Australia: ONE OR TWO QUESTIONS

A great come back from Tim Blair on his blog at the daily telegraph. In case you've missed the brilliant announcement, the Australian shrew PM will be introducing a carbon tax from 1 July 2012; this after she went to last year's election saying that there would be no carbon tax under the government she leads. But, she came to her political senses and decided that it was more important to ruin Australia than to lose the Green vote to keep her in power. Australians are NOT HAPPY. This Carbon tax is going to be a tax on everything - except "agriculture" which produces a quarter of our "emissions". Andrew Bolt (another very popular conservative blogger in Australia) posted that a carbon tax would bring in $11 billion alone just by taxing the top 300 Australian companies in the first year! Can you imagine how competitive Australia will be by the end of this exercise? But, not to worry - Julia is going to give some all of the money back in the form of subsidies to the most vulnerable because apparently only poor people and people on the dole don't emit carbon. Of course, the UN will get a nice stiff piece of the financial pie to "support" developing nations. Steal from Peter to give to Paul and Sipho. In any case, Tim has put a few very pertinent questions together for our esteemed and moral PM - not that she'll bother answering them. She'd rather we look the other way whilst she stabs us in the back as she did to Kevin Rudd...

Dear Prime Minister Gillard,


Thank you for making the weather nicer by forcing us to pay more for everything. Who knew that fixing the global climate was so simple? Still, one or two questions remain about your new plan and a few related matters.

Yours in climate justice,

Tim

• By how much will your carbon dioxide tax reduce Australia’s temperature?

• If after five years there has been no recorded decline in temperature, will the tax be abandoned?

• Multiple choice! How much money has already been wasted by federal Australian governments on pointless climate change initiatives that have done nothing:

a - $2,000,000,000

b - $3,500,000,000

c - $5,500,000,000

• If taxing Australians at a certain level will make us more competitive with the rest of the world, as you claim, then surely taxing us at even higher levels will make us more competitive still. Universal taxation at, say, 80 per cent should make us a global powerhouse. Why are you holding Australia back?

• You claim that Australians want this new tax. How about testing your theory at an election?

• If I announced on television that I was going to kidnap the federal cabinet and put them through a series of deadly Saw-style torture tests, do you think I could avoid charges by asking the police to stop going on about “semantics” and “word games”?

• Do you have any experience in herding cats? This might be important during your coming 16 months of negotiations with the Greens, who you seem to have forgotten are completely insane.

• Considering Labor couldn’t run a simple grocery pricing website and Labor’s attempts to insulate houses ended up setting them on fire and killing people, what are the odds Labor can successfully run the country’s largest and most complicated tax regime?

• Labor promised to reduce the number of boat people arrivals. As with everything else, Labor’s policies resulted in exactly the opposite outcome. Now you’re trying to change the weather. Where should people hide?

• Carbon dioxide contains two oxygen atoms for every one carbon atom. Shouldn’t we call it an “oxygen tax”?

• If the aim of the carbon tax is to change behaviour, why are you planning to compensate so many households? They’ll just keep killing the planet and get no penalties at all.

• At what point does carbon dioxide’s necessary presence in the atmosphere become “pollution”?

• If the carbon tax is definitely going to be introduced on July 1, 2012, how come Tim Flannery is going to be paid $720,000 over the next four whole years while he roams the country “explaining” it?

• Isn’t explaining new taxes your job? Or, more specifically, Wayne Swan’s?

• For that matter, where was Wayne the other day when you announced this massive new tax? You were there, and so was Bob Brown and Christine Milne and Greg Combet and Tony Windsor and the Hairy Princess. But no Wayne.

• The next time you see Wayne, could you ask him why he said this last August: “What we rejected is this hysterical allegation that somehow we are moving towards a carbon tax.” This question should really be asked by journalists, I guess, but they’re too busy making excuses for your hilarious lies.

• What is the point of building a $27 billion national broadband network to deliver computer connectivity across the nation when Greg Combet is telling people to turn off lights and televisions?

• Another thing: how much more cost will be added to the NBN courtesy of the carbon tax?

• Agriculture, which produces around a quarter of our carbon dioxide output, is exempt from the carbon tax. You’re not really serious about this whole “carbon pollution” deal, are you?

• Why don’t you just ban the mining, burning and export of coal? Your boss Bob Brown wants to. He thinks that coal caused the Queensland floods (or “water pollution").

• You’ve said that people shouldn’t be worried about media estimates of the amount they will be penalised. Why should they believe you?

• How does taking money off person A and giving it to person B help the climate?

• You’d be surprised, Ms Prime Minister, you really would, at the way clever lawyers can shift investments and capital around so that the source becomes “agriculture”.

• In 2007, Labor resources minister Martin Ferguson said that a mere $30 carbon tax on local flights would ”kill the Australian aviation industry both domestically and internationally.” If he was right, what does that mean for all Australian industries facing a carbon tax?

• What level of bureaucratic expansion will be required to deal with the intake and dispersal of something like $10 billion per year?

• Will your compensation plans take into account Australia’s regional differences in living standards? Because if they don’t, hard-up families in Sydney are going to be giving money to the well-off in Adelaide.

• What percentage of revenue from the carbon tax will be lost in bureaucratic churn between it being collected by your government and handed out in compensation?

• Instead of creating a tax system that eventually gives people their money back, why not just let them keep their own damn money in the first place?

• According to you, “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” Would you mind telling us who does lead this government, then? Otherwise I’ve sent this to the wrong person.

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