A gift for Turnbull, who doesn’t deserve it.
Welcome to Election-2016 in Australia.
We’ve done this before: Bill Shorten has promised there will be “no carbon tax under Labor”. This almost exactly mirrors the promise made by Julia Gillard on her way to the most pathetic parliamentary win ever recorded in Australian history. Gillard’s barely-there-with-the-help-of-two-turncoats-success was based on this infamous deceit, which Mr Bill Shorten approved of and voted in. Channelling Gillard-2010
At least he is kinda upfront about saying there will be no tax apart from a lot of new taxes he calls trading schemes. What kind of trade are you forced by law to make? A tax…
“There will be no carbon tax under Labor, there will be no fixed price under Labor, what we are doing instead is we are working with the market to create an Emissions Trading Scheme,” Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said.
He is offering a kind of “Cap N Trade”, which is bound to suit all the Aussies who’ve been lining up at protests saying “No Carbon Tax. We want Cap N Trade”. Have you met one ? Me neither.
Let’s not forget the advantages of trading versus taxes:
- Markets are forever. They create property rights and are almost impossible to unwind. (Too bad, ye voters).
- An ETS would create lots of jobs (in China).
- Fake markets feed fraud and corruption (we need more financial sharks right?).
A carbon tax-trade thing only hurts big “polluders”, and people who do things like heating, cooling, or travelling.
“There will be an ETS for electricity generators…
Translated — will be a tax for electricity consumers,
“…and a separate one for businesses in other industries who emit more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon pollution per year.
And another tax for consumers buying things off big business.
Labor heard the wrong message:
“Shadow environment minister Mark Butler says Labor “heard a very clear message from the Australian people about the carbon tax” and says it will not be returning to that model.
What the Labor Party didn’t hear was that the Australian people didn’t really care about the model. They don’t want to pay more nor vote on this issue. Eighty percent don’t donate to environmental causes. Eighty-eight percent don’t even pay $2 to neutralize their flights. More than half are skeptical in survey after survey.
Can anyone help a poor banker?
Mr Shorten’s plan is to funnel large amounts of money through overseas bankers to buy paper certificates to change the weather.
“Labor said 100 per cent of the offset obligations could be met by buying cheap international permits.
Mr Shorten the-anti-banker-man wants a Royal Commission on Australian Bankers but will be the best friend of financial houses like Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs etc et al. The large financial houses have been lobbying for international carbon markets for years. The largest fiat commodity market in existence? A license to print…
But lets not forget that Turnbull is planning a carbon trading-tax scheme too. Labor-Liberal, what’s the difference? Australians keep voting “No” and throwing them out, and both parties are still saying “Yes”. Time for an alternative. Please.
Graham Lloyd at The Australian says it’s an uncosted toll with few details that pretends to be a free market thing:
Federal Labor has set out a sweeping narrative to combat climate change that talks the language of the free market but carries the toolkit of a control and command response.
Fossil-fuel generators will be set against each other to penalise or reward competitors, depending on their relative greenhouse-gas emissions profiles. This will encourage bad coal-power generation to give way to good renewables to meet a target of 50 per cent by 2030.
The government will be the buyer as well as the seller of wind and solar? Righto comrade!
The transition will be helped by the federal government entering power-purchase deals for wind and solar — something electricity companies are unwilling to do — for energy that is already subsidised by renewable energy certificates under the renewable energy target.
Shorten will also make small new cars harder to afford. This will keep more people in old higher-emitting cars for longer.
“Labor also plans to introduce mandatory light vehicle standards, which it says will save drivers $8,500 in fuel costs over the life of car but add $1,500 to the price of a new car in 2025. — ABC
Car manufacturers are already free to sell cars to voluntary buyers which could “save them $8,500 in fuel bills”. Since they don’t, we can only assume that either drivers don’t want it, can’t afford it, or that the technology doesn’t really exist to do it. Or perhaps there is some other tradeoff that buyers don’t want. Perhaps the “lighter” car is the loser-car in crashes, and speaking from personal experience, when there is an idiot or a tired driver on the road — you don’t want to be in the “lighter car”. It’s a momentum thing.
It’s just another way we get reminded that the only people who really want a Free Market in Carbon are the people who don’t know what a free market is.