The Carbon Tax starts down under

On July 1st, the much hated Carbon Tax was implemented in Australia. Given that PM Gillard made a promise for no Carbon Tax on video at the beginning of her term in August 2010, then broke that promise, followed by a devil may care attitude, I can’t imagine anything that would enrage Australians as much as this.

Since there is so much coverage on this epic failure of the Gillard government, I thought I’d create a collage of coverage here. Follow the links to the appropriate essays and news articles. There’s also a speech at the end. First up is Jo Nova:

The-Tax-Whose-Name-Shall-Not-Be-Spoken Begins

Australians will pay $77 million per week in carbon taxes, while Europe with the 30 most green countries pays just one third of that, according to the Mineral Council of Australia.

“Australia’s carbon tax starts generating $77.3 million per week from today. New figures from the Centre for International Economics show that Europe’s emissions trading scheme — which covers 30 nations — has generated $23m per week so far in 2012.”

…

The ACCI points out the contradiction in sending a price signal but intimidating anyone who dares to say how big that signal is.

…

I loved this cartoon she posted to get around the ridiculous law that says shop owners can’t mention price increases due to the tax:

She says: Shop owners — do feel free to plagiarize ad lib. No copyright on those images.

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Carbon Tax Day and Labor slumps to 22% in Queensland

The carbon tax is now in operation and according to the latest Newspoll Labor will not win a seat in Queensland and is in danger of a wipeout Australia -wide if an election is held. A new Nielsen Poll also shows the carbon tax is poison for Labor in the electorate. It may not be true but the electorate will see every price rise as a result of the tax and it will be difficult to convince voters otherwise. As a political figure Julia Gillard was portrayed as an iron lady in the Thatcher mold when the carbon tax was introduced but she is now looking very much like Marie Antoinette riding in a tumbril to her fate.

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Voters desert carbon tax

PUBLIC support for the carbon price has plunged to a record low of 33 per cent, as Prime Minister Julia Gillard faces the fight of her political life to try to reconcile the public to her deeply unpopular tax.

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An utterly unserious government. An insult to our intelligence | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

My God. This man is a minister in the Federal Government, trying to explain to Australian voters why they are paying a tax that won’t do anything the government claims, but will cost them jobs.

Would Menzies have behaved like this? John Howard? Bob Hawke?

Watch the singing and dancing from 1:20, and know that we are led by children.

The government has become a circus. Draw the curtain.

For those WUWT readers who don’t know:

Craig Anthony Emerson, Australian politician, has represented the House of Representatives seat of Rankin in Queensland for the Australian Labor Party since the 1998 federal election. He is the Minister for Trade in the Second Gillard Ministry.

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Here is a speech delivered by my friend David Archibald in Sydney yesterday at the Carbon Tax Rally:

Sydney Carbon Tax Rally Speech, 1st July 2012

Fellow Australians.

Plato said that “The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

There is no doubt that we are ruled by evil men and evil women.

Evil men and evil women who are fully aware of the damage they are doing to our economy, and to the warp and weft of our society.

Evil men and evil women who seem to be in a manic rush to do as much damage as possible in the time left to them.

It is now universally accepted that the carbon tax is a very bad thing promoted by evil people.

The evil goes back a bit further than Julia Gillard’s broken promise and Kevin Rudd’s inane pronouncements.

This tax has been a long time coming, and has mixed paternity.

The last dark deed of the Howard Government was the passage of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act in October 2007.

That act is the auditing basis of the carbon tax.

Mr Howard’s plan was to get the auditing system bedded down, then start taxing.

Labor’s carbon tax would be a couple of years behind schedule if Mr Howard had not laid the bureaucratic foundations for it.

The evil that men do lives after them, and in Mr Howard’s case that is a possible future in which Australia does not have a cement industry, a steel industry, oil refining, a multitude of other industries and, most importantly, a synthetic liquid fuels industry.

That is the part of the Howard legacy that many of us have toiled mightily to avoid.

That legacy is now with us, and we stare into the abyss of a continually shrinking economy.

The list of carbon tax plotters is a lot longer than Howard, Rudd and Gillard.

As a scientist, what saddens me is that most of our scientific institutions have failed in their duty to serve and protect the Australian people.

The CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the universities – have all failed us and sold their souls for a handful of silver.

Our academics have met our lowest expectations of them.

And then, there are the institutions that actively, and purposefully, and very treacherously, conspire against us.

Chief of which is the ABC, which has ceaselessly, and shamelessly, promoted the bizarre cult of carbon.

The ABC pays lip service to the norms of our society while doing their utmost to undermine it.

The ABC is well past its use by date.

It sees Australia through its perverted lens of self-loathing.

The next federal Government will inherit a lot of debt.

Sacrifices will have to be made to pay off that debt.

The easiest sacrifice to make will be to shut down the ABC.

The huge sum that is spent keeping the beast alive would be better spent paying off Labor’s legacy of debt.

If our nation is to endure, the ABC must not survive the next term of federal parliament.

None who love this country will weep for it.

Just as this Government did not weep for the cement workers who have already lost their jobs due to the carbon tax.

And then there is the matter of the CSIRO.

They have told too many lies over too many years.

Their betrayal of the Australian people cannot be forgiven.

To this day, they are trying to sell the Australian people into the slavery and oppression of the carbon tax.

The CSIRO must be reformed through the benefit of much correction.

The factory and smelter closures due to the carbon tax, that were so predictable, have begun.

Many of those factories will be closed forever, and no amount of wishing or hoping or endless tears will bring them back again.

The people who worked in those factories, leading productive lives that helped us all – well, many of those lives are now broken, families broken, ambition thwarted.

To those whoever breathed a word in favour of the carbon tax, bear the guilt of those broken and disrupted lives, and broken and disrupted marriages, to your graves.

Your sin was not a love of nature, but a loathing for your fellow man.

Your fault was not a desire to do the right thing, but lack of an enquiring mind.

The notion of global warming was concocted to provide a cloak of scientific respectability for a massive socialist redistribution of wealth.

That is as plain as day.

All attempts to even up slices from our economic pie, irrespective of effort, result in a shrunken and misshapen pie.

Thus we are witnessing the shrinking of the Australian economy now under way due to the carbon tax.

It is an accident of history that that notion of global warming caused people like me to enquire as to what actually is going on with our climate.

I am proud to have done my bit to push back against the darkness that ever encroaches on us.

What I found is that there is much to fear, but of course in the opposite direction to that claimed by the socialists.

I will summarise the findings of my last six years of research in the field of climate science in two sentences:

Our generation has known a warm, giving Sun.

The next will suffer a Sun that is less giving, and the World will be less fruitful.

Specifically, the current solar cycle is going to be a very long one.

That will result in the climate over the following solar cycle being very cold.

The grain belts of the wold will shift up to 700 km towards the equator.

World grain production will fall by at least 25%.

That is going to be the biggest problem the World will face in the next thirty years.

What about carbon dioxide?

Carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas.

The total warming from here due to carbon dioxide may be up to point four of a degree centigrade.

Or it may even be nothing.

All we can be sure of is that it is not a problem.

The heating effect from carbon dioxide will be lost in the noise of the climate system.

The fake problem of carbon is distracting us from real problems.

First of which is the fact that Australia’s oil self-sufficiency is declining rapidly.

It is forty per cent now.

It will be down to twenty-five per cent by 2020.

We now import oil from as far afield as Azerbaijan, Algeria and the Congo.

We are forced to rely upon their kindness to keep our farms and factories running.

It need not be like that.

We could make our own transport fuels from our own coal.

And keep the money we pay for them in Australia.

Only then will our nation have any hope of being secure and happy.

But that won’t happen while the carbon tax, and the mining tax, live.

The carbon tax and the mining tax are a particularly horrific combination for Australia.

The carbon tax penalises our biggest resource endowment.

The message from the mining tax is that risk capital is not welcome in Australia.

The synthetic fuel plants meant for us will be built in Canada and Chile instead.

There could be a very good outcome from this carbon tax debacle.

It is not enough to merely put things back the way they were before this particular lot of Australia-haters came along.

We must use this opportunity – your righteous anger – to unleash the Furies on those who failed us, and those who conspired against us.

There are so many wrongs that need to be righted if we are to make Australia the earthly paradise it should be.

So let’s right those wrongs.

Let’s not squander control of the Senate next time.

Let’s have a good cleanout.

It requires effort on your part.

Coming here today is only the beginning.

Many of you are shareholders, and many of the companies you are invested in have sold their souls to get their snouts into the carbon trough.

Make their lives hell.

They deserve it.

Hound the directors until they recant.

As for any politicians who have ever believed in global warming, or supported the carbon tax, or a carbon-constrained economy, there is no hope for them.

They are either too stupid or incompetent to be taken seriously.

Merely recanting, at this late stage, won’t be enough.

Make their lives hell too, just as they wished a diminished life on you.

Australia will soon face some big challenges as the world enters one of its most turbulent periods.

Just maintaining our standard of living in the face of those challenges will require a lot of rigor.

We will only get the required level of rigor if we demand it.

Firstly of ourselves, and then of the politicians we choose to represent us.

Even then, keeping Australia safe and secure and happy will take our eternal vigilance.

David Archibald

Perth-based scientist David Archibald is a Visiting Fellow of the Institute of World Politics in Washington where he teaches a course in Strategic Energy Policy.