Story submitted by Richard Abbott
At the last Australian federal election the incumbent government lead by prime minister Julia Gillard’s Labor party stood with a “no carbon tax policy”. To form a minority Labor party government three elected independent members sided with Labor and to ensure upper house control of legislation change the Greens offered their solidarity provided a carbon tax was introduced.
Currently Australian parliament is debating the carbon tax bill, which has emerged with a rather bitter and poisonous pill. The carbon tax legislation’s emission right is to be treated as conventional property rights, therefore making it almost impossible to repeal once enacted, because of the enormous compensation that the Australian government of the day would be required to pay to the 500 polluting companies being forced to purchase carbon emissions permit credits.
Sadly Labor accepts the Gore camp theory and leaves no chance for repeal when global climate change is found not to be caused by industrial man. The poisonous pill added was to prevent the Liberal opposition party repealing the carbon tax legislation at the next federal election in 2013. Not surprisingly the prime minister’s popularity at the last media poll was 28% and with this announcement today likely to drop further. Sadly because of the Independent’s own personal guaranteed agendas and Greens with their agenda Australia is now guaranteed a carbon tax far removed from climate change.
Prime minister Gillard said when she announced her change of mind that we would now have a carbon tax, as Australia needed to set an example for the world to follow. (Albeit Australia contributes 1.4 % of the total global emissions.)
Yes, we will be the laughing stock of the world, seen jumping head first off a cliff into a shark infested sea, as we will have no way back, because we were sold a tax that has nothing to do with climate change, instead introduced purely for egotistic governance.
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It is a severe lesson to all voters to think before you act. The legislation which is being forced down the throats of the Aussie populace is 3 people (greens) who are basically dictating to millions via a Government of weak politicians who would rather see their country ruined than fall on their sword and have another election. Disgraceful greed, but a lesson to all, I am sure that you will remember the culprits names come settlement day.
The problem with Gillard is that she’s not just evil but stupid too.
Australia appears to be eager to become the Greece of the Southern Hemisphere. The label “green” does no change irrational government policies, engineering reality, or economic science.
What will the carbon tax funds be used for? What will be the net benefit (affect) of carbon tax and carbon trading schemes? (Massive overhead, “green” carbon sink shams, the loss of the Australian industrial base, and no net benefit to the environment.)
Multibillion dollar subsides does not change facts. Solar companies and biofuel companies are going bankrupt for a reason. The European amply named wind farms that are constructed in farms in the center of the continent where the wind does not blow.
CO2 is not an evil dangerous gas. Plants eat CO2. Commercial greenhouses inject CO2 into the “green” houses to levels of 1000 ppm to 1500 ppm to raise yield and reduce growing times. Plants reduce the number of stomata on their leaves when CO2 rises to reduce evaporation loss of water which enables them to make more effective use of water. (Desertification is reduced, yield increases in dry regions.)
Global warming is over. A paradigm shift in scientific beliefs followed by public beliefs is going to occur.
Dave F. …The tax has been set so that for a future government to repeal the tax the 500 largest emission polluters in Australia (who are only known to the government) will require to be reimbursed billions of dollars from the Australian government to compensate them for their purchases of emission permits. I understand that we are the only country adopting a carbon tax not to have an out clause.
Hence my conclusion that it is a governance socialist tax that has nothing to do with climate change, as if it were related to climate change, then their would be an out clause when science finally proved that man does not contribute to climate change as Al Gore would have us want to believe.
Makes this claim:
Sadly Labor accepts the Gore camp theory and leaves no chance for repeal
And then makes this claim:
has nothing to do with climate change, instead introduced purely for egotistic governance.
Caught red-handed by a self contradiction.
The carbon tax revenue falls short to the tune of ~AU$450mil after compensation/tax cuts/benefit increases. 9 out of 10 house holds will receive some amount of compensation/tax cuts/benefit increases. Households with income of more than, I think, AU$100k WON’T receive any “benefit”. The Govn’ts clean energy future home page has a “How much will I get?” estimator (Heh! Of course, estimates can, and do, change. Not sure how many supporters understand the difference between a calculation, an estimate and a quote). on it. Of course these “benefits” will diminish over time when the tax becomes an ETS. It’s already expensive to do business in Aus with many companies “offshoring” work. I can see this speeding up. There are 18 bills in the carbon tax legislation which, apparently, MP’s had only 18 minutes to read each bill. Sounds great eh? And Gillard wonders why the ALP is floundering in polls and performance.
Someone had a comment on the article with respect to the people of Australia petitioning the Governor General. I wonder if there is any legal currency to this idea. The part of the article which finally got to me was;
“Appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Scrutiny of New Taxes, Treasury said its models were “publicly available” and that anyone willing to pay for those models could obtain them.
That evidence was misleading. For Treasury relied on a model developed by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. And ABARE has now confirmed it will not make available the model Treasury used.
Moreover, Treasury blended the ABARE model with other models and data sets. Given that, only Treasury can provide users with the capacity to test its modelling: and the government clearly does not intend it to do so.”
I think now I know how Anarchists are born.
How can you tell when a politician is lying? Its lips are moving.
Australia and Canada may be the only two traditionally “western” countries that largely avoided the financial crises of the last several years. Now the Aussies are set to self-immolate, leaving Canada forelorn and ignored. As a Canadian I’m starting to feel very lonely…
But Hey! Canada’s official opposition to the ruling Conservatives is the NDP, the most rabid, far left party that Canada has ever produced. And you never know… a juicy Conservative scandal along with a good ol’ NDP love-in by the CBC (similar to the Brits’ BBC or Oz’ ABC), and they could catapult into power! Oh, Nirvana! There is yet hope that we can rejoin you guys in the mire.
Shows how economics is supreme to the word of the people.
I suspect when she gets out of office, a high paying position waits for her.
polluting companies
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/caught-on-camera/2294517.aspx
The only legitimate aim of a new tax is to raise money for a government to spend. While this is not an aim that many of us find laudable, it is at least better than the more recent practice of spending without
first raising the additional revenue required to finance it. During the course of a rather generous lifetime, I have never once seen a new tax designed to promote some supposed public behavioral good, achieve its aim. I have seen effects aplenty, but never those effects that were purpose designed.
Gillard has always been a liar, she is lying now and she will always lie.
There is Youtube video showing her lying to a voter re this policy.
Gillard lying
Greetings,
Scrap the last post by me – the link did not work.
Gillard has always been a liar, she is lying now and she will always lie.
There is Youtube video showing her lying to a voter re this policy.
Gillard confronted and accused of lying
Julia Gillard was not elected by the majority of the electors and is dancing to the tune of the unelected minority Green Party and we all know what they represent 🙁 Julia Gillard takes the record for Australia’s most unpopular Prime Minister though much loved by the ABC left wing media. Most Australians are pining for the next election tho’ what to do with the Labor legacy is the burning question.
This is an example of a flaw in the Parliamentary type of representative democracy – the coalitions are more fluid than the two party system because of multiple parties shifting on allegiance on specific issues. Not that two parties is a perfect situation, but at least it tends to stabilize the volatility.
We have the Carbon Tax well and truly in place in the uk, except its a stealth tax. Gas and Electricity prices being pushed up at ridiculous rates to fund uneconomic so called sustainable energy schemes.
As an American, it appears our only chance for economic success is for other countries governments to make themselves uncompetitive on the global stage at a faster rate than our own government destroys our ability to compete. Bravo, Australia…..unfortunately, there is the small matter of China.
I think many miss the point: a new tax *is the goal*; the environmental argument is just the excuse. The Australian government needs new tax revenue because it has overspent and overcommitted for other programs. Rather than admit previous sins, the easier course is to raise taxes. The climate change discussion is just a way to obfuscate the reason for it.
I realize that as a US citizen I have no moral right to criticize other governments for overspending. We’re guilty of the same thing on a much larger scale; it’s just we have a bigger line of credit and can hide from reality a little longer …
“This “carbon tax” is really just a socialist wealth redistribution tax. Take from the rich, give to the poor. ”
NO. EXACTLY WRONG. It’s Gramscian redistribution, not Marxian redistribution. Take from the poor and the middle, and give abundantly to the obscenely rich. The poor suffer most from energy-related taxes.
Every law can be repealed. So that is an excuse that i don’t know why.
Nasty piece of legislation, indeed. Australia will be the laughing stock of the world over this one. Gillard’s legacy – her parting gift to her country to show her love for us is sure to earn her the label “worst Prime Minister ever,” although many have already awarded her that epithet. For non-Australian readers, the cruel, pointless carbon dioxide tax comes on top a series of bungled, spendthrift, wealth redistributing (from the productive to the unproductive) and wealth destroying policies. Some examples are: a home insulation scheme that cost billions but resulted in millions of homes getting sub-standard installations causing, in some cases, houses to burn down and even deaths; unnecessary extended stimulus spending in response to the GFC that included measures like giving billions in cash to the lazy to spend on booze and cigarettes and tens of millions of Australian dollars to expatriots (to boost the domestic economy!); a GFC stimulus initiative to build school halls that still hasn’t been fully delivered after four years and has resulted in billions of dollars of rorting and in many cases the buildings are of poor standard or poor value for money or are even unwanted (e.g., schools got halls when they already had one) and that took up valuable playground space; hundreds of millions spent providing pensioners with AUD $300 dollar HD set top boxes (that’s what she paid – regular retail price AUD $50), even though the vast majority had already addressed the conversion from analog to digital television themselves; meaningless, politically correct apologies to Aborigines, who continue to live in 3rd world conditions; an AUD $40 billion dollar overkill fibre optic cable roll out that duplicates existing private sector investment and ignores technology trends and cuts out future investment in wireless which would be more cost effective, especially in remote areas; government debt up from $AUD 0.0m to $200 billion and rising at $1m a day; the creation of 20,000 meaningless green bureaucrat jobs, mostly in Canberra; creation of outrageous green subsidies (e.g., solar power installation & feed in tariffs) that it has had to withdraw because of rorting and budget unsustainability; tens of millions of dollars on green loan schemes that it then had to withdraw due to rorting; plunging the government budget into deficit to the tune of tens of billions and no-one can see it coming back into the black under current government policies – and when a natural disaster actually occurred, she had to raise taxes because there is no money left in the taxpayers’ kitty; national productivity is falling significantly following labour law changes (think UK Labour Governments of the 1960’s) at a time when other countries are stepping up competition in international markets. One could go on and on, I’m sure I’ve missed some of the real beauties because they are too painful to contemplate. But this Carbon (Dioxide) Tax takes that case in all respects: cost, stupidity and political bloodymindedness. How Gillard rose so far in politics is a mystery but the mystery can be solved if you read Australian Labor Party rules and understand she rode on the back of certain political correctness agendas that placed particular criteria ahead of commonsense things like talent.
“Albeit Australia contributes 1.4 % of the total global emissions.” Obviously a big sin that will cost much in order to achieve absolution.
Some interesting Maths I found…. http://www.natscience.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/meteorology/11145/The-Answer-Flannery-Refused-To-Give-MAYBE-Just-0-00005-C-In
Q. What is the central estimate of the anthropogenic global warming, in Celsius degrees, that would be forestalled by 2020 if a) Australia alone and b) the whole world cut carbon emissions stepwise until by 2020 they were 5% below today’s emissions?
Answer a). Australia accounts for (at most) 1.5% of global carbon emissions. A stepwise 5% cut by 2020 is an average 2.5% cut from now till then. CO2 concentration by 2020, taking the IPCC’s A2 scenario, will be 412 parts per million by volume, compared with 390 ppmv now. So Man will have added 22 ppmv by 2020, without any cuts in emissions. The CO2 concentration increase forestalled by almost a decade of cap-and-tax in Australia would thus be 2.5% of 1.5% of 22 ppmv, or 0.00825 ppmv. So in 2020 CO2 concentration would be 411.99175 ppmv instead of 412 ppmv…
So the proportionate change in CO2 concentration if the Commission and Ms. Gillard got their way would be 411.99175/412, or 0.99997998. The IPCC says warming or cooling, in Celsius degrees, is 3.7-5.7 times the logarithm of the proportionate change: central estimate 4.7. Also, it expects only 57% of manmade warming to occur by 2100: the rest would happen slowly and harmlessly over perhaps 1000 years.
So the warming forestalled by cutting Australia’s emissions would be 57% of 4.7 times the logarithm of 0.99997998: that is – wait for it, wait for it – a dizzying 0.00005 Celsius, or around one-twenty-thousandth of a Celsius degree. Your estimate of a thousandth of a degree was a 20-fold exaggeration – not that Flannery was ever going to tell you that, of course.
Answer b) . We do the same calculation for the whole world, thus:
2.5% of 22 ppmv = 0.55 ppmv. Warming forestalled by 2020 = 0.57 x 4.7 ln[(412-0.55)/412] < 0.004 Celsius, or less than four one-thousandths of a Celsius degree, or around one-two-hundred-and-eightieth of a Celsius degree. And that at a cost of trillions.
Quote:A cautionary note: the warming forestalled will only be this big if the IPCC’s central estimate of the rate at which adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes warming is correct. However, it’s at least a twofold exaggeration and probably more like fourfold. So divide both the above answers by, say, 3 to get what will still probably be an overestimate of the warming forestalled.
“A little revolution, now and then, is a healthy thing, don’t you think?”
Time to turn on your voice in the streets of Australia. Hiding it away in blogs and twitters has NOT the same strength. The American colonies marched in the streets and threw tea into the harbor. Our nation went to the streets with arms over slavery. Women marched for the vote. Many more marched for a dream. If you want change, say it, do it, don’t just type it.