Memo to Tony Abbott: you’re not helping!
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By gum that young Kevin Rudd chap is a clever, clever politician. He has made life a misery for the Coalition on climate change. There has been the odd tactical fumble on the issue, like the abortive reference to a House of Reps inquiry earlier this year, but otherwise the Prime Minister has used the issue deftly to club his opponents about the head. But surely not even Rudd’s evident political smarts could possibly extend to the walking debacle that is Tony Abbott, now starring in his own version of I Was A Labor Sleeper Agent. Wilson Tuckey is one thing. He’s great value, but doesn’t mean anything. Ron Boswell and Barnaby Joyce are climate change deniers and left the reservation a long time ago anyway. Their absence from serious climate debate, and for that matter planet Earth, is of no moment. But I observed on Tuesday that the Coalition is only a brain explosion away from another climate change disaster and suggested Tony Abbott had some form in that regard. Lo and behold… The best line in Abbott’s op-ed piece in The Australian today is the last one.
No, I can’t see “climate change” in that list either. But Tony isn’t talking about his own portfolio, as any number of journalists have discovered in the last 24 hours. Tony is launching a book shortly – the launch that will possibly coincide with the new season of Mad Men, from which it apparently draws its core values – and isn’t talking about issues like indigenous housing in the interim, as part of his publishing deal. Peter Costello not commenting on the Liberal leadership in the lead-up to his own book launch was one thing. A shadow minister not doing his job for the same reason is something else, especially when he insists on offering 1000 words to the national broadsheet on an issue outside his own portfolio. If you wrote this stuff in a political comedy you’d be told it was too silly. The point of Abbott’s piece was not really to argue – via a detour into smoking regulation — that backing the Government’s ETS was the smart political move. It was to point out that under Malcolm Turnbull the Opposition is headed for a hiding if there’s an election. Abbott, as the only Liberal figure who currently rates less than Turnbull in leadership polling, may not be entirely disinterested in making such observations. Nick Minchin was on telly last night talking about climate change as well, but at least he could argue he was reiterating what is currently the Coalition’s position. The Prime Minister mustn’t be able to believe his luck. Maybe it’s the case that if you repeat “the Opposition is in disarray” often enough eventually it will become true. The more sensible piece in The Oz today was from Dennis Shanahan, showing that when he’s not running a partisan agenda he’s an astute analyst. He’s dead right in identifying the Coalition’s real problem of failing to have used the eighteen months since the election effectively to work out where they stand. Deciding your vote on one of the most important economic reforms in Australian history purely on the basis of political expediency would be bad enough. Doing it when it is plain that you don’t really know, as a party, what you think on the issue is bordering on criminal, and will be punished at the ballot box. The most sensible intervention in the debate yesterday came from Martin Parkinson, who heads Penny Wong’s department, in a conference speech. Parkinson correctly noted that emissions trading is a long-standing approach to environmental problems and has been under consideration for a decade in Australia, and that much of the rubbish modelling produced by the likes of the Minerals Council and other rentseekers was inexplicably being treated as on a par with far more rigorous Treasury modelling. But Parkinson’s most acute point was one to which the “business community” and the Coalition might give detailed consideration. The US approach, as currently encapsulated in the Waxman-Markey Bill, is nothing like the polluters’ nirvana being suggested by those who want Australia to mimic it. As the Australian Conservation Foundation spotted when they compared ACES and the CPRS, free permits to emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries under the proposed US model are capped and cannot rise beyond 11% of total permits; under the CPRS, free permits start at 28% and can keep going up until the point where the Government will need to dip into the budget to meet its obligations. Nor is there a permit price ceiling, or a petrol excise offset, or unconditional handouts to electricity generators, and assistance to households is aimed at improving energy efficiency to bring about long-term energy cost reductions. Next week it is likely that the Government will complete its wedging of the Coalition by announcing some additional assistance for the coal sector and perhaps electricity generators, which Cabinet will consider mid-week. The electricity generators latter will get nothing like the tens of billions of dollars they have been demanding. The coal industry, which has been singled out by the Government to miss out on the sort of handouts every other emissions-intensive sector (and some not so intensive sectors, like LNG) may get a doubling of the currently-proposed level of assistance, which is $750m. This can be advertised to mining unions and coal mining seat MPs — as well as the rest of us — as further evidence of the Government’s willingness to be practical about the costs of the CPRS. There’ll be much talk, as there usually is from the Government, about “getting the balance right.” If they’re talking about making life hell for the Opposition, the Government has got the balance absolutely perfect. |
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Crikey's Guide to Julia Gillard
8 Comments
The political squabbling surrounding the ETS is always couched in terms of how it will affect the bottom line of large polluters, but at the end of the day we know that any costs incurred to miners and power companies will filter down to the tax payers. Which begs the question, why choose a complicated carbon trading scheme over a much simpler and more transparent carbon tax - a tax where the price of carbon emissions is predictable for business, and the revenues collected by government could be allocated towards efficiency programs and clean technology?
Why is this a debate we never had? Who decided that an ETS is the best global solution, and cui bono?
An ETS is a government mandated market that forces companies to purchase carbon credits, with bankers and hedge funds operating the levers of trade. The problem with this system, as we have seen over the last few years in markets from oil to food crops, is that those bankers are able to manipulate prices far outside the realms of supply & demand in order to profit from price volatility. And since global markets set the prices for these goods at the pump and supermarket, people at the end of the supply chains (you and me) are footing the bill.
The question I want answered is this : Why does the Australian government want to introduce and enforce a private taxation scheme for banks like Goldman Sachs, when a carbon tax would be easier, fairer, and more transparent?
Well Jeebus, pick up the phone and do some asking, write some letters to those who may have answers, like the Government!!!! Mere mortals such as I do not have the ear of Mr Rudd, Ms Wong or any other front bench Minister. Perhaps Sen’s Fielding or Joyce, who have been mouthing off can help you, or play the big card The Rev Anthony Abbott, he seems to be a ‘font’ of wisdom on this topic. I would steer clear of ironbar though, you could cop one in the ole state of grace.
Fair question about Goldman Sachs though, the buggers dont pay enough tax anyway. Hit em in the back kick, way to go.
becoming cuckold as a juvenile can send you cuckoo
The minute a Jesuit trained God’s own politician wearing a spectral cross the size of Sydney harbour, pontificates about the environment, health and female reproduction/euthanasia, or indeed anything to do with reality, is the minute I refuse to read the comments. WTF would Tony Abbott know about such issues? All his theories come from the Pope-whom we know to be uncannily cognitive on such issues. Tony Abbott is merely a conduit from the holy see to a gullible sector of the electorate.
To see the gothic horror of an alternative and Coalition government one needed nothing more than to have watched last night’s performance on Q&A of Senator Nick Minchin. This should have been mandatory viewing by all those frustrated souls, who in a dementia of fury about the Rudd Government’s inertia apropos the environment, swear they are going to vote for the opposition during the next Federal election. Not after they’ve seen last night’s sorry performance.
The wretched Minchin doesn’t even know why the electorate turfed out the Coalition, let alone helping the leader of the Coalition to make them an actual voting alternative.
Jeebus (3.15pm). The notional reasons for favouring an ETS over a carbon tax are that it should become an international trading market, which in a perfect world would bring the most efficient mechanisms to bear — -such as the very green idea of paying Brazilians or Indonesians to capture carbon in, and conserve, their vast forests. And of course all the people who have written the reports (eg. Stern, Garnaut) are economists. The economic models — formally called “cap and trade”, for the perfect ETS are wonderful. A cap and trade system worked for reducing sulphur-dioxide emissions (acid rain) in the 90s. Once in place, a government could in principle be hand-off, and therefore also try to avoid any political price or responsibility for the outcome.
But a carbon tax requires government to decide on a price and hope they get it right. Although both an ETS and a carbon tax do similar things, there is a visceral reaction anything that seems such a blatant tax that it even has it in its name (though Rudd would no doubt invent some workaround language, it wouldn’t fool anyone). Politically a carbon tax was never a proposition in the US, and therefore the world.
So the short and truthful answer is: politics.
This is merely a plaintiff question. Have I got such a terrible reputation that my comments are always held up ‘for moderation’? Or is it because I’m a bore?
“Kevin Rudd chap is a clever, clever politician”
Well perhaps. Cynical is another word for using the sacred concerns of a viable world for the low rent angle of wedging the Libs and Nats. As Gandhi said aim for integrity not simply to win.
As for ART - another Rudd triumph - not, regretably no commentary here on crikey on the banal Therese Rein foray into the mass media last weekend, timed no doubt to rescue brand ALP from the incredibly grubby embrace of the uranium/radon gas spreading/nuke weapons promoting mining industry via sellout Garrett. Not to mention the tonne by tonne of yellowcake wieghting now in favour of an international nuke waste dump in Australia in our lifetime (aka Pangea proposal). We send, we get it back? You bet.
For instance it might have been a subject of comment here that the tragedy of the ruthless bombing in Jakarta virtually squandered that large ALP spend of political capital re Rein foray. It’s an ill wind that blows no good I suppose, in that the ALP choreography mistimed due to events, and Garrett’s name still remains mud: The National Interest show on ABC RN this morning had to block any more calls in an ethics session with Simon Longstaff about “sell outs”. Callers wanted to talk ad nauseam about Garrett and other politicians, and move onto other cute ethical conflicts in say the finance industry.
Almost on cue we had ex premier Bob Carr front page of the SMH promoting his now old style ‘green’ ALP credentials here in NSW on forest/river redgums protection. Refer Simon Santow World Today show (today). Trouble is when I looked at the real file record with me re Bob Carr’s own record on forests 1998/99, his record is not as impressive as he wants to claim. Overstated in fact. Current Premier Nathan Rees could easily do better than Carr on the redgums conservation issue. The record shows Carr broke several election promises (eg Eden chipmill) and released easily 50% of the scientifically recommended areas under consideration for 20 year unscientific logging guarantees. You would never know reading Bob “akimbo” Carr, ever the gifted thespian.
Under the NSW ALP the privatisation of profit in our publicly owned forests was entrenched and 5 icon pieces of green legislation were repealed. Time permitting the source docs will be blogged in due course. And the caravan moves on … 20 days to go.
If only we had a decent media in this country, the questions raised re alternatives to the CETS would have been put to the government before this. I’m in a state of permanent frustration re any govt in the country-the so-called journalists are at best lazy; are in bed with the govts or just don’t give a hoot?What’s the training these days? A lunch with Murdoch or Stokes or ???Even the ABC get ‘picky’ or argumentative on the wrong part of the issue. They’d rather tackle Turnbull over the state of the coalition rather than make him put forward his so-called solutions to global warming? Why is this? Laziness or stupidity. It happens all the time! A good example is the coverage of the horror in Iraq or Afghanistan; usually with the US foreign/energy policies in mind.
Perhaps I should start watching days of our drearies or Oprah or??