Guest post by Ruth Bonnett
In late 2010, I wrote about how bad science can give rise to bad policy. My Christmas message to farmers in Australia and around the world:
I am an urban dweller who just happens to think that the ‘unsettled science’ and restriction of technology has brought about bad policy by way of the Kyoto Protocol and subsequent disastrous consequences for our farmers, and anyone else who values sound science, property rights and our democratic freedoms
Little did I know that our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who promised that ‘there would be no carbon tax under the government I lead‘ would now break her sacred trust with the Australian public on 24th February 2011 and seek to burden all Australians with a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.
To inflict this harm, our Prime Ministers has resorted to several unconscionable tactics including characterising the producers of this nations as ‘big polluters’, launching personal attacks on critics, and on ordinary Australians who protest against this ‘carbon’ tax, and by bringing out stars such as Cate Blanchett and Michael Caton to somehow convince us ordinary folk that this ‘carbon’ tax will somehow reduce the temperature of the planet, make grey skies blue and improve the health of our children.
Never mind that Canada has just handed Conservative Stephen Harper a comfortable majority – the only party to go to the Canadian people without a headline ‘climate change’ policy. Never mind that Canada, Japan and Russia have all indicated that they would not join a second round of carbon (dioxide) cuts under the Kyoto Protocol at United Nations talks this year, with the USA reiterating that it would remain outside the treaty. Never mind that unilateral action by Australians would put us in a vulnerable trading position and severely impact our economy.
And never mind the bald faced lies used to sell this bad tax, based on unsettled science, fear mongering and outright hysterical claims.
Recent polls have shown that fully two thirds of Australians want an election before any carbon (dioxide) tax is introduced.
Indeed, say YES. Say YES to an election.
An excellent article 7th June 2011 in Financial Post. Please take the time to read it
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/07/climate-models-go-cold/
David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The comments above were made to the Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally in Perth, Australia, on
YES!
The longer this government is in office the more it ignores the will of the Australian people.
Comrade Gillard, the head of the Australian Politburo, will do everything in her power to avoid an election, since her Labor Party is so low in the polls they need a bathysphere.
Hey Ruth – good post, but, “watcha gonna do bout it?” As a Kiwi, I tried everything I knew: attending meetings, met with pollies, made submissions to parliament, emails to pollies, venting on blogs. Along with thousands of other Kiwis. To no avail. A hidden agenda prevails the darkness, it seems. Democracy is dead in New Zealand.
Maybe the thin-end-of-wedge policy is now spreading to the next discrete population which is easy to control in its complacency. I know 90% of kiwis are asleep at the wheel – Aussies are just an extension of the testbed. Hope you can force back this tide of watermelon fever.
The PM and many in the ALP are atheists and now look they have now found something to believe in CLIMATOLOGY
Well said Ruth,
Now what we need is to get someone to admit to the 10% of the Carbon Tax that Minister Combet signed up to at Cancun, designated as the UN Green Climate Fund. (that is 10% of the Carbon Tax that 67% of us do not want)
PM Gillard lied in the Parliament, when this question was asked by Julie Bishop MP
Indeed, say Yes, Yes, Yes to an election.
(Apologies to Meg Ryan, in “that” scene from the movie “When Harry met Sally”)
Yes from me too. I hate to see science trashed so by this mad government.
Well, if they did not learn anything from the NSW election and if they won’t learn from all the bad polls then I hope the ALP disappears the way the Canadian Progressive Conservatives did.
Kiwis have for many years been dismayed by the economy in NZ economy lagging behind Aussie, many of us hoping that politicians would have the guts to do something about it. Amazingly, the politicians now most likely to solve this problem are Aussies. Thanks for trying Julia, but it wasn’t quite what we had in mind.
I’m inside the Murray Darling Basin and I say YES!
I realise that people ‘know’ that politicians are all liars etc and that they have some degree of ‘intuition’ that democracy is a sham but what people have not yet grasped under the current (global) paradigm is that the above HAS to be the case.
The MSM has a crucial role in an ongoing ‘implied consent’ process.
Do people see what I’m driving at?
What a fascinating time we all live in.
Well said “…………unsettled science’ and restriction of technology has brought about bad policy by way of the Kyoto Protocol and subsequent disastrous consequences for our farmers, and anyone else who values sound science, property rights and our democratic freedoms” so much money spent on Educating the masses yet we still suffer form Bad Politics through lack or abuse of sound science………… coffee break is over!
Good luck Ausie, we had that poo pushing Greens leader, Bob Brown in NZ last week end, New Zealand needs a carbon tax as well blah, blah.
He says that only the polluters pays, yeah right, so they will absorb the AUD25-50/T cost will the so called polluters.
Yes.
We are all sadly familiar with the absence of logic that typifies the Warmist position, You know the kind of thing I’m talking about…the snow is caused by warming, the drought is caused by warming, the rain is caused by warming, the icecaps are melting…but the sea levels aren’t rising, more hurricanes, no hurricanes etc etc etc- ad nauseam…but here’s one that will have you rolling in the aisles.
The Australian Federal Finance Minister Wayne Swan is so desperate to sell the idea of the Carbon Tax that he has done some ‘modelling’ and discovered that a 20 dollar a ton tax would have NO SIGINIFICANT IMPACT on jobs, prices or economic growth.
Let’s just think about that for a second or two.
A tax that is designed, whose very purpose is, to throttle the use of energy…thereby saving the planet will NOT according to Mr Swan have ANY noticeable impact on economic activity!!!!!!!!!!
So it won’t reduce temperature increases (well, we kinda knew that anyway) because Australia is a relatively minor source of C02 emissions on a global scale…and it won’t have any impact on our consumption of fossil fuels…hmnn.
At this point any sane Australian would have to ask….’so what’s the bloody point of it then?’
If you want you can find the original “Say Yes” advert with Battersea Power Station in the background (shut down 30 years ago). You can see Cate Blanchett remove the dull grey clouds of pollution (even though CO2 is colourless). I much prefer to watch this parody of the ad.
Labor government now in the minority in the polls, people against the Carbon (Dioxide) Tax in the majority.
Just like us here in the UK – producing less than 2% of the world’s emissions and being bullied, cajoled and forced into economic and technological reverse. This is being achieved by taxation and by the reshaping of our energy balance to include demonstrably useless “wind farms” (more accurately labelled “subsidy farms”) enforced by vested interests and politicians with conflicts of interest so profound that they should in all conscience remove themselves from any involvement in the making of policy. (Cameron and Clegg, for example. The former’s wife is the daughter of a wind farm profiteer and the latter’s wife is a director of a Spanish wind turbine manufacturer – and that’s just for starters – the vested interests and conflicts are rooted far and wide within the political class.)
The future result of current UK policy? A few already rich people get richer, much richer, most of the rest of us get poorer – and it effects global temperature and climate change not one iota.
Business leaders are already deciding to leave Britain, calling it a “Tax Bandit”. Our politicians of all main parties (Con/Lib/Lab) appear intent on wrecking our economy to make a few already rich people very much wealthier and the greens (headed by the awful Caroline Lucas) repeatedly call for a return to “wartime austerity” for the proles (by which they mean poverty).
Where can I say YES?
Where is the ear?
I’ve been hollering for a referendum for yonks now
The moment a politician opens his/her mouth he/she starts lying. Therefore you have the right to to protect yourself against these people when they go crazy. Second Amendment .(United States)
They serve us not the other way around.
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/paintimage2025.jpg
Your Prime Minister is maybe lining her box for the future. She has possibly been tempted by an offer from the UN of a lucrative post in that organisation which is intent on becoming the world government. so, she needs to keep on side and the Aussie public can go hang! Australia covers 5.6% of the world’s landmass area or about 0.5% of total world surface area. But a miniscule area of the continent is urbanised. Averaging out population per square mile would also be an interesting exercise to show how futile any attempt at reducing CO2 emissions would be, let alone a “carbon tax”. I look forward to seeing the result of your next election based on “No Carbon Tax, thank you”!! Me from UK!
Absolutely, yes!
It is tttoo ccccold ttto vvvote ppproperly.
JUST QUIT JULLLIAR!
It is completely beyond my comprehension how otherwise sensible people can swallow the propaganda of this con. Never before have I seen gatherings of people bleating “Tax me”. Well, not directly me, but the “1,000 worst carbon polluters in the country” as the Prime Minister has said. Ignore the flow-on effect to your peril as you get poorer by the day.
Pure and simple, if the Greens held sawy and in their zealotry they closed all carbon intensive industry, millions of us would be dead in weeks. Ethically, by their standards, we could not leave Australia on aircraft, whih burn fossil fuel, and not many of us have a sailing boat on standby.
Even a partial reduction, short of a complete ban, would damage this country so badly that it would take decades to recover. Please, don’t act the fool.
Hey Mike Jowsey,
I tweet and text and blog and post and share. Public pressure WILL force changes. Julia Gillard’s leadership is weak, and she is losing the support of those members in marginal seats. Surely, public pressure and mounting public opinion count for something, and independent blogs are a fine place to start.
And yes, I am running for the State seat of Brisbane Central here in Queensland, Australia, with The Queensland Party.
I have taken part in rallies to support our farmers; I have taken a public stance against misconduct in community titles schemes; I have helped sustain a massive, public campaign against ‘land tax’ or ‘rates’ increases dished out by Brisbane City Council.
I have spoken, I am speaking and I will continue to speak until we have our say at the ballot box.
Thanks for posting a comment.
I say YES too.
This is how Clarke and Dawe thought our parliament should have been operating after the last election as both major parties were put on probation by the electorate.
Unfortunately we were betrayed, hopefully the result will not be as close next time and this Ponzi scheme in green clothing can be killed off here too.
JeffT – good clips, thanks. What a load of BS. How do they sleep at night?
Nick Smith, NZ Minister of Climate Change Issues, has done a similar complete about-face. When in opposition he decried the ETS tax as putting NZ into an uncompetitive position internationally. Now his job depends upon the lie, he has become that which he despised.
As happened in Ireland, careful that calling for a new election and getting a new government who said they were against the previous’s mishandling of the economy and would put it right, only to leave all the policies completely unchanged.
Get it in writing..
Or perhaps vote to just get rid of goverment altogether.. 🙂
As an Australian, I also say YES…to an election.
You ozzies need to change your voting system too. We were offered the chance to change to your system and upon seeing what your PM is doing, and on realising that our labour leader was “elected” to lead his party by such a system, even though he lost the vote, we Brits overwhelmingly rejected AV as a way to elect governments.
Now we see that another of the “pro AV” reasons for supporting AV is a lie. “AV makes your politicians work harder for you and listen more to you!”
I am glad we voted no.
Now all we need is for the tories here to abandon their crazy addiction to climate alarmism. Every mainstream party here is very much a deep believer in cAGW.
YES!
Vote Gillard out of office. I do not understand how she got into Australia in the first place. She is Welsh and a red head to boot.
John Marshall: In case you didn’t know, Tony Abbott was born in London. But yeah, redhead needs to go.
Paul R thank you – that is hilarious.
JeffT – did Australians vote to give 10% to the UN? I don’t personally wish to fund an unelected and unaccountable global body.
Ah – Richard – good vid – of course Cate and Michael are entitled to have their say, and so should all the rest of us.
John B, Both Abbott’s parents were Australians and so he may have been born in London, but he was an Australian citizen by birth.
you can say anything against gillard it sticks like teflon just runs off, it is 1 minute to midnight we need all the help we can get god help us
“Ruth Bonnett says:
June 7, 2011 at 1:58 am”
I salute you Ma’am.
You have much to give, and you give much. Non illigetimi carborundum.
“Business leaders are already deciding to leave Britain, calling it a “Tax Bandit”. Our politicians of all main parties (Con/Lib/Lab) appear intent on wrecking our economy to make a few already rich people very much wealthier and the greens (headed by the awful Caroline Lucas) repeatedly call for a return to “wartime austerity” for the proles (by which they mean poverty).”
The policy is a communistic redistribution of wealth to the third world, which capitalists are also backing. It is NOT about tackling climate change. The countries which adopt aggressive carbon reduction policies will simply offshore their manufacturing in the third world where there are no carbon restrictions, nor any real call for restrictions in how much carbon is produced.
It meets the communist ideal of global redistribution of wealth on the one hand by taking jobs from the productive west and creating them in the poorest countries instead, but simultaneously provides cover for greedy capitalists to offshore manufacturing to the lowest cost countries in terms of manpower. Both sides win. A few elitists in the west make a fortune whilst the communists get money redistributed to poor countries.
It does NOTHING to tackle climate change.
Australia has become a police state run by lawyers of the left. I am not a right or left person but this is obvious. There has been a complete erosion of individual freedoms (re Jones story above). Fortunately I don’t live there anymore
Clarke and Dawe with Abbott’s take on a carbon tax
and more climate change
http://pindanpost.com/2011/06/07/swan-modelled-…-press-release/
7th June 2011 From Barnaby Joyce
I saw a model and I assumed it wasn’t – Swan
Well Mr Swan has told us that under his modelling with a carbon tax, employment will grow, gross national income will grow and if he had been pressed, no doubt he would have told us the dahlias would grow and Pinocchio would have been truly excited.
It is increasingly evident that this government is making it up as they go along. If we will all be better off, what is the point of this tax? Didn’t Julia say – ‘inflicting some cost pain is the point’? I wonder how long it will be before a back bencher just grows a spine and crosses the floor. It will only take one. But wait, if one of Labor crosses the floor, will Turnbull even the score?
That’s a very interesting question. I wouldn’t put it past that weasel (with apologies to weasels). I’m actually in his electorate and have been emailing him for years on this subject to no avail, of course. He was at the voting station where I voted last year and I told him to his face that I was reluctantly voting for him simply to support Tony Abbott (who is dead against a carbon tax and/or emission trading scheme although he still pays obeisance to the “science”). He just gave me a smug smile. Water off a duck’s back. His real constituancy is Goldman Sachs.
I had better get my citizenship sorted out.
“Mike Jowsey says:
June 7, 2011 at 12:34 am”
The real issue is it is not the politicans you see, and apparently vote for, who are in control. Its the civil servants you do not see behind the scenes that are the real power brokers. As an example; the “civil servants” who sold Post Bank, a wholly NZ owned bank, to ANZ Bank, an Aussie owned bank, setup Kiwi Bank, a wholly NZ owned bank. I met one of them once, along with a mate of his. They both said in general chat that “We’re civil servants.”, had a bit of a laugh between themselves and then said “We don’t have to be civil and we serve no-one.”
Pretty much sums up the “Westminster” version of govn’t in both NZ and Aus.
“PatK says:
June 7, 2011 at 12:50 am”
National, once in power and not sure if they took this to an election, raised GST by 2.5% to 15%. GST in NZ is applied to all consumption, unlike VAT in the UK and GST in Aus. National also introduced an ETS which applied a cost increase to consumption of ~8%. So, in NZ the cost of living rose by ~10.5% in the instant National took power.
Electricity costs in NZ have been some of the highest I have ever paid even factoring in the fact that much of the base power comes from hydro and geothermal.
Bruce of Newcastle says:
June 7, 2011 at 12:43 am
Yes from me too. I hate to see science trashed so by this mad government.
Well, if they did not learn anything from the NSW election and if they won’t learn from all the bad polls then I hope the ALP disappears the way the Canadian Progressive Conservatives did.
Sorry to tell you this it was our libs that got wiped out and the PC got a majority !!
so we here in Canada are in good shape for atleast 4 years!!
Meanwhile we have this contribution from a self described “reasonable man” from the “we really need a Carbon Tax side”
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-dangers-of-boneheaded-beliefs-20110602-1fijg.html
“Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.
Not necessarily on the forehead; I’m a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ”Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?””
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-dangers-of-boneheaded-beliefs-20110602-1fijg.html#ixzz1ObXXORzF
The piece is given a thorough but very profane evisceration here
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=9943
Dear Ozzies, Fix bayonets and advance or you’re lost.
There are lots of us redheads here in freezing cold Melbourne, Australia, who vote YES to an election.
Australian T.E.A. Party site just received its 2 millionth hit!
In Australian T.E.A. Party stands for Taxed Enough Already and is not a descendant of the American Tea Party, although the sentiments and objectives are the same. Secondly, Australia is a nation of around 22 million, so two million hits in the short time the site has been up is a huge milestone! Take a look at one of the articles from the site: http://austeaparty.com.au/?p=3487#more-3487
And the Japs are at it too! http://austeaparty.com.au/?p=3425#more-3425
http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/?p=6789
What a waste – I am amazed how the labor party has mismanaged what should have been an opportunity to entrench themselves in the political landscape for a long time through bad choices on green politics.
Subsidies to the well off for solar systems that the poor can simply not afford even with the subsidies, choosing to build “school halls” over hospitals and health clinics. Rudd squandered the opportunity because he was a self serving egotist – Gillard caved in to the greens and looks likely to lose support from conservative independents who can resurrect their political careers if they choose to desert the minority government.
And now a carbon tax ????
They have deserted the very people who supported them – any wonder they are the chosen political party of only about a third of Australians and that figure will drop even further.
I will never vote labor again until the “carbon” zealots are voted out of parliament permanently and some intelligent people are installed.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/07/australia-say-yes-to-an-election-on-carbon-tax/#comment-675121
JeffT – now you’ve let the whole world know how childish our politicians and political system is. Schoolyard behaviour at its worst.
Of course, this might explain why we are getting a carbon tax.
Uh, the Progressive Conservatives just swept Parliament. It’s the Liberals (moderate leftists) that got reduced to nub status. Even their leader lost his seat, and has gone back to private life; probably to Harvard, where he came from. (Yes, that’s in the US.)
@Patrick Davis: (June 7, 2011 at 6:07 am)
… “Pretty much sums up the “Westminster” version of govn’t in both NZ and Aus.” …
– Patrick, you should try experiencing the “Westminster” version of government in its natural habitat. Not just on CO2, either – e.g., something like 2/3 of the country wants out of the EU, yet all our “representatives” completely discount the idea. There are numerous issues with the same sort of stats. MPs? Truly, they are not as other men.
Good luck with your tweeting and blogging and posting, Ruth – a small step in the right direction may be small, but it’s still a step in the right direction.
“Steve C says:
June 8, 2011 at 3:51 am”
I am originally from the UK, so I know what you are talking about. And with the EU thing, thanks to the Tories in 1974, we’re, or rather you’re stuck in the EU. But the single currency for the EU was a mistake IMO, I don’t recall if there was a referendum on that, I had left the UK just after.
I recall in the 80’s Rowan Atkinson did a sketch about individual EU country contributions to the EU, I don’t recall all of it but went something like this;
Spain, a bottle of sherry, bullfighting and a siesta.
France, a string of onions strung to a bike and a frilly cravat.
Holland, hash cakes.
.
.
.
Britain, 10 trillion pounds.
Nuff said…