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WA State Labor leader has it both ways: Carbon Tax bad but trading good. No. No. No.

Mark McGowan , the West Australian Labor leader hoping to win the election in March and become Premier of WA, announced that he doesn’t like the Carbon Tax. But apparently he does like emissions trading, showing that he’s as keen as anyone to help large financial institutions reap nice profits for little risk, and no benefit.

It’s an industry which deals in paper sales of an atmospheric nullity and thus, by design, prone to fraud. (See the $7b VAT tax fraud where 90% of trades in some markets were criminal). The EU emissions price is collapsing, and the scheme has made no difference to emissions in the EU. The US reduced CO2 more than the EU without a tax or a national trading scheme. In the unlikely event the scheme overcame the fraud and inefficiencies and actually reduced carbon dioxide, stopping the entire output of Australian industry and commerce would make 0.0154 degrees to global temperatures, at best, and that’s assuming the IPCC assumptions turned out to be correct despite all the evidence suggesting they are wrong.

“It’s no coincidence that the only people who argue for a free market solution are those who profit from it, or those who don’t know what a free market is.Jo Nova Sept 2010

McGowan is trying to have it both ways but failing to make sense to either group: a kind of fence-sitting yoga. How do you pretend you care about West Australian voters, many of whom deeply distrust the Federal government and the carbon tax, but pretend at the same time that you care about the carbon monster, so you can appease the Greens and avoid the “denier” tag?

Western Australia’s Labor leader Mark McGowan has distanced himself from Prime Minister Julia Gillard by saying he opposes the carbon tax ahead of next month’s state election.

But Mr McGowan says he does support an emissions trading scheme.

Newspoll has pointed to a landslide election win for the WA Liberals on March 9, putting it ahead of Labor 57 to 43 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese defended Mr McGowan’s stance.

“I notice that he also said that he supported an emissions trading scheme,” he told Sky News.

“Of course what we have is a fixed price on carbon evolving into an emissions trading scheme.”

Read more WA Today.

Not a healthy relationship then?

This says all you need to know about Western Australia’s relationship with the national government:

Though he (Mark McGowan) has been standoffish to the Prime Minister – even going on holidays when she visited Western Australia- Mr McGowan said that if elected he would not be vicious towards other states or the commonwealth as he believed Mr Barnett had been.

“Just because we are richer than them it doesn’t mean we have to be rude,” he said.

The Australian

If there was a problem with carbon, an ETS would not be the way to solve it.

From a past post of mine:

An Emissions trading scheme is an artificial market that draws money out of the real economy and diverts a whole class of people from doing other useful productive work. There is no money “produced” by this money-go-round to return to the public. It’s just a very complicated incentive scheme that favours some citizens over others, (see “patronage”) and creates a class of people who will fight to keep the gravy flowing.

I am a big fan of free markets, but only where there is a real good or service to be traded. A 2 trillion dollar market based on government certificates is the most expensive Create-a-parasite-scheme the world has ever seen.

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