NO matter what Julia Gillard or Greg Combet claim, their carbon tax is a failure and their arguments supporting it are complete nonsense.
The tax, supported by the Greens and the independents, has done nothing to reduce emissions, will do nothing to affect global warming (which has in any case been on hold for more than a decade) but will destroy Australian industry and will hurt Australian families.
It is not just a dagger pointed at the heart of the nation, it is a dagger thrusting deep into the body of the nation, slashing and tearing at the vitals of the economy and the society.
That’s because it is essentially an electricity tax, as Greg Hunt, the shadow spokesman on climate action and the environment, noted in a considered address to the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy on Thursday.
Because electricity is an essential service, the carbon tax is not merely a tax on big business, it is a tax on families, pensioners and economic activity. And that is why, in an international environment with no genuinely comparable system, the government’s own modelling shows our emissions will go up not down.
Hunt said it is also why, rather than trying to double the price of electricity to punitively try to change behaviour, he passionately believes that a buyback, just like a water buyback, is the simplest, most effective way to actually reduce emissions.
Gillard has been conning the nation on the carbon tax ever since she uttered her primary pre-election lie “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead” in August 2010.
Since then she and former union boss Combet have maintained that Australia has been an international trailblazer, a beacon to other nations anxious to rein in their carbon dioxide emissions.
This is a monstrous falsehood.
The government’s own Productivity Commission found that “no country currently imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse emissions or has in place an economy-wide ETS.”
As Hunt said, not China, not India, not the USA, not even the EU.
Gillard has managed to bluff her sycophants in the Canberra press gallery with the oft-stated claim that China is closing some of its smaller coal-fired power stations.
Again, Hunt highlights the critical fact that the prime minister omitted: the missing part of the sentence which should have been “and replacing them with larger stations as part of the fastest growth in emissions and coal consumption in human history”.
According to available statistics, Chinese coal consumption will increase from 1.4 billion tonnes in 2002 to approximately 4 billion tonnes in 2015. And only last year, Minister Wu Yin indicated that Chinese coal consumption would continue to grow to 7.5 billion tonnes a year by 2030.
He said that Indian emissions are also growing at a dramatic pace. India now accounts for approximately 5 per cent of global emissions and this figure is rising commensurately with its economic growth. Unfortunately, Gillard has also attempted to distort what is happening in India with the statement that India is taking “national action” on pricing carbon through a “clean energy tax on coal.” But the Indian coal tax is $1 a tonne. By comparison, the state royalty on Queensland coking coal is $20 a tonne.
As for the European Union, the Minerals Council of Australia has released research showing that over the first five years of the European emissions trading scheme, it raised approximately $500 million a year.
The Australian carbon tax, by comparison, will raise approximately $9 billion a year. The Australian carbon tax will be 18 times larger in dollar terms than the European scheme in each of its first five years.
Breaking down the tax on a per capita basis, the comparison is devastating. The EU has a population of just over 500 million. Therefore the EU scheme raised just over $1 per person per year.
Australia has a population of approximately 23 million, so our scheme, said Hunt, at the government’s $23 price, is raising almost $400 per person per year, making it 400 times more onerous per capita than the European scheme.
Read this carefully: the Labor-Green-independent minority government’s carbon tax is now 550 per cent higher than the European scheme.
Closer to home, New Zealand, much-vaunted as our cleaner, greener neighbour, is currently trading carbon at about $1 a tonne.
Australia’s carbon tax is more than 20 times as expensive—and is legislated to rise again on July 1 and rise again next year, again on July 1.
Australia’s carbon tax just doesn’t work. Treasury’s own figures showing our emissions are set to rise from 560 to 637 million tonnes between 2010 and 2020.
Families are hurting and the government isn’t listening. The do-nothing, cost-the-world tax must go.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/julia_gillards_carbon_tax_is_hurting_families_and_must_be_scrapped/
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