Whatever happens to the ETS, it represents colossal failure
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There are three possible outcomes for the Government’s ETS bill. One is that it gets “deferred” i.e. rejected in a few weeks’ time, but when it comes to the crunch later in the year, enough Liberals are worried about the threat of an election to change their minds and vote it. We end up with an ETS that will create more carbon emissions than it saves in the vast paper chase it generates. The second is the bill gets rejected twice, and the Prime Minister decides to not make the serious but non-fatal mistake his predecessors John Howard and Bob Hawke made, and go to an early election. There’s no ETS, good, bad or indifferent, and every time anyone complains that Australia is doing nothing about climate change, the Government points at the Coalition and says “that’s their fault”. Or third, the Prime Minister decides he’d prefer to fight an election late this year against Malcolm Turnbull, with the Government’s public works program in every school in the country fresh in voters’ minds and before unemployment peaks, rather than late next year, probably against Peter Costello, when the economic outlook might be better or might be a lot worse and voters have forgotten why their new school hall was built. And we end up with a dud ETS after the post-election joint sitting. I’ve ranked those outcomes in order of probability. A double dissolution election needs the Government to raise the political temperature to near-crisis point so voters get the impression there’s a genuine reason for an election. Most voters would only be barely aware of what the Coalition’s position is after yesterday’s announcement. The Government needs it to be front-page stuff, day in and day out. In truth, though, any of those outcomes represents a failure of our governing class. And there’s plenty of blame to go around. The Government has never taken climate change seriously enough to invest political capital in it. It could have followed its “moral challenge” rhetoric and tried to engage the Opposition in a genuinely bipartisan approach to addressing the issue. Instead, it saw it primarily as a weapon to use against its political opponents. The Prime Minister gave carriage of the issue to an over-promoted minister with no negotiating skills, and kept tight control of the process. The Government comprehensively botched its handling of the details of its ETS, starting off with a poor scheme that has been compromised to the point of ineffectuality in subsequent negotiations. And it has been cowed by the likes of Mitch Hooke and Don Voelte when, as its NBN experience should have told it, big companies can be brought to heel by a ruthless display of executive power. The Coalition, which ignored the issue for a decade in office, is equally culpable, with the sceptics, agrarian socialists and the plain bloody-minded allowed to shape policy, stalling and possibly preventing the passage of even the Government’s hopelessly ineffective scheme In the middle are Steve Fielding, a man hopelessly out of his depth, and Nick Xenophon, for whom climate change or any other issue is less important than his own ego and passion for the limelight. Only the Greens have clean hands in this debacle. Yesterday Malcolm Turnbull called for the Productivity Commission to consider the proposed ETS, as part of his litany of reasons for further delay. Um, Malcolm, the PC has already looked at the CPRS in its new industry assistance review. And its judgement is pretty harsh — but not for the reasons you’d like. The PC says this about assistance for trade-exposed industries under the CPRS (it looked at the White Paper version, not the even more generous recent version): Identifying activities that may contract, shut-down or shift offshore following the introduction of a domestic constraint is not sufficient. The test for carbon leakage is whether these shifts would still have occurred even if other countries effectively constrained their carbon usage. The difficulty in forming these judgements make it likely that any policy response will at times fail to protect against carbon leakage and also at times provide assistance where no carbon leakage would have otherwise occurred. The PC goes on to say:
Further:
In short, the assistance provided by the CPRS has a poor rationale, has a substantial cost and makes things more difficult for everyone else. And that was for the White Paper version. Apparently Greg Combet thinks this is a big tick in favour of the CPRS. Just how skewed this debate is was shown yesterday when Malcolm Turnbull in effect argued that we should delay and reconsider an ETS because the Americans were planning a scheme that provided even more assistance to some of their industries than the CPRS. In essence, because the Americans are considering being even more protectionist than us, we should match them. If Turnbull had used this argument to call for a delay in other forms of protectionism — the reduction of automotive tariffs next year, say, or for an official Buy Australian policy, or keeping foreign firms out, he would have been howled down by every economic commentator in the country. But carbon protectionism is so deeply embedded in Australian political culture that the argument went unchallenged. Funny thing is, that’s the good news. The bad news is, the only way climate change will be slowed is if the rest of the world takes action, and if you thought our politicians were self-interested, wait til you see what the rest of the world’s are like. Too bad Australia will be among the first and worst casualties of climate change. |
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32 Comments
Interesting stuff. I wasn’t aware the PC had looked over the CPRS. Clearly neither was Malcolm. That might be worth a read.
Is this the sort of thing the Liberals proposed policy analysis branch or budget review committee or whatever it was (mentioned in MT’s Budget Reply) would have a look at? The recommendations from CP seem incredibly sensible, and completely overlooked by most commentators.
This is clearly the fault of the media. When Rudd refused to release any policy until the week prior to the election. The media rolled over.
Perhaps, if Rudd had released such a policy earlier we as a nation might have had more of chance to get it right. Rather than the Rudd way, release it with franken-info, leap on those who rightly question it then re-release it with revised data.
Great article-and you’re a clever man Bernard.
Option two has a nice rounded ballistic- missile feel to it. But the Government doesn’t deserve to have such a beautiful solution to hand. Whether it’s all the fault of Kevin Rudd that the Government has given the voter such a display of contempt for its opinion or not, is debatable. But never in my life have I seen a political Party being rendered as even more clod-like than her majesty’s opposition (The Republic; that’s something else they didn’t attempt to live up to.)
How do political writers maintain any semblance of normalcy in the face of such despicable cretinism.
As for the po-faced Penny Wong! It’s almost as if she had been designed by Kevin Rudd to achieve precisely what she hasn’t achieved.
To Crikey: Sorry to have made a mistake. Where it says ‘Notify me..’ was meant to be a yes. Thanks.
The second possible of Bernard’s outcomes would be no “colossal failure” in the event that (yet again) we are in fact not living in ‘unique times’ wherein ‘Gaia’ is about to croak (yet again).
Doing nothing in response to the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ would have been far better for Australia and almost certainly doing nothing for ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ would be also be best for Australia.
If we do wish to good global citizens fair enough.
But paraphrasing Rudd: ‘we will commit Harikari before you in order to show you our great example’ is no recipe for success.
Unilateral suicide contrary to leftist opinion does absolutely nothing for the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Venise, next you will be telling us when you are going to the toilet and whether it is a number one or a number two. Time to get off the pot, Venise.
David, what’s up with you? Perhaps you have run out of victims? Booze? Unattainable goals? You other half told you what to do with yourself?
At least I attempt to stick to the subject under discussion. Whereas you always indulge in personal invective. I used to have hysterics when you and JamesK were battling it out; what happened, run out of wit?
BTW, David: I find lavatory humour to be particularly offensive. Most especially when used by the middle-classes who can’t bring themselves to say the word lavatory or having a crap. (As in Sir Thomas Crapper, of course.)
Be a good boy, David, rush down to the off-license - pub-and get another bottle of your favourite tipple. The one you were drinking before attacking me.
Chin chin old boy.
Venise, I am asking you to not post irrelevant personal drivel such as the post below:
“To Crikey: Sorry to have made a mistake. Where it says ‘Notify me..’ was meant to be a yes. Thanks.”
If you want to contact Crikey with this kind of stuff then email them directly. Don’t waste our time by posting it here. Doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it?
So it’s ‘the royal we’ now. As in ‘Don’t waste our time’. I shouldn’t have to explain myself. This was the first and only comment I have made like that. I was in a desperate hurry. And I scarcely think you are in any position to be sledging. I don’t think I’ve ever read am impersonal comment from you.
Anyway, I’m happy for you that you have so much spare time to be potting other people. Unfortunately, my time is limited.
Venise, you have made dozens of such posts. As I said yesterday it is self-indulgent - nothing else - to be treating these pages as your personal message board for matters that are trivial and irrelevant. Claims that your “time is limited” are no excuse for wasting other people’s time.
And since when was typing an email more time-consuming than typing a post here? What drivel and humbug.
Any ETS which lets high emitting companies off the hook runs against the purpose of an ETS. The over-riding thrust of ETS methodology is to make the emitting of carbon dioxide so expensive to these companies, that there is a market incentive to invest in more efficient energy technologies, or sources of energy, or means of conversion to mechanical work…… etc…….ad infinitum. The imposture of this investment will create whole new industries, whole new investment streams, new ideas, new ways of thinking, definitely new markets, possibly whole new societies. Why are we even pausing to think about it?????
I remember many years ago, an aboriginal fellow by the name of Ernie Bridge, then State minister of something or other, proposed that a water pipeline be built to pump water from Lake Argyle to Sydney and Melbourne via Alice Springs and parts in-between. This concept was, of course shouted down by the economic rationalistst and curmudgins of all descriptions, and yet the idea would have singlhandedly created the infrastucture investment so sorely needed at the time, and inherited from that time by the present govenment, and confronted the signs of longterm drought which were visible at the time, and have now become reality, although they may be easing now in the form of violently destructive rain-bearing storms that detsroy more than the ravages of what came before. Think of the communities which could have been created along the track between these places based on allotments of irrigatable land with water taken from the pipes. How many generations will pay for this oversight?
Where are the iconoclasts? Where are the people of vision? The ones that leave something behind of lasting benefit to all of humanity? The pyramidBuilders, the Eifeltowermakers, the SydneyHarbourBridgeConstructors? Will anything be remembered about this Baby-Boomer, greed-obsessed, money-grubbing, immitation of a generation except drought, famine, financial crisis, and recession?
Only time will tell.
That completes my rant for this evening. Would anyone who wishes to respond to the above please bare in mind that I will respond in like tone.
“”bare in mind” - sums up the last post perfectly.
David S, your wit is so subtle that comment completely passed me by.
Tom, Thursday is ranting day, please stick to the procedure from now on. I like the colourful language though, and agree, there aren’t many men or preferably women of vision in the public sphere these days. Except Malcolm! I guess you get what you pay for, and we are shackled to a political system that includes everyone, so the debate drops to the lowest commong denominator.
Debt!
Jobs!
Nation building!
Debt!
It goes on like this.
I offer no solutions apart from taking personal umbrage with every IDEA that you disagree with. If we’re going to live in a Democracy, everyone must learn to make their point clear, play the ball, not the man, and try steer the country where you want it to go.
With that in mind, I’ve spent the week telling anyone who wil listen that the CPRS is a pig with lipstick, and if my dog was that ugly, I’d shave it’s bum and make it walk backwards.
Again, a agreat article BK, you’ve been in fine form the last week.
I really don’t think anyone should be suprised at all. As has been demonstrated since the “tough” budget, this is a government of spin, and nothing else.
If they were serious about this, and though “the sky is falling”, then there’d be no hesitation etc. in doing what would be needed to reduce the INCENTIVE to pollute. Isn’t it amazing that the word INCENTIVE is hardly ever used in the media in regards to this. It’s the ONLY purpose of the CPRS. But of course we have all this talk of permits etc. yadda yadda yadda.
They aren’t serious about reducing emmisions, they just want a headline. And shame on the true believers for sidling up alongside this government. For once in my life, i actually admire the principles of The Greens.
Of course on another note, any government that proposed actual tough cuts that would hurt the hip pocket of anyone, would be thrown out the door quicker than you can say…. well you know what i’m getting at.
Evan Beaver
Evan Beaver (EV) Oh dear! You say ‘David S, your wit is so subtle that comment passed me by’. Very funny. Intrigued, curious, I re-read the comment posted by Tom Yeats. All he did was to make one spelling mistake as in ‘Bare in mind’. But that was enough for the Nerd from the North, Mouth from the South, Wet from the West-whoever, to build his own pathetic little one liner. ‘Bare in mind’.
Having read umpteen duals between DS and JamesK-the latter always winning-I tend to know where he is coming from.
The CPRS is yet another fistful of spin-dirt being flung into the voters’ faces in order to go to an early election. No-one could have flung that much dirt without realizing it would end in a DD. Unfortunately the born to rule mob haven’t spent enough time in the wilderness to earn another shot at leading the country just yet. For starters they need to learn humility. Ah Ha, ah ha. Thus does the Australian electorate suffer from mediocrity of governance. Not to mention a limited choice-I was going to say philosophies. Silly me.
Try to be a little patient with David S, it’s that time of the month!
I would just like to express my appreciation for the intelligent replies posted by EV and Venise Alstergren, to the astute one-liner posted by David S in relation my posting, and feel no compulsion to further detract from the point at hand by saying anything else on the matter, except to point out that the use of the word ‘bare’ rather than ‘bear’ was deliberate and has distinct meaning in this context.
In comments by Evan Beaver I note an aversion to debt. I find myself wondering if he runs a credit card in his personal finance and, if so, what the percentage of its balance is to his net annual income. Only a year ago debt was good. Banks were coercing people into going into debt to buy consumer goods they didn’t need, money was popping around the economy, and the Keynsian cantata continued. Now it’s all gone bad. But another day will come.
The new day is presently being shaped by policy moves around the world, heavily influenced by the mega-rich elite lobby groups, and it all looks fairly bleak. This ‘financial crisis’ and ‘recession’ presents a cyclical opportunity to analyse and address the causes of the ‘crisis’, implementing policy and regulatory changes which can prevent its recurrence, if properly applied. Unfortunately, most of what is happening along these lines in the big economies of the world are leading to an inevitable repeat of the mistakes of the past. It is therefore inescapable that the markets will revive and it will be business as usual. Best to buy some shares now while the market is on it’s knees and wait for the next bubble. But, of course the banks aren’t lending for such risky enterprises so you will need cash, and if you have fallen into their coercive call to debt, when debt was good, you have none.
I shall put Thursdays in my calendar as Ranting day in future.
Tom, for pompous twaddle your last post really does take the cake. Would you care to explain what “distinct meaning [bare has] in this context”?
Or would you prefer us to conclude that you pomposity is a flimsy cover for a bare mind?
Tom Yeats. Thank you for your nice comment.
It wouldn’t surprise me if DS was flung out of the school debating team for his unremitting hatred and personalization of his opponents.
If he actually contributed something towards the point under discussion he wouldn’t be so pathetic. Also when he asks you if your ‘pomposity is a flimsy cover for a bare mind?’ This question is a mirror image of the cretinous pomposity of the writer’.
He has so much hatred it keeps exploding out of him like a viscous cancer.
G’day Tom,
No, I have no aversion to debt. Like any good Aussie I’ve got debt stretching out for years in front of me. I was just trying to summarise the talking points from Question Time that I’d seen this week. I know the awesome power of debt, and neither party is doing a good job of articulating that.
If I was ever PM, I’d spend a lot of time explaining decisions. Hence I would never be PM. However, Obama seems to be giving the public more explanation, so maybe there is some hope for the future of politics?
Thanks Evan.
I only just started on Crikey and am not aware of ‘Question Time’ which you refer to, so please forgive my comment and I hope it did not offend. I don’t know what the question was but the answers you summarise give some indication. I have been concerned somewhat about recent criticism of the Rudd stimulus package debt accumulation, and have seen many emotive comments implying that all debt is bad and national budgets should never run in deficit. My impression is that people making these comments are getting panicked by the sheer mounting size of the debt, without considering our ability to pay it back. Anyway this was the thrust of my comment.
I’m not sure if an unwillingness to explain decisions is a prerequisite for running for PM, so maybe you have a shot at it. Obama does seem like a breath of fresh air, and he is saying many of the right things, but so did JFK and the acheivements didn’t quite match up. In relation to the financial crisis and recession Obama is still being hobbled by the neocon aversion to regulation and direct federal intervention. Anyway, it’s all kind of interesting.
“I am not aware of ‘Question Time’ which you refer to”
Dear god, is there no end to this pompous twittery?
Terrific attitude David.
I’d prefer a bit of pompisity over breakfast to your endless bitching and sniping.
Evan, perhaps you could refrain from telling us that the only reason you will never be prime minister is that you are too honest. There are a thousand reasons why you will never be prime minister and that is not one of them.
Haha! At least that insult was funny.
No worries Venise, I think it is most unlikely that I will ever be spending the night with you. Happy hunting though. Let us know if you have any luck.
David. Oh, I’ve always had a more than adequate supply of men to spend breakfast with?
You wouldn’t have even passed the minders at the front door. Let alone making it to my king-sized bed.
I think Crikey has stopped further comments, but I did get your email. Minders are needed David, to sort out the men from the boys. The latter being the the group which is indicative of your mentality. Old boy.
You people are so boring I hope Crikey does cut you off.
Why would such an acidic personality feel that it is necessary, obviously for his own persoal gratification, to personally insult so many, when only intelligent conversation was sought? ‘Pompous’ is the only insult he can think of, when nothing said could possibly be construed as the normal meaning of the word.
Normal procedure would be to ignore such stupidity and have an intelligent conversation on the side. Unfortunately, his need was fueled by continuous responses to his acidic (yes, I repeated a desciptor, shock horror), non-sensical, self-agrandising, irrelevant, STUPID, twaddle.
My apolgies to Venise and Bevan but I have watched this unfold for a while now, and aside from disovling in laughter, I can see no other oppropriate reponse.
Good Bye.
Tom, before you get too carried away on your crusade for everything that is nice and good in the world consider this. You told an obvious untruth when you said that “bare in mind” instead of “bear in mind” had a “distinct meaning in this context”. That untruth was mixed in with a lot of pompous phrases that did not add up to much. Despite being asked to explain this nonsense you did not do so.
You then made it clear, in a pompous fashion, that you had no idea what Question Time is. That meant that you were blathering about Australian politics without even a rudimentary knowledge of one of the main features of Australian political life.
In short, your integrity and knowledge were so poor there was no reason to take you seriously. And I didn’t.
That’s a lot of hate for one man David.
David is the sort of person who would rather hack off his own leg with a Swiss Army Knife than allow the conversation to evolve from the author’s article. ‘Whatever happens to the ETS, it represents colossal failure’ by Bernard Keane.
As this is David Sanderson’s modus operandi for all his favourite hatreds, I am forced to imagine his manifold dislike is based on jealousy. He is jealous of Bernard Keane. And in his foetid imagination he thinks “What better way to undermine Bernard Keane, et al, to divert the attention due to Keane than to start a new discussion about an entirely different thing”. In his case it’s himself he wishes to talk about.
It is hard, I know. But if we all refuse to bite he will run out of steam, and get fuck-ng furious in the process.