- by: Peter Costello
- From: The Daily Telegraph
- March 11, 2014 12:00AM
Greens’ industrial devolution: saving the planet by destroying livelihoods
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 these 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 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 these policies it would be worth a visit to 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. This 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 fifteenth of the votes a New South Wales 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 deindustrialise it.
However 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 larger share of the GST pie than it pays in. It gets make-work schemes and call-centres and subsidised roads out of national taxes.
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 last 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”.
Then there is the mining tax. When it was first introduced it was promised to raise over $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 never worked. It never had 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 last 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. Our 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.
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never mind, abbrott will save the planet - a good start by destroying 74,000 hectares of forest
http://theaimn.com/2014/03/05/tony-abbott-has-that-rare-ability-to-be-incredibly-stupid/
Tony Abbott has that rare ability to be incredibly stupid
Image courtesy of thepunch.com.au
Tony Abbott keeps raising the bar of stupidity.
His speech last night at a timber industry dinner lauding timber workers as “the ultimate conservationists” brings home the gold medal.
Corinne Grant provides a wonderful take on this superb performance:
It’s pretty much standard for politicians to suck up to their audiences.
If they’re talking to mining magnates, they tell them they’re the backbone of Australia. If they’re talking to farmers, they tell them they’re the backbone of Australia.
If they’re talking to factory workers they tell them they’re the backbone of Australia (and then they tell them they earn too much).
But when Tony Abbott told a room full of loggers that they were the ‘ultimate conservationists’, even that audience must have been reaching for its sick bag.
Seriously, people who cut down trees are saving them? As what? IKEA furniture?
Just brilliant, Corinne.
But while this latest example (of what are affectionately called “Abbott’s brain farts”) has anyone with an IQ over 25 picking their jaws up off the floor, this medal-winning performance of stupidity has been matched with an equally brilliant display of hypocrisy.
In last night’s speech Abbott also announced that:
“We don’t support, as a government and as a Coalition, further lockouts of our forests,” Mr Abbott said. “We have quite enough National Parks, we have quite enough locked up forests already. In fact, in an important respect, we have too much locked up forest.”
Mr Abbott said his government was pushing ahead to delist a world heritage listing of 74,000 hectares of forest in Tasmania. “Mr Abbott said the area – which was protected under Tasmania’s forest peace deal – was not pristine forest and was too degraded to be considered a sanctuary“. (I guess they aren’t trees of calibre. Their ‘breeding’ shouldn’t be encouraged).
Tony Abbott’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. Do you remember this?
Tony Abbott believes he can fight climate change with a $3.2 billion plan to plant 20 million trees . . .
Mr Abbott said planting 20 million trees by 2020 at a cost of $5 a tree would create “urban forests” and green zones in regions and along highways.
To lull the Australian electorate into believing he had genuine concerns and a genuine plan for climate change he conjured up some fabulous idea of planting a tree on just about every square inch of spare piece of dirt. Cities, suburbs and sidewalks would no longer be concrete jungles. He would have promised urban forests in Alice Springs, Adelaide, Bendigo, Brisbane . . . everywhere. Everywhere, now, but Tasmania. This year they head to the polls so he declares to the axe-happy loggers that he would prefer to see Tasmanian trees chopped from the landscape.
Tony Abbott has that knack of being able to mix a classical brain fart in amongst some blatant political opportunism. He really has that rare ability to be incredibly stupid. In the same week we saw the Minister for the Environment promoting the green army Abbott talks about clearing heritage-listed forests. How does he do it? If I were the Minister for the Environment I’d be locking myself in a sound-proof room and screaming.
agree
@nero_wulf wrote:
@the_hawk* wrote:The wonderful thing about closing car plants and smelters is all the pollution it will prevent. This is a great step forward in the battle to save the planet.
Closing the plants will actually cause more pollution when the production moves to Asian countries where they don't care about pollution.
Just like when old tires and plastic covered copper wire is shipped overseas with everyone knowing its going to a third world country to be processed is the most unenvironmentally ways possible, but the people feel they have clean hands because its not us actually doing the burning.
Out of sight out of mind and ignorance is bliss, trippers
I agree but tell that to the greens/labor, as they simply dont care, kill all jobs in Australia like they have done in Tasmania and send it all over seas.
as you said... Out of sight out of mind and ignorance is bliss, to these people....
and this is what they want to do to Australia.... Based on their brilliant success in Tasmania
