Labor's carbon tax lie

[brty]

Q How do you tell if a politician is lying?

A Their lips are moving...

... so the joke goes. Politicians are forever doing deals to get themselves into power, deals that mostly involve changes to their prior positions. After the last election, to maintain power, they did deals all over the shop.

Is anyone really surprised at this new tax?

This is a share forum, the simple thing to do is adjust your shareholdings accordingly in regard to the new tax.

I am in favor of this new tax, but only if everyone else is doing it, which is clearly not happening. I am in favor of it because of fossil fuel useage, not climate change. The world is rapidly using up the bounty of FFs and there should be a price paid to make change happen, to wean us off glutony.

As the world cannot reach a consensus on carbon reduction, the question becomes where do we (the world) start? Should individual countries start the ball rolling by introducing something, or should we all step back and do nothing until everyone agrees? Or do we all do nothing and head straight for the cliff like the lemmings.

brty

 

[Logique]

From brty: ...there should be a price paid to make change happen, to wean us off glutony...

So we bump up the research dollars and focus into more efficient renewables, as suggested by Bjorn Lomborg, a climate change believer.

My local member was on the radio this morning saying that during the Canberra rally yesterday, a division was called, forcing all the pollies to scurry back up to the House.

The CEO of Bluescope Steel says the tax is likely to threaten 12,000 jobs in Wollongong alone.

I'm careful with what I say now, as I'm in all sorts over on the Speech Pepperisms thread for saying 'gobsmacked'.

 

[Logique]

The Prime Minister would at least have earned some respect yesterday if she had come out and fronted the rally and stood up for her beliefs. PM you didn't need a gold invitation.

As opposed to her heading for the hills (literally) down in Bungendore, traipsing around a wind farm, a meeting surely easily rescheduled.

 

[trainspotter]

They looked like a motivated group of good kids to me not an ipod in sight.

Good on them in having a say in their future and at least being part of the debate they at least had the front to get up and have a go.

Wonder if they are the youth group of the 100 random people Climate Change Forum or a phalanx from Rudd's Army? Woooops ....... none of this happened.

We now have a Multi-Party Climate Change Committee made up of the PM, Treasurer, Aspiring PM and rampant Union Official, Leader of the Greens, Green attack dog and two Independent weasels. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy knowing they are doing the right thing by the climate and this country.

HEY ........ hang on a minute. Where is Peter Garett (Oils aint Oils without Peter -Minister for burning beds) and Penny Wong (Huáng Yīngxián - I am openly gay but I can't support gay marriage as it goes against the party line).

Ohhhhhhhhh that's right, Wong got shoved to Minister for Finance and Deregulation and Garrett lucked out with Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth.

Yep ........ they know a LOT about their current portfolios.

 

[Calliope]

The Prime Minister would at least have earned some respect yesterday if she had come out and fronted the rally and stood up for her beliefs. PM you didn't need a gold invitation.

Both Combet and Senator Brown took offence to a placard describing Gillard as "Bob Brown's Bitch"

I hope they don't fight over her.

 

[Logique]

One blog poster who was there said that some of the worst placards were carried by 25-30 yr olds, who looked a little different to the average demographic, and speculated that they may have been plants by GetUp! or the Greens.

Interesting that the worst placard conveniently found it's way through the crowd to be right behind Abbott, where he couldn't even see it.

 

[sails]

One blog poster who was there said that some of the worst placards were carried by 25-30 yr olds, who looked a little different to the average demographic, and speculated that they may have been plants by GetUp! or the Greens.

Interesting that the worst placard conveniently found it's way through the crowd to be right behind Abbott, where he couldn't even see it.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if GetUp! or the Greens infiltrated the rally with crude signs to make the rally look like a bunch of out-of-control extremists. The fact that labor were calling them extremists seems a bit sus and makes one wonder if they knew those extremists plants existed.

 

[sails]

I'd say its more important what the tax will do. What you are saying implies that if it had all been fully honest and timed well, it would be a good course of action. Really though, Gillard may as well just start bombing things. I can't think of an action that could be more damaging to a nation short of outright malicious assault on the population.

Honestly, I can't remember the last time a policy was passed by a politician and I didn't think "why don't you just dump cyanide in our reservoirs? If you are pro-bad, at least be consistent".

Tothemax6, I don't think it is a good idea at all and personally don't agree with the carbon tax in any shape or form. I think it's nothing more than a money scam to tax us further.

The point I was trying to make is to let the people decide on the tax. Some do believe in it - not that I understand how anyone could possibly be fooled by it. But that's life and some really think that by cutting a few percent from our emissions which are only about 1% of world emissions will actually make a difference. It might make a teaspoonful of difference while hurting families at a time when there is enough price rises.

But in respect to those who still think this is for real and not just a money scam, IMO, labor should do the decent thing and take it as a major policy to the next election as Howard did with GST to ensure that the majority are in agreement with Ms Gillard's carbon tax. I doubt the majority want it and is most likely the reason she plans to force it on to us. She would also know it will likely leave a massive mess for the next government to try and sort out.

All politicians backflip, but it's one thing to backflip on a major issue, but quite another for force that backflip onto the community when it was absolutely guaranteed that there would be no carbon tax in this term or in Ms Gillard's government.

In the link below, Abbott asked Gillard if she honestly believes she would be in the Lodge today if, six days before the last election, she had been straight with the Australian people and said up-front to them, 'yes, there will be a carbon tax under the government I lead? Of course she didn't answer even though he requested it several times.

However, I think the answer is pretty clear in that it seems she had to deceive the people to get votes. And yet she persists in attempting to force this tax as an unelected PM by the people and leading only a minority government and without ensuring that the majority of voters agree with her on such a major policy.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/9062519/gillard-abbott-trade-blows-over-carbon-tax/

 

[trainspotter]

Bob Brown & Christine Milne on their way to a hug a tree rally on the new carbon free, non polluting mode of transport imlpemented by the Government. Coming to a dealership near you soon as the carbon tax is introduced.

.

 

[sails]

Looks like the tax cuts idea was just another policy idea on the run. Now another backflip?

From Dennis Shanahan at the Australian: Generous tax cuts exposed as a fraud

FOR the last week, "generous income tax cuts" for low- to middle-income earners have been a "live option" to compensate households for carbon tax price rises actively promoted by Julia Gillard and her ministers. Yesterday, the live option became a dead end.

How anyone can think about believing a word Gillard or Swan say or promise after the lies already told (and admitted) is totally beyond me...

IMO, it is quite possible that any compensation by whatever means will be short lived. This government seems desperate for money...

 

[Julia]

IMO, it is quite possible that any compensation by whatever means will be short lived. This government seems desperate for money...

That's what I've been thinking also. The suggestion re the carbon tax appears to be that it should be raised by 4% per year. Will the compensation continue to be paid year on year, with the same 4% addition?

 

[OzWaveGuy]

I found this interesting

No noticeable drop in temperatures for 1000 yrs?? Sorry, but this assertion is just bizarre. We're already seeing significant changes in natural variability now (eg it's becoming cooler). I suggest Flannery is saying let's start paying more for CO2 and we'll circle back in 1000yrs to see if it's made a difference.

What happened to the we must act now as the earth is on a "tipping point", we only have 5 or 10 years left before it's too late. Now, "lets see what happens in a 1000yrs". The alarmists comical assertions and policies are disintegrating.

........Flannery: I just need to clarify in terms of the climate context for you. If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

Bolt: Right, but I just want to get to this very basic fact, because I’m finding it really curious that no one has got (this) fact. If I buy a car … I want to know how much it costs and whether it is going to do the job.

Flannery: Sure.

Bolt: In this case I want to know the cost of cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and will it do the job: how much will the world’s temperatures fall by if Australia cuts its emissions by this much.

Flannery: Look, as I said it will be a very, very small increment.

Bolt: Can you give us a rough figure? A rough figure.

Flannery: Sorry, I can’t because it’s a very complex system and we’re dealing with probabilities here.

Bolt: …I’m just trying to get the facts in front of the public so we know what we’re doing. Just unbiased. Is it about, I don’t know, are you talking about a thousandth of a degree? A hundredth of a degree? What sort of rough figure?

Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.

Bolt: That doesn’t seem a good deal… Someone surely must have done the sums that for all these billions of dollars we’re spending in programs that it’s got to have a consequence in terms of cutting the world’s temperature. So you don’t know about Australia, you wouldn’t dispute that it’s within about a thousandth of a degree, around that magnitude, right?...........​

 

[trainspotter]

The USA version of a carbon tax. :



Anyone hear about the 3 billion hole in the budget due to "natural disasters here and overseas?" Apparently the carbon tax will fill this hole hence why the astounding announcement from PM Julia Gillard on 24th February 2011.

 

[white_goodman]

Anyone hear about the 3 billion hole in the budget due to "natural disasters here and overseas?" Apparently the carbon tax will fill this hole hence why the astounding announcement from PM Julia Gillard on 24th February 2011.

theres only one thing worse than julia gillard as PM, its wayne swann writing up our national budget...

i give it about 2 years till Australia grovels back to Costello, for the love of god we need some competency in govt

 

[GumbyLearner]

The USA version of a carbon tax. :

View attachment 42065

Great post TS.

Fallacy of Decomposition summed up perfectly.
Australia is one part of the sum of many that is the world.
Exchange Value vs. Use Value is the economic argument that no-one is talking about yet. Except for the CEO of Bluescope trying to keep jobs in Australia and Les Twentyman trying to stand up for the average battler.

But then again what would "extremists" like they know.

And Bob Brown talking about how offended he was with the placards assembled by some members of the rally addressed by Tank Abbott and BJ.

I was insulted this week by Bob Brown's legislative approval that in effect attempts to silence free speech on the net and the "sources" that bring them to daylight.

Here is why Bob Brown is an unrepresentative pontificate and a sneaky scoundrel! You can try to stifle the truth all you want Bob, in the end you support the State more than the responsible citizens that reside within it.

Green amendments a serious setback

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nat...-serious-setback/story-e6frgd0x-1226026347126

THE federal Coalition is a longstanding supporter of the "Right to Know" campaign.

The Fraser government introduced the first Freedom of Information laws in Australia in 1978. The Howard government referred the protection of journalists' sources (shield laws) to the Australian Law Reform Commission in 2004. The next year, following the release of the ALRC's discussion paper, I became the first federal parliamentarian to call for the introduction of commonwealth shield laws following the anomaly revealed by the Harvey and McManus case.

At last year's election the Coalition, unlike Labor, pledged to introduce comprehensive shield laws. Late in the day, as part of the price for securing the support of independent Andrew Wilkie, Labor came on board.

On Monday, the bill introduced by Wilkie and independent senator Nick Xenophon and then adopted by the government, passed in the House of Representatives. It was prematurely greeted by many as a victory for the public's right to know. However, in the form the bill ultimately took, it was a serious setback. The reason is because the government was foolish enough to adopt several amendments moved in the Senate by the Greens.

Superficially, the Greens amendment appears to expand the scope of the legislation, but their practical effect will be to limit its operation. This results from the alteration to the definition of journalist. In its original form, the bill sought to protect information obtained from sources by a journalist "in the normal course of that person's work in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium".

In its amended form, the protection has been expanded to cover any person who "is engaged and active in the publication of news" in "any medium".

The alteration of the focus of the definition from "the normal course of a person's work" to being "engaged and active" in the publication of news clearly takes the definition well beyond those professionally engaged in journalism.

Because news itself is not defined, these alterations make a serious difference. They potentially include anybody, whether a journalist or not, who publishes in "any medium" what they consider to be news, including bloggers, tweeters and those who post on social media such as Facebook and YouTube. The legislation has ceased to be a law for the protection of journalists and their sources. It has become a law that protects any secret told by one person to another which the latter considers to be newsworthy and decides to publish in any form.

There are two reasons this matters. First, the legislation has immediately made secret a vast body of information that was never secret before.

Given that the objective of the Right to Know campaign has been to extend the public's access to information, it is a bizarre example of the law of unintended consequences - or perhaps poorly thought-out lawmaking masquerading as law reform - that the bill may now keep much more information from the eyes of the public.

The second reason is the likely reaction of the courts against the bill's extended operation.

The way in which the bill originally proposed to protect journalists' sources, following the model of the NSW Evidence Act, was to give the courts a discretion to exclude evidence that would have revealed the source. Shield laws work by keeping certain facts from disclosure; that is, the identity of a source. Paradoxically, it is by concealing one type of information that such laws serve the policy of extending the right to know because journalists will have a greater capacity to publish other types of information more widely.

Justice is served by having all of the relevant facts before the court. Excluding otherwise admissible evidence is justified only if an important public value is served by doing so. Where those relevant facts are not excluded per se by the operation of the laws of evidence but on a discretionary basis, judges approach the exercise of the discretion with proper scepticism. The wider the exclusion - the wider the range of otherwise material evidence that is sought to be kept from the court - the more reluctant will judges be to exercise discretion in favour of doing so.

The opposition originally proposed to assimilate the law with respect to the protection of journalists' sources within the general law of the protection of professional confidences.

Such legislation would have served the public policy purpose of shield laws without over-reaching.

Sadly, in the form in which they have emerged from the parliamentary sausage machine, Labor's much-vaunted new shield laws are no longer focused on journalists, no longer concerned to protect their sources, and are, in their operation, likely to weaken the very policy objective they purport to serve.

George Brandis is the shadow attorney-general.

IMO Just my

 

[sails]

........Flannery: I just need to clarify in terms of the climate context for you. If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

Bolt: Right, but I just want to get to this very basic fact, because I’m finding it really curious that no one has got (this) fact. If I buy a car … I want to know how much it costs and whether it is going to do the job.

Flannery: Sure.

Bolt: In this case I want to know the cost of cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and will it do the job: how much will the world’s temperatures fall by if Australia cuts its emissions by this much.

Flannery: Look, as I said it will be a very, very small increment.​

Good find, OWG...

I have put in bold the quotes that confirm what many of us have been saying for a while. This is the same Flannery that is paid $180,000 pa approx to convert us to this nonsense?

At least he was honest - even if it was only a little. But it only continues to confirm my belief that carbon tax/ETS is no more than a money grab and unlikely to do a thing for the earth even if there is a problem.

I have no intention of turning lights off tomorrow night. Candles are much too dangerous with which to play games. And will have school age grandchildren here who have been pumped up about "earth hour" rubbish at school. They can go to school and tell them their Grandma thinks it's only about the government trying to get their grubby mits on other people's hard earned money...

(No they don't have to say that - we'll think of something nice - but I want them to know that it is controversial and not to believe everything they are dished up at school.)

 

[IFocus]

I found this interesting

No noticeable drop in temperatures for 1000 yrs?? Sorry, but this assertion is just bizarre. We're already seeing significant changes in natural variability now (eg it's becoming cooler). I suggest Flannery is saying let's start paying more for CO2 and we'll circle back in 1000yrs to see if it's made a difference.

What happened to the we must act now as the earth is on a "tipping point", we only have 5 or 10 years left before it's too late. Now, "lets see what happens in a 1000yrs". The alarmists comical assertions and policies are disintegrating.

........Flannery: I just need to clarify in terms of the climate context for you. If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

Bolt: Right, but I just want to get to this very basic fact, because I’m finding it really curious that no one has got (this) fact. If I buy a car … I want to know how much it costs and whether it is going to do the job.

Flannery: Sure.

Bolt: In this case I want to know the cost of cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and will it do the job: how much will the world’s temperatures fall by if Australia cuts its emissions by this much.

Flannery: Look, as I said it will be a very, very small increment.

Bolt: Can you give us a rough figure? A rough figure.

Flannery: Sorry, I can’t because it’s a very complex system and we’re dealing with probabilities here.

Bolt: …I’m just trying to get the facts in front of the public so we know what we’re doing. Just unbiased. Is it about, I don’t know, are you talking about a thousandth of a degree? A hundredth of a degree? What sort of rough figure?

Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.

Bolt: That doesn’t seem a good deal… Someone surely must have done the sums that for all these billions of dollars we’re spending in programs that it’s got to have a consequence in terms of cutting the world’s temperature. So you don’t know about Australia, you wouldn’t dispute that it’s within about a thousandth of a degree, around that magnitude, right?...........​

As an aside Oz do you have an opinion on population / resources usage grow and the solution or do you think its all good?

 

[OzWaveGuy]

Good find, OWG...

I have no intention of turning lights off tomorrow night. Candles are much too dangerous with which to play games. And will have school age grandchildren here who have been pumped up about "earth hour" rubbish at school. They can go to school and tell them their Grandma thinks it's only about the government trying to get their grubby mits on other people's hard earned money...

Right, you can easily find my house tomorrow night - every light will be on:

 

[OzWaveGuy]

As an aside Oz do you have an opinion on population / resources usage grow and the solution or do you think its all good?

Should I assume you require a 1000yr version?

 

[sails]

Should I assume you require a 1000yr version?

Good one...