Julia clearly looks up to Bob Brown

What is it about Labor governments and taxes? They just can’t help themselves. Any opportunity they see to wring more dollars out of the average man in the street, they grab it with both hands. Witness the ill-considered flood levy – why bother about keeping the budget in order when we can slug everyone for more money instead? So a carbon tax, which is effectively a tax on energy, which is effectively a tax on everything, is the ultimate prize for Labor. However, no-one (except possibly the ABC and Fairfax) is buying it:

Herald Sun: Prime Minister Julia Gillard has her hand in our pocket

IF a carbon price is so essential to Australia’s economic future, why has Prime Minister Julia Gillard chosen to announce it while the nation is in shock over the New Zealand earthquake?

The answer is Ms Gillard and her Government are playing politics. They know the attention of Australians has been diverted by the earthquake that has taken 98 lives and left 226 people unaccounted for.

That makes the carbon tax the most cynical of policy pronouncements and while the Prime Minister might posture and prevaricate, Australian voters will see it for what it is: an ill-prepared policy that promises to rip money from our pockets without the courtesy of telling us how much they intend to take.

Ms Gillard says Tony Abbott will brand it “a great big new tax on everything” and she is right about that. The Opposition Leader is already pledging himself to devote “every second of every minute of every day of every week of every month” to fighting a carbon tax.

News.com.au: Families will be worse off under Gillard’s carbon price

STRUGGLING families will be compensated with cash for rising energy costs when the Federal Government imposes a carbon tax on Australians from July 1 next year.

But most households won’t be able to escape Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s new emissions trading scheme, with forecasts that it will push power bills higher by between $300 and $500 a year.

Accused yesterday by the Opposition of betraying Australians, Ms Gillard formally broke a key election pledge and announced that the Government would impose a price on pollution from July 1, 2012, with a full emissions trading scheme to be operating as early as 2015.

It will be the most complex and broad-ranging carbon tax of almost any country in the world.

The actual carbon price has yet to be set, but industry experts claim that the flow-on costs of a moderate $26 price per tonne of carbon would result in a $300 rise in electricity bills due to the country’s reliance on coal-fired power generation.

Herald Sun: Deceit will hurt every one of us

JULIA Gillard has now turned her big lie into a big new tax.

The carbon tax – that before the election she promised would not be imposed by “a government I lead” – now starts in 16 months. She hasn’t even got the guts or the honesty to take it to voters at the next election.

It will start as, or very quickly be, the equivalent of a 25 per cent increase in the GST – and then rise from there. Every year. Forever.

You don’t like your already much higher electricity bills? Get used to it, they are headed much higher. And then higher again and again.

And that’s only the start of it. Like the GST, Gillard’s carbon tax will not only push up electricity prices; it will increase the price of everything.

It sets out to hurt every Australian – to absolutely no point. It can make not the slightest difference to the local climate, far less the global climate.

It purports to cut our emissions of carbon dioxide when we are happily pocketing the billions from selling coal and iron ore to China and the rest of Asia.

Talk about hypocrisy, stupidity and deceit rolled into one.

The Australian: Curious strategy is fraught with danger

JULIA Gillard’s formal announcement of the government’s intention to start a carbon tax from July 1 next year is a huge political gamble.

The Prime Minister has decided to build on this week’s parliamentary momentum and Tony Abbott’s internal difficulties by taking on a bold policy challenge against “the politics of the past”. It’s a curious decision fraught with dangers. The release of the so-called framework on climate change yesterday raised more fears and asked more questions than it settled.

Daily Telegraph: Gillard will pay high political price

“THERE will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” These words uttered on the eve of the last federal election will haunt the Prime Minister every day until the next one.

John Howard may have survived introducing a GST under the same false promise.

But it is unlikely that the Australian people will be as forgiving towards Julia Gillard.

And that is because she was forced to break that promise

for one reason alone — to form government with the Greens and the NSW independents.

Again, it comes down to a question of conviction for the PM.

Forget the merits of climate change policy. The question in people’s minds will be the authenticity of her climate change conversion when only six months ago she declared as much interest in it as the devil does in Christmas.

Ms Gillard’s attempts to reclaim a moral premise as the justification for a carbon tax will only remind people of the last time they were told that.

Labor will pay a high price for the relationship the PM has forged with the Greens.

That price is what households will now be forced to pay as they are financially penalised for making toast or turning on a light. Most people did not vote for the Greens.

The decision’s been made. Perhaps we can now disband the Climate Committee and the Climate Commission and save the money… hmm, fat chance.

UPDATE 1: My favourite comment so far on the “rabble” that runs our country, under a photo of the announcement, by Tim Blair:

Seriously. Just look at them.

UPDATE 2: Business clearly wasn’t consulted about this either – what a surprise – just like the mining tax:

THE nation’s biggest manufacturers have accused Julia Gillard of failing to consult business over her plans to introduce a carbon price next year that could cost the top 200 companies a combined $3.3 billion a year.

In a reaction reminiscent of the mining industry’s attack on Kevin Rudd’s mining tax, steelmakers BlueScope and OneSteel said they were blindsided by yesterday’s announcement that a fixed price would be put on carbon from July next year before transition to a trading scheme.

Paul O’Malley, chief executive of the nation’s biggest manufacturer, BlueScope Steel, said he was worried the government would send emissions offshore by taxing and potentially killing manufacturing in Australia.

“We are very disappointed about the lack of consultation with industry ahead of today’s announcement,” Mr O’Malley said.

“The proper forum for discussion of critical details that affect industry is the Business Roundtable, not the Multi-party Committee on Climate Change, which contains no members from businesses affected by this policy.” (source)

UPDATE 3: The ABC runs a story about how the UK and Denmark are advocating “even deeper cuts” to emissions, just to show subliminally that Gillard is definitely on the right track:

The British and Danish governments want to move to a 30 per cent cut by 2020. Their call comes as EU states are considering whether to move faster than the 20 per cent reduction from the 1990 level.

A draft paper showed earlier this month that the EU is overhauling its strategy in favour of a 25 percent cut.

EU governments have agreed to deepen cuts to 30 percent but only if a strong global climate deal is reached which would also bind developing countries to a similar goal.

“Denmark and the UK are in agreement that our future prosperity depends on stimulating green growth and getting off the oil hook,” British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne and Danish Minister for Climate and Energy Lykke Friis said in a joint statement.

“Decarbonising further, faster, can keep Europe ahead in the global low carbon race, but the UK and Denmark can’t do that alone,” the ministers said. (source)

Pure insanity. Seriously, how long will it take before they realise that such moves will utterly wreck their economies? They are truly living in fantasy land.

Unilateral climate action

I seem to be using the “money down the lavatory” image quite a lot at the moment, because it illustrates so well the pointlessness of unilateral Australian action on climate (and indeed any attempts at climate mitigation for that matter). Anyway, who cares if we shamefully waste your hard-earned taxpayer dollars? We’re “saving the planet”, right?

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that over $5 billion has been wasted on such gimmicks in the last decade – that’s an awful lot of nurses, teachers and policemen by the way. And what difference has it made to the climate? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Because Australia’s emissions are a piddling 1.5% of the global total, it wouldn’t make a skerrick of impact even if we reduced our emissions to ZERO overnight (and that is all the while assuming that CO2 has an effect on the climate anyway, which is far from certain):

MORE than $5.5 billion has been spent by federal governments during the past decade on climate change programs that are delivering only small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

An analysis of government schemes designed to cut emissions by direct spending or regulatory intervention reveals they have cost an average $168 for each tonne of carbon dioxide abated.

While some have reduced emissions cost-effectively, many of the more expensive schemes are exorbitant ways of tackling climate change, costing far more for each tonne of carbon avoided than any mooted emissions trading scheme or carbon tax.

The worst offenders have included the Labor government’s rebates for rooftop solar panels, which cost $300 or more for every tonne of carbon abated, and the Howard government’s remote renewable power generation scheme, which paid up to $340 for each tonne of carbon.

By contrast, the proposed emissions trading scheme blocked by the Coalition and the Greens in the previous Parliament was expected to put a price on carbon of $20 to $25 a tonne in its early years. (source)

So in the Moonbat Herald’s view, an ETS would be better, because whilst it would still be a total waste of money, it would be less of a waste than the gimmicks we’ve had so far? Great argument…

And similarly, Julia’s deceitful carbon tax, due to be introduced in 2012 in a cynical breach of an express pre-election promise not to do so, will also be a complete waste of money that could better be spent on something (anything) else – health, education, helping the poorest in society etc etc. At least the Herald Sun demonstrates some climate sanity this morning, exposing the pointlessness of unilateral action:

Apart from the most blatant political dishonesty, Gillard’s embrace of a carbon tax is almost exquisite in its stupidity. In 40 years of watching politicians and policy, I cannot think of anything that comes even remotely close.

Analyst and commentator Henry Ergas nailed it exactly in our sister paper, The Australian, last Friday.

Now the core argument propounded for a carbon tax or its equivalent, a price on carbon is that we in Australia have the most to lose from supposed “climate change”, formerly known as global warming.

We’ll leave aside the stupendous self-absorption in that claim. That what happens to 22 million Australians is so far more important than the other seven billion people on the planet, the overwhelming majority of whom live in dramatically more degraded circumstances than us.

That while yes, so the argument goes, there is a big cost in reducing our use of fossil fuels the entire point of the carbon tax; but the benefits to us as a nation will eventually over time exceed those costs.

The critical point is that those benefits of preventing global warming arrive only if, to state the obvious, we do actually prevent global warming. That is to say, only if the world joins us in cutting the use of fossil fuels.

The simple but absolutely fundamental point Ergas made is the devastating double loss we will suffer if we engage in unilateral mitigation (of carbon dioxide emissions).

But international agreement is not reached and the “catastrophic outcome it (Gillard, chief climate hysterics Ross Garnaut and Tim Flannery etc) fears eventuates”.

That is to say our punitive carbon tax wrecks our economy. But we still suffer the droughts, the bushfires, the hurricanes and floods that climate change is supposed to deliver.

It is a simple but extraordinarily important point that I have not seen made by any other commentator. (source)

Except me, that is – he should have been reading my blog for the past two and a half years. It continually amazes me that supposedly intelligent politicians cannot see this blindingly obvious point. But that’s what happens when you are overwhelmed by a faith-based belief which prevents you from seeing sense any more. I really hope the public aren’t that stupid.