Labor's carbon tax lie

Knobby22 said:

Abbot knows that he is on a winner here.

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Yes Knobby, but;

Given that Mr Abbott has subscribed to the same carbon reduction target as the government -- cutting Australia's emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 -- the framing of the debate in this fashion pushes the onus on to him to produce more substance. His "direct action" policy relies on the government picking winners rather than the market seeking out least-cost abatement, so it is bound to be less efficient than a trading scheme, and therefore more costly on the economy. Mr Abbott should not escape by simply pledging to repeal the carbon tax. He must show how he can meet his target without creating a large burden on the budget. Scepticism about his ability to do this abounds, especially given he promises to provide tax cuts for families and business, while scrapping the carbon and mining taxes.

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(my Bolds)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...short-of-targets/story-e6frg71x-1226413836997

The brave little Aussie battler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8rsyg0lkkM

Knobby22 said:

Yes, well she doesn't believe in it either.
She is only pushing it because it was in the deal with the Greens to give her power this term.
Pretty hard to argue convincingly about something you don't believe in either.

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I suspect it's the same with asylum policy. Like she did with the carbon tax during the election campaign, she's moving towards the Greens policy position by stealth.

Knobby22 said:

Her hope is that all the fuss will go away once we have got used to it, like the GST.
I don't think it will though.
Abbot knows that he is on a winner here.

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Two crucial problems for Labor here,

1) The GST was a policy taken to an election. Even then, it was a tough battle for the Howard Government after the 1998 poll.
2) The GST does not rise over time as the carbon tax is designed to do.

The carbon tax, handouts and all is still deeply unpolular along with the government that introduced it even though a clear majority still believe in global warming, according to the following SMH poll.

http://www.smh.com.au/polls/global-warming-fact-or-fiction-20120702-21bry.html

The political price Labor pays for this lie will be very high indeed. I suspect this was something the Greens understood well at the time.

Gillard on 2gb

http://www.2gb.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8669&Itemid=471

Craig Emerson


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZboCxbTzHk&feature=player_embedded


Unbelievable.

dutchie said:

Craig Emerson


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZboCxbTzHk&feature=player_embedded


Unbelievable.

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Just saw this on 7pm ABC news but they only showed the singing and dancing bit at the end... not a good look

The irony of all this is that while Gillard and co. label Tony Abbotts response to the carbon tax as a scare campaign, the reality is the reason - they claim - behind this new tax is a response to the mother of all scare campaigns, climate change

dutchie said:

Craig Emerson


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZboCxbTzHk&feature=player_embedded


Unbelievable.

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He might be figuring that after the next election he won't have a job, so he's getting a head start for auditioning for Australia's Got Talent.

He's in for a let down there too.

dutchie said:

Craig Emerson


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZboCxbTzHk&feature=player_embedded


Unbelievable.

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You can't make this stuff up!

dutchie said:

You can't make this stuff up!

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He did. It was clearly premeditated.

I wonder how much time he spent practicing in front of the mirror.

tech/a said:

So all those who dont export yet have to compete with imports which dont have our taxes applied have to compete while payinmg $28/tonne carbon tax----duurr what about these jobs??

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Agreed BUT I doubt that the exporters are really paying as little as government would have us believe.

Eg they might get a low rate on their direct emissions or even on grid electricity. But there is nothing to offset the cost rises associated with non-exporting suppliers who the business might also use. Eg contractors and all sorts of others. Nor is there anything to offset, for example, a rise in natural gas prices due to more of it being gobbled up in power stations. Etc.

It's like the argument about tariffs and how that increases costs right throughout the economy, thus affecting exporters. Eg we put a tariff on imported computers and, since practically every business has at least one computer, that increases costs for just about every business including exporters. The carbon tax has the same effect thus making it difficult to really give anyone a true exemption or measured discount.

drsmith said:

I suspect it's the same with asylum policy. Like she did with the carbon tax during the election campaign, she's moving towards the Greens policy position by stealth.



Two crucial problems for Labor here,

1) The GST was a policy taken to an election. Even then, it was a tough battle for the Howard Government after the 1998 poll.
2) The GST does not rise over time as the carbon tax is designed to do.

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LOL on both counts, Keating was the first to push a GST so it was hardly a great leap for Labor and of course the GST rises over time because the econoy grows therefore the GST intake grows the GST is essentially a growth tax.

Today I had a small practical example of the stupidity of Labor's claims that - because there has been no immediate discernible impact of the carbon tax on 1st July - all Mr Abbott's claims are pure scaremongering.

I asked the owner of a hairdressing business whether she intended putting up her prices to account for the increased electricity costs. She replied that she didn't know and would have to wait until she received the next electricity account.

This will be replicated across hundreds of thousands of small businesses over Australia, the owners of which are already doing it hard. They cannot be expected not to pass on increased costs.
And so it will all flow through to us, the reluctant consumers.

How facile is the government's claim that "it's only the big polluters that will pay anything: almost everyone else will be better off with our compensation experience".

PS The government's latest cliche is "the lived experience".
Expect to hear this repeated a la "working families".
According to Mr Combet on Radio National this morning, we will all soon know that Mr Abbott has been lying and scaremongering, as we have the joy of the 'lived experience" of the carbon tax.

Wow!

So_Cynical said:

LOL on both counts, Keating was the first to push a GST so it was hardly a great leap for Labor and of course the GST rises over time because the econoy grows therefore the GST intake grows.

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The GST % remains the same. The carbon tax will rise per tonne every year.

When Keating was in power he raised the sales tax on vehicles from 20% to 25 % and very few were aware of it.It was a hidden tax. When the GST came in the sales tax was removed ans replaced wit the 10% GST

Here's an update on what's happening with power generation on the first weekday with the carbon tax.

Prices have been in the order of $100 for much of the day, and around $200 - $250 during the evening. This is more than double what would previously have been expected.

Average prices for Sunday were as follows, with last financial year's average price in (brackets).

NSW = $58.09 (29.67)

Vic = $60.47 (27.28)

Qld = $52.49 (29.07)

SA = $59.61 (30.28)

Tas = $47.53 (32.58)

It should be noted that since this is for one day only, a Sunday, prices thus far are likely to be lower than that which would prevail on average over a full year. Certainly they have been very much higher today (Monday).

A spike to extremely high levels, over $12,000 occurred in Victoria and SA today immediately following an unplanned total loss of supply from Tasmania. The spike itself is a normal response to such an event, although without the carbon tax there wouldn't have been such a reliance on supply from Tas in the first place.

The loss of supply from Tas was caused by a transmission line fault in northern Tas. There have been two such faults over the past 24 hours, both resulting in disconnection of the Vic - Tas link. It would be difficult to blame this on the carbon tax in a technical sense, transmission line faults do just happen from time to time, but suffice to say it seems an amazing coincidence that the AC line running to the Basslink converter station fails on the first day of prolonged very high loading.

Smurf1976 said:

Here's an update on what's happening with power generation on the first weekday with the carbon tax.

Prices have been in the order of $100 for much of the day, and around $200 - $250 during the evening. This is more than double what would previously have been expected.

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Smurf, for those of us who have no idea about how all this works, could you provide a rationale for why this is occurring? Is it really because of the introduction of the carbon tax???

This is an interesting qoute from todays paper.

''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 $23 million per week so far in 2012,'' the Minerals Council of Australia complained yesterday.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/polit...to-the-test-20120701-21arv.html#ixzz1zYnx0CJX

Well I would never have believed that, what is the government going to do with all this extra tax money, pay for pink batts?

Julia said:

Smurf, for those of us who have no idea about how all this works, could you provide a rationale for why this is occurring? Is it really because of the introduction of the carbon tax???

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There's a degree of disarray in the industry at the moment. In short, rival generating companies use different pricing strategies and are waiting to see what others do.

It's not simply a case of adding the tax on top of the old prices since, with different power stations paying different amounts of tax per unit of output, this still alters the physical production of electricity. Right now nobody is too sure who will be generating what.

Another complexity, and this is a big one, is that the system has directly lost operational flexibility as companies seek to minimise carbon tax. Examples as follows.

In SA there has been some baseload capacity withdrawn from operation. It is no longer contributing to baseload and, since such a facility takes a long time to start up, it can't suddenly be switched back on when electricity demand spikes. There is thus an outright transfer of this load to other plants - plants that used to deal mostly with variations in load are now running more constantly.

Another one is Tasmania. If there is 480 MW flowing south overnight, and then 594 MW flowing north during the peaks, then that is roughly a 1100 MW response from Tas to changes in load in the other states. But if Tas is exporting constantly then it can do nothing to offset the peaks in Victoria, SA etc which must now be supplied by means of ramping up generation within those states. The trouble being that coal-fired plant, especially brown coal, doesn't like being ramped up and down and there are technical limits as to how quickly it can be done.

There's plenty more examples like that involving various coal, gas and hydro stations. In short, coal works best running 24/7 whereas gas and especially hydro are far more flexible. So normally, you'd have the coal plants running all the time with modest variation in output throughout the day, and the gas and hydro plants changing their output dramatically in response to load changes. But with the carbon tax there's a financial incentive to run that in reverse and that's the issue.

Further complexity arises in that some generation companies are unsure of what their real costs of increasing output are. For example, gas-fired plants often have long term contracts with gas producers which cover a set volume of gas at a set price. But if they increase production then they will use up that gas and need to buy more - but at what price? The general thinking being that if there's a move to more gas-fired generation then logically the gas price will rise. But to what extent? Uncertainty there would be making some owners of gas-fired generation cautious about increasing production - it looks profitable now, but whether or not it really is depends on what it ends up costing for extra gas. So they will respond by offering production only at prices they are reasonably confident will be profitable in the context of needing to obtain more gas - and that price will be above the price that results from a simple addition of carbon tax to their present operating costs.

Then there's all the uncertainty. Nobody wants to sign up for more gas, for example, and then find themselves stuck with more gas than they can profitably use if the carbon tax is scrapped 18 months from now and coal returns to being the preferred fuel. Hydro generators face the same uncertainty. Should they be aiming to run storage down to low levels by the end of 2013 on the basis that electricity produce now is worth more than it will be in 18 months time? Or should they hold the water back in expectation that a rising carbon tax, plus a rising gas price, means that water in storage for future power generation will gain value?

Simply generating electricity, at existing power stations, has become an exercise in speculating upon the outcome of the next federal Election. That's something which is is outside the expertise of those who run power stations and that in itself will add some caution.

And what about coal contracts? What to do there? And what about power stations which own their own coal mine? And especially those where there is no option to export coal not used in the power station?

In normal operations, some generators will intentionally seek to achieve specific physical outputs by means of the prices they offer. For example, a hydro generator with a dam that is spilling will take whatever price they can get for power produced on the basis that anything is better than allowing the water to go to waste. Then there are things like coal-fired plants wanting to avoid shutting down during low demand periods to the point that they even offer negative prices simply to keep the plant running at minimum output (below which it has to be shut down completely).

Now consider politics. Power generation is one of the most politically influenced industries regardless of whether ownership is public or private. It is probable that at last some companies will have considered political implications in their pricing response, especially those large enough to actually influence the market price.

And then there are those who will do whatever maximises profit in the short term, without actually having any real long term operating and pricing strategy as such.

So overall, there's a lot of things going on in terms of how the generation businesses respond to all of this and right now I don't think anyone is really too sure of anything. Hence the prices reflect that uncertainty as well as actual costs associated with both the carbon tax and the shift toward higher operating cost generation (gas).

I don't think it will be possible to say anything definite about this until we get to Autumn 2013. We need to go through next summer (peak demand season) to see what happens. That plus giving enough time for things to settle down a bit to the point that industry participants adopt a consistent strategy under the new input costs regime.

Julia said:

Today I had a small practical example of the stupidity of Labor's claims that - because there has been no immediate discernible impact of the carbon tax on 1st July - all Mr Abbott's claims are pure scaremongering.

I asked the owner of a hairdressing business whether she intended putting up her prices to account for the increased electricity costs. She replied that she didn't know and would have to wait until she received the next electricity account.

This will be replicated across hundreds of thousands of small businesses over Australia, the owners of which are already doing it hard. They cannot be expected not to pass on increased costs.
And so it will all flow through to us, the reluctant consumers.

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So, specifically if you don't mind, how much has the cost of a haircut gone up in % terms over the past 18 months or so due solely to the large increases in the cost of electricity that have already occurred in that time?

Eager said:

So, specifically if you don't mind, how much has the cost of a haircut gone up in % terms over the past 18 months or so due solely to the large increases in the cost of electricity that have already occurred in that time?

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Rest assured
As the cost of living for Hairdressers rise as with everything else
So will the price of hair cuts and everything else.

So my bet is there will be an inflation issue within 5 yrs.
So take advantage of low interest rates while you can
If your heavily leveraged then get rid of it!

sptrawler said:

This is an interesting qoute from todays paper.

''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 $23 million per week so far in 2012,'' the Minerals Council of Australia complained yesterday.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/polit...to-the-test-20120701-21arv.html#ixzz1zYnx0CJX

Well I would never have believed that, what is the government going to do with all this extra tax money, pay for pink batts?

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That will gobbled up to keep the illegal boat people in luxury for the rest of their lives.