By Andrew Bolt
It is lunacy to impose a carbon dioxide tax that will slow our growth on the eve of a financial calamity, and it?s utterly delusional to do on the expectation that this is the very time when sinking economies will impose similar taxes themselves.
Paul Kelly:
THIS week Europe hovered on the brink with its debt crisis threatening more nations in the Eurozone, America was mired in gridlock over its huge debt burden and Australia declared its confidence in the domestic and world economies by moving to price carbon.
The juxtaposition is staggering. In the advanced economies there are 45 million jobless. Public debt as a portion of gross domestic product is 145 per cent in Greece, 120 per cent in Italy and about 100 per cent in the US. This constitutes a crisis of governance in the West and an intellectual crossroads for economic policy with competing needs to boost activity yet reduce debt.
Never has Australia?s political divorce from the rest of the West seemed more stunning.
Read it all.
UPDATE
Tery McCrann makes the same point:
I doubt that even Gillard would contemplate embarking on a carbon tax and consequent emissions trading scheme if faced with a bleak national future of US or European levels of unemployment, mortgage defaults, devastated businesses and general voter?sorry, consumer?distress?
While Gillard might actually believe the nonsense from Climate Change Minister Greg Combet that China ?is taking action on climate change? that shames us in our tardiness, he must know the simple truth that it is actually going to double its CO2 emissions by 2020?
Combet knows that in net terms, China is planning to increase its coal-fired generation capacity by close to 500GW by 2020.
That?s to say, over the next decade, China is going to increase its coal-fired power generation and so its CO2 emissions by about 10 times Australia?s total generating capacity.
Underscoring the madness:
JULIA Gillard will push ahead with the $ 11 billion carbon tax as the Australian economy starts to falter and speculation mounts that the next move in interest rates could be down?
The Westpac consumer confidence index published this week, taken before the carbon tax policy release last Sunday, reveals recession-like conditions across the economy.
The long-standing index collapsed by 8.3 per cent in July, the biggest one-month fall since the start of the global financial crisis in October 2008.
UPDATE 2
Professor James Allan is right to say that Tony Abbott could indeed repeal this tax:
Ah, say the purveyors of the ?he won?t be able to repeal it? bogeyman, but he won?t control the Senate.
At this point one obvious rejoinder is the possibility that he will. It?s possible the Greens and Labor will not control the Senate after the 2013 election. A voter backlash, with the then likely new independent senators, may well give Abbott?s Coalition the numbers to repeal it in the Senate.
But let?s say the Coalition wins the House of Representatives but doesn?t control the Senate. Are we really to believe that following a drubbing in that election, with Abbott given a clear voter mandate to repeal the tax package, that a chastened Labor Party would block the repeal in the Senate?
If they did it would be disastrous. I?d bet money that Labor would roll over. To do otherwise would forever cast the party as indistinguishable from the Greens, who might block repeal because they would have far less to lose.
UPDATE 3
India exposes Gillard?s fantasy of the world following her lead:
A single Indian state is to build a new fleet of coal-power stations that could make it one of the world?s top 20 emitters of carbon emissions ? on a par with countries such as Spain or Poland.
In an echo of the Chinese economy in the 1990s which depended on the exploitation of vast reserves of coal, India last year approved plans for 173 coal-fired power stations expected to provide an extra 80-100 gigawatts (GW) of electricity capacity within a few years. Many are expected to be fuelled by cheap coal imported from Australia, Indonesia and southern Africa, but applications to mine more than 600m tonnes of coal in India have been lodged.
Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.
Andrew Bolt?s columns appear in Melbourne?s Herald Sun, Sydney?s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide?s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and hosts Channel 10?s The Bolt Report each Sunday at 10am. He is also heard from Monday to Friday at 8am on the breakfast show of radio station MTR 1377, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.
Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt?s Blog . http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
PA Pundits – International
Bamir Topi Barack Obama Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini Bashar al Assad Benigno Aquino III
