Abbott has them over a barrell with the Carbon tax, they either have to stick with their principles and support an unpopular tax or back down and look silly. They will need some fancy footwork to come out of this issue looking good.
Quite possible, it will be interesting to see how Labor, refocus and regain some of the middle ground.
I saw a bit of Christine Milne on the news, she appeared a bit like a ship without a rudder also.
My quess is they are going to have to wait untill Abbott makes a stuff up, or public sentiment turns against him. The elections in Tasmania and W.A, may give some indication.
Abbott has them over a barrell with the Carbon tax, they either have to stick with their principles and support an unpopular tax or back down and look silly. They will need some fancy footwork to come out of this issue looking good.
Quite possible, it will be interesting to see how Labor, refocus and regain some of the middle ground.
I saw a bit of Christine Milne on the news, she appeared a bit like a ship without a rudder also.
My quess is they are going to have to wait untill Abbott makes a stuff up, or public sentiment turns against him. The elections in Tasmania and W.A, may give some indication.
THERE’S one group of people who should be cheering the closure of Ford, Toyota, and Alcoa’s Port Henry aluminium smelter.
Heavy industries like those use a lot of electricity. That electricity comes from burning coal, mostly brown coal, which throws off enormous amounts of carbon dioxide — the stuff the previous government used to call “carbon pollution”.
The wonderful thing about closing down car plants and smelters is all the pollution it will prevent. This is a great step forward in the battle to save the planet.
But they’re humble folks, those Greens. They don’t boast about their successes. Businesses that needed cheap power to stay profitable are becoming uncompetitive and closing. The carbon tax is working the way it was intended: taxing heavy emitters out of business. The carbon tax is highly effective. And the Greens must be proud of the results.
If you want to see what a place looks like after years of those policies, visit Tasmania.
Tasmania produces the cleanest energy in the country from its hydro-electric schemes. Since hydro works off water, which has to be collected in dams (another Green no-no) there isn’t that much of it and it’s pretty expensive.
That means Tasmania has de-industrialised. You won’t find car workers in Tasmania. But it is a clean, green state. Per head of population, Tasmania generates much less “carbon pollution” than New South Wales or Victoria.
Tasmania also has the highest unemployment of any Australian state. The trouble with all those eco-jobs is that there are not many of them. Green jobs are mostly jobs paid out of other people’s taxes. Unemployment would be much higher still if Tasmania hadn’t perfected the art of extracting financial subsidies from the rest of us. Tasmania sends 12 senators to the Commonwealth Parliament, the same as every other state. But since the population of Tasmania is so much smaller, a Tasmanian senator needs about one-tenth of the votes a Victorian senator needs to get elected. A very small group of Tasmanian voters has been sending Greens like Bob Brown and Christine Milne to Canberra for decades with the aim of doing to the whole country what they have done to their own state: to de-industrialise it.
But there is one big difference. No matter how much damage Tasmania does to itself, it will always be able to call on federal subsidies to cushion the blow. It has political clout beyond its numbers embedded in the Australian Constitution. It gets back a much bigger share of the GST pie than it pays in. It gets make-work schemes and call centres and subsidised roads out of national taxes.
But if the Greens succeed in giving the Tasmanian treatment to the rest of the country, there is no great international benefactor that is going to step in to give Australia money to save it from itself. Tasmania may be cocooned inside a Federation but the nation is not cocooned by anything or anyone. It is on its own.
A STATE election is being held in Tasmania this weekend. The Greens-Labor government of the past four years is on its last legs. Tasmanians look like they will elect a government that wants to get the state out of its hole. But at the national level the Greens and Labor are still working hand in hand to defend the carbon tax that is ripping apart employment in the manufacturing industry. One day the unemployed workers of the manufacturing plants might turn around and realise how badly they were betrayed by the people who claimed to be “Labor”.
If Federal Labor wants to see what happens when a party cannibalises its base, it can look at the poll numbers of Tasmanian Labor Premier Lara Giddings. She is polling barely above 20 per cent, not far in front of her junior coalition partner, the Greens, who are about 18 per cent. So much for a tax that is highly effective.
Then there is the mining tax. When it was first introduced it was promised to raise more than $6 billion this year. The usual crowd of those who want the government to spend more lined up to cheer it on: Labor MPs, academics, progressive archbishops and so on.
All of the expected proceeds were allocated to various spending projects.
The trouble is that it didn’t work. It didn’t have the slightest chance of working. This year it will be lucky to raise one-tenth of what Julia Gillard promised it would when she announced it in July 2010.
All that effort, all that compliance and nothing to show for it. I introduced a new tax once. All that effort, all that compliance but at least it raises $50 billion each year. The mining tax has got to be the biggest tax failure of the past 50 years. As I predicted at the time, there was the dog with no bark, the pub with no beer and now the tax with no revenue.
One tax should go because it is hopelessly ineffective. The other should go because it is highly effective, just effective towards the wrong results. The Australian tax system needs radical improvement: lower company tax rates, lower marginal income tax rates. If we get rid of the bad stuff perhaps we can then get on with some of the important business.
Poor ole Bill Shorten, is calling for the release of the commission of audit.
I fail to see how it can reflect well on Labor.
The coalition has only been in office for six months, it hasn't brought down a budget.
It reminds me of the 'Black Night' skit in the Monty Python movie.
Mortally wounded, failing to acknowledge it, yet demanding they bring on the mortal blow.
Weird.IMO
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-11/shorten-calls-for-the-budget-bad-news-to-be/5314072?section=wa
The C.O.A. contains recommendations for the cuts the Liberals want to make. The Libs obviously want to hide it until after the State elections. If it's such a bad document for Labor, the Libs would have it all over the media.
Tasmania - I'd certainly agree that the Greens have "de-industrialised" the state to a substantial extent and have done so via a well thought out, calculated campaign over a prolonged period.
Eg stop hydro development = stop the growth of energy supply which then necessarily stops the development of industry generally. Then preventing the modernisation of the paper industry in the late 1980's guaranteed its' eventual demise some years later. And so on.
But on one point I call absolute bull **** in regard to Peter Costello's comments "Since hydro works off water, which has to be collected in dams (another Green no-no) there isn’t that much of it and it’s pretty expensive."
Sorry Peter, but I think you'll find that the expensive power isn't here. Despite the best efforts of the Greens, Liberals and others to screw things up, Tasmanian electricity is still the cheapest in the country especially for industry.
2012-13 average spot price:
Tas = $48.30
NSW = $55.10
Vic = $57.44
Qld = $67.02
SA = $69.75
So an economics failure there from Peter Costello it would seem.
Back to politics generally, I don't doubt for a minute that Labor-Green has screwed things up in Tas. But then Liberal-Green gave us 13% unemployment in the late 1990's, and Liberal majority government almost sent the state bankrupt in the 1980's so the Liberal track record is nothing to be proud of.
More pragmatically, the Liberal's stated financial policies are virtually identical to Labor's. So however bad / well Labor-Green has done, the Liberals are actually promising to do the same within about 1% with the only differences being what the money is spent on. By promising to spend around 107% of the state's income, both are effectively promising either increased debt, a running down of assets, or both.
None of the politicians we have down here are much good to be honest. It's either go broke, go broke or go broke and that's just based on their official promises. A key issue is that ending of the carbon tax will, in itself, further deteriorate Tasmania's financial position.
As for specific issues, the Tas election will (in my opinion at least) be decided largely over local issues with state finances and the economy generally as key points. Notable points of broader significance are Labor trying to gain some leverage from the NBN issue, and a state Liberal policy that depends on continuation of the Renewable Energy Target or alternatively a carbon tax.
I've read some serious analysis by those with a good understanding of it and in short:Forgive me, but I thought Tasmania, was already broke.
I've read some serious analysis by those with a good understanding of it and in short:
The state is spending somewhere around 104 to 107% of its' current income. Based on announced policies, this is likely to continue under either a Labor, Liberal or Green government (or any combination thereof). That is, from a "big picture" perspective they all have essentially the same approach to finances.
This is despite the state receiving a disproportionate share of GST revenue on a per capita basis.
This is also despite current power industry dividends etc accounting for over 5% of Tas government revenue.
Now, it seems unlikely that Tasmania's GST revenue would increase anytime soon, indeed if anything were to change then it would more likely be a cut. It is also publicly announced, though not acknowledged by any of the political parties, that Hydro will be paying significantly lower dividends after 30 June 2014 for the foreseeable future.
So realistically, that 104 - 107% figure is likely to push toward 110% I'd expect. So Tas isn't broke, but it's very clearly heading in that direction in the absence of drastic change. And none of the major parties, Labor, Liberal or Green, is publicly proposing such a change.
This is what happens when the industry base is slowly but surely destroyed. You lose a lot of taxation revenue, and end up with a population disproportionately dependent on government services. End result = state goes broke. Politically, Liberal, Labor and Green have all contributed to the situation over the years.
However he did give them a weekend to do it.
.IMO
Perhaps more importantly, they were also expected within that time to fully assess any risks involved. The woman involved said she recommended a roll-out time twice that on which the government decided.I see today in the papers, they are saying Rudd appointed two public servants to cost the roll out of the home insulation debacle.
However he did give them a weekend to do it.
Perhaps more importantly, they were also expected within that time to fully assess any risks involved. The woman involved said she recommended a roll-out time twice that on which the government decided.
So far the ALP have not put the knife in to the Greens.
The Liberals have unequivocally declared them last in every election.
Until the ALP grow a pair and go for the Greens they will be also rans on 29-33% of the Primary vote, beholden to the Greensa and other nutters for Government on preferences.
gg
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?