Carbon tax the cost of duplicity Piers Akerman
Daily Telegraph Thursday, February 24, 2011
LED by her Greens and independent partners in Government, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has now taken a huge step towards crippling the Australian economy and slugging individual Australians with her new carbon tax.
This is the tax that she explicitly promised not to introduce during last year’s election campaign.
In her own words, just five days before the August 21 poll, she told Channel 10: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”
In case anyone was possibly in any doubt, she repeated the line - “I rule out a carbon tax” - in The Australian on the day before the election.
Should Australians have believed her? Well, in her own words, election promises are meant to be honoured.
“I think when you go to an election and you give a promise to the Australian people, you should do everything in your power to honour that promise,” she told ABC broadcaster Jon Faine on March 20, 2009.
That was then, though.
The announcement of the carbon tax is just another broken promise and Gillard didn’t even get the chance to be the first to announce her own backflip. Greens leader Bob Brown put out a press release praising her stunning hypocrisy before she had had the opportunity to inform the people of her own mind-numbing duplicity.
Then, backed by Brown and his deputy Christine Milne and her own Climate Change minister Greg Combet, with support from the two independents principally responsible for putting Labor in office, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, she sought to dismiss the stupendous hypocrisy of her position.
It was, even by the lowly standards we have come to expect from this Prime Minister, a farce. Bizarrely, she attempted to compare her betrayal of the Australian people with the spectacular career of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, saying Gates understood change and had ridden the information technology revolution to fortune.
“This is the time to be pricing carbon and dealing with the change to a clean energy future,” she said.
Even more fatuously, she then added: “This is the parliament the Australian people voted for - you are seeing it on display in front of you. And we have to get on with the job of pricing carbon.”
She went on to tell parliament that “the Australian people had voted for a carbon tax” at the 2010 election. This would be news to all.
As Opposition leader Tony Abbott made plain during Question Time, only one political leader went to the last election with a plan for a carbon tax and that was Brown.
Just one politician campaigned for the introduction of a carbon tax, Abbott said. Meanwhile, 149 members ruled out such a tax.
“When does one vote trump 149 votes?” Abbott, justifiably, asked.
If Gillard’s horizons extended beyond The Lodge to an examination of the global marketplace, she would understand that nations around the world are currently walking away from the restrictions of carbon taxes in an effort to resuscitate their economies.
Gillard’s arguments for introducing this massive impost on Australians are hollow.
She is wedded to the belief that climate change is induced by human activity - a view certainly held by some, but by no means all, scientists.
She believes scientific views should be determined by consensus - a view which would have isolated all those who have relied on scientific proofs to support their theories.
She believes that people must be bludgeoned by draconian taxes into changing their ways, but she cannot explain how highly taxed Australians will be able to compete with trading nations whose economies have not been hobbled by Green-Left politicians.
Gillard has introduced her new tax on the basis of policy developed by her climate change committee, the same Green-Left and independent MPs whose political careers depend upon Labor remaining in power.
The committee, which has held just four meetings since it was set up last September, replaced another brain bubble Gillard had in the lead-up to the last election: A Citizens Committee to decide climate policy.
But overlooked in this cynical effort to buy the votes of the Greens and independents is the reality that, without a global agreement on carbon taxes, whatever Australia does is absolutely meaningless.
Just being among the first nations to sabotage its own economy is not going to change the temperature of the Earth, as much as the Green-Left may wistfully cling to their hopey-changey culture.
Labor’s traditional voters should be aware that the bare minimum increase they will have in electricity prices alone in the first year of Gillard’s carbon tax is estimated to be between $300 and $500. That does not take into account the additional increases that will naturally be triggered when industry adds the cost of the tax to their inputs.
Gillard makes no apology for this, claiming there will be offsets and compensation payments. But why would anyone believe anything she says or, worse, promises, given her appalling record of saying one thing and doing another?
Whether it is Gillard or her predecessor Kevin Rudd, the current run of Labor governments has a disgraceful history when it comes to promises made on climate change.
Under Rudd, the “greatest moral challenge” of our time was dumped like a dead and stinking cat as soon as the Copenhagen Conference crumbled into insignificance.
It is apparent that Gillard learnt nothing from Rudd’s mistakes. Worse, she has permitted herself to become hostage to a handful of MPs whose views are not those of the majority of Australians, Labor or Liberal.
The Greens attract little more than a token vote and have just one MP on the floor of the House. The independents have, by betraying their conservative electorates, earned nothing but universal disdain, no matter what Oakeshott may feel about the “new paradigm”.
Gillard’s broken promises on a carbon tax are nothing short of grotesque but her intention to impose a new tax without consultation through an election, as John Howard did with the GST, is pure treachery.
Last week the Labor Party’s own review of the last election warned of the dangers of placing too much power in the hands of a few.
It showed yesterday that it has not heeded the advice of its own elders - to the detriment of all Australians.
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