why the talkback lines are smoking, protest rallies are planned, and Essential Research, in a poll this week, detected a huge and election-losing drop in Labor’s support.

But in one part of Australia, that anger is not felt. No zephyr of protest wafts. No objection is raised to Gillard stealing an election with a lie.

That part of Australia is where some of our most influential political reporters and commentators work. To them, it seems, Gillard did no worse than make a compromise, and, indeed, she may have even risen to glory.

Read it all.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Key Labor adviser rejects carbon tax

1 March, 2011 by

No support for carbon tax

One by one, they abandon the sinking ship. Hopefully, another nail in the Gillard/Brown Labor/Green coffin. Heather Ridout, chair of the influential Australian Industry Group, has refused to support Gillard’s carbon tax proposal:

TONY Abbott has vowed to scrap Julia Gillard’s carbon tax and demanded she seek a mandate for the plan as Labor’s closest business adviser, Heather Ridout, refused to back the Prime Minister’s package.

As the Opposition Leader labelled Ms Gillard a “fraud” for breaking her pre-election promise not to introduce a carbon tax, the Prime Minister branded Mr Abbott the most irresponsible political leader in 15 years over his vow to scrap the program.

But Ms Ridout, the Australian Industry Group chief executive, last night declined to back Ms Gillard’s proposal to introduce a fixed carbon price from July 1 next year and an emissions trading scheme three to five years later.

“The jury is very much still out on the introduction of a carbon price in Australia, with industry very concerned about the competitive impacts,” Ms Ridout said.

“In this regard, all options should still be on the table, including that of rollback until the final shape of the government’s proposal is clear.

“While certainty is important for decision-making around major long-term investments, this certainty should not come at the cost of a loss of competitiveness that sends jobs and emissions offshore or risks the continuity of energy supply.” (source)

So that leaves moonbats like BHP’s Marius Kloppers (see here) supporting it… Why is it so difficult for the Government to see the writing on the wall? A price on carbon will do nothing for the climate, and damage our economy. It’s very simple, but Gillard et al are either too stupid to see it or too blind to look.

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Bob Carter lashes Labor

28 February, 2011 by

Climate sense

A joy to read. Professor Bob Carter (who, let’s face it, is a proper scientist) teaches the warmist scaremongers Garnaut, Flannery, Combet and Gillard a lesson in basic science:

Do you understand the meaning of the phrases “empirical science” and “hypothesis testing”? [I can answer that one: “no” – Ed]

Do you understand that the correct null hypothesis is that gentle warmings, such as that which occurred between 1979 and 1998, and equivalent coolings, are to be viewed as due to natural causes unless and until evidence indicates otherwise. [Ditto, “no” – Ed] Gentlemen, where is that evidence, and why is it not presented in the voluminous reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that you and the government so often refer to?

Despite this lack of evidence for dangerous, or potentially dangerous, warming, and despite the lack of efficacy of cutting carbon dioxide emissions as a means of preventing the trivial warming that is likely to occur (cutting all of Australia’s emissions would theoretically prevent, perhaps, around one-thousandth of a degree of warming), the political course in Canberra is now set on carbon tax autopilot, and the plane is flying squarely into the eye of a storm that is labelled “let’s spin a regressive new tax as a virtuous environmental measure”.

For instance, the Prime Minister says:

I also want to be very clear with Australians about what pricing carbon does. It has price impacts. It’s meant to. That’s the whole point.

No, Prime Minister, that is not the point at all. The point is supposed to be attaining a meaningful reduction in future warming, which a carbon dioxide taxation policy will not achieve – even were it to successfully close down the entire industrial economy of Australia

Climate Minister Mr Combet believes that reducing “carbon pollution” to “drive investment in clean energy …. is fundamentally what a carbon price is about”.

No, Greg, the matter has nothing to do with either carbon or pollution, for the alleged dangerous warming is supposed to be produced by the atmospheric trace gas carbon dioxide. To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is an abuse of logic, language and science, given its pivotal role in the photosynthetic processes that underpin most of our planetary ecosystems. In essence, carbon dioxide is the very staff of life, and increasing it in the atmosphere helps most plants to grow better and to use water more efficiently.

…

Never has an important national policy issue been so surrounded with public dishonesty and deliberate ambiguity of language as is the issue of dangerous, human-caused global warming.

Choreographed over the years by green lobby groups, politicians and commentators alike now participate like puppets-on-strings in an entirely faux public gigue involving words or phrases like “carbon” (when they mean carbon dioxide), “pollution” (when they are referring to an environmentally beneficial trace gas), “settled science” (when the science is hotly contested, and the onus of proof of danger still rests, unattained, with the climate alarmists of a discredited IPCC), “climate change” (when they mean dangerous global warming), “energy efficiency” (in the same breath that they rule out the environmentally friendly baseload energy source represented by nuclear power) and “international good citizen” (at a time when international action on climate policy has never been less certain).

It is therefore entirely unsurprising that there has been a swing in public opinion against alarmism on global warming, though nervous Labor politicians are doubtless already sucking in deep breaths of surprise at the apparent strength of the swing. One recent online poll, in The Age of all places, received an 89% NO answer to the question “Would you support a climate tax?”; and another, in the Herald-Sun and with more than 30,000 respondents, received an 85% NO to the question “Do you support a price on carbon (sic)?”.

Wonderful stuff. Read it all.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , , ,

Tony Windsor: stooge for environmental activists

28 February, 2011 by

Keep an eye out, Tony, your electorate are after you…

Independent? Independent, my foot. Eco-fruitcake, more like. Tony Windsor is showing his true colours today by launching a report by the Climate Institute, an environmental advocacy group (see here for an example), which owes its entire existence to the current climate scare:

A new report says a price on carbon could create 34,000 new jobs in the renewable energy sector in regional Australia over the next two decades.

The report, by the Climate Institute, was launched this morning by independent MP Tony Windsor, just days after he helped the Prime Minister announce plans for a price on carbon by July next year.

Last week, Mr Windsor would not commit to backing a tax, but he says he is keen to generate a discussion on renewable energy.

“For many years now I have sort of been preaching a gospel I guess that there are enormous opportunities, particularly for country people, but for the nation generally, in terms of renewable energy,” Mr Windsor said. (source)

What on earth is Windsor doing spruiking this kind of nonsense from the Climate Institute anyway? What the report doesn’t mention, of course, is that for all those 34,000 subsidised, taxpayer-funded, propped-up, fake “green jobs”, you will lose several times as many real, proper, genuine jobs, as our competitiveness sinks beneath the waves and industry moves offshore. But don’t expect the Climate Institute to look to closely at that, they’re on the climate bandwagon, feeding at the trough of alarmism that we’re all paying for through our taxes.

And if that isn’t nauseating enough, Windsor then goes on to smear Tony Abbott in the Fairfax press, spilling his guts about the confidential post-election negotiations:

Tony Abbott was so hungry for power he was willing to do anything to form government after the election, one of the men who blocked his dream says.

Independent MP Tony Windsor says his discussions with Mr Abbott did deal with what do about climate change.

“Tony Abbott did say during those discussions that he would do anything to gain power,” Mr Windsor told reporters on Tuesday.

The NSW MP said he presumed that applied to climate policy.

Asked for specifics, Mr Windsor was not keen to discuss confidential discussions.

“He made the point that he would do anything to gain power.” (source)

Ah, right, so it’s OK to breach confidences when it suits you to smear Abbott, but you play the “confidential discussion” card when asked a difficult question, right? I get it. None of this should surprise us really. Virtually every utterance since the election has rubbished the Coalition and supported Labor, including on the floods and the NBN. Independent? I think not. Labor in drag. What a disgrace to politics and to his (essentially conservative) electorate, who will no doubt give him the bloody nose he deserves at the ballot box at the next election.

But one piece of good news is that Tony Abbott has confirmed he will roll back the carbon tax if elected. You took too long to announce that, Tony, should have been seconds after Ju-liar’s announcement…

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,
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