Who do they think they're fooling?
Jun. 6th, 2011 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pathology_docWAYNE Swan will today move to reinvigorate the government's carbon tax sales pitch, unveiling Treasury modelling that predicts Australia's income will be $8000 a person higher by 2020, even with a $20 a tonne carbon price.
The Treasurer - in a major speech aimed at boosting the government's carbon tax plans and cutting down Tony Abbott's cost-of-living attacks - will release modelling that shows average annual growth in real national income per capita will be 1.1 per cent until 2050.
Modelling is only as accurate as the assumptions you feed into it. This government has made a botch job of everything since it's been elected, and hasn't even managed to deliver a surplus budget yet. This despite declaring, three years ago, its intent to keep the budget "in average surplus over the cycle."
The Treasurer will declare that national income will continue to increase under a carbon tax, telling the National Press Club: "This means a carbon price will only reduce growth in GNP per person by about one-tenth of one percentage point."
Carried by the mining sector and what's left of the manufacturing sector until both become uncompetitive, and maybe by the farming sector if the impact of this tax doesn't drive it to the wall.
The Treasurer will argue that carbon pricing is "the next crucial frontier" in economic reform, likening it to the abolition of tariffs and the introduction of compulsory superannuation.
Oh, so THAT'S what it's about. When things like this are said, I really have to doubt whether it's about saving the planet at all - or whether it ever was.
Arguing that as Treasurer, "I refuse to let this country become an old-world, high-polluting, technological backwater", Mr Swan will release the modelling showing real national income per capita will be 16 per cent higher than current levels by 2020, an increase of more than $8000.
This government has had since late 2007 to begin an extensive, integrated program of constructing every "renewable energy" option known to humanity, not to mention the option Britain is currently going for in order to slash CO2 emissions - nuclear power. What we should have seen is something on the scale of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme (look it up). What we've got is... nothing like that.
By 2050, the increase is about 56 per cent, more than $30,000.
So unrealistic as to be unbelievable. This is a carrot dangled before the people they have browbeaten into fear and ignorance - a great big money carrot. It's a political bribe with no hope of realisation; because if they get it wrong (as they have got everything else wrong), just how much will thirty thousandWeimar Deutschmarks Australian dollars buy in 2050?
"That's before you take into account the long-term benefits of carbon pricing - like protecting tourism icons such as the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu, or the agricultural wealth of the Murray-Darling Basin," Mr Swan will say.
No point in protecting the Murray-Darling basin if you're going to bankrupt half the bloody farming sector!! As for the Reef or Kakadu - sorry, but service industries like tourism just DO NOT MAKE THAT MUCH MONEY. And much of that tourism is international tourism, which (funnily enough) creates heaps more of those "carbon emissions" Mr Swan and his fellow-travellers want to see reduced!
Although the numbers to be unveiled by Mr Swan relate to a carbon price of $20 a tonne, it is understood Treasury has modelled a range of figures and that the government is yet to make a final decision on the starting price.
A painless foot in the door - or wedge in the castle wall - that can be ramped up and up and up without the need to consult Parliament, is what I'm predicting. Our only hope, funnily enough, may be the rampant lunacy of the Greens - who (as with the ETS) will not come to the party unless the starting figure is set ruinously high, even for those who believe in this mad scheme.
Mr Swan's speech comes as the government's multi-party climate change committee enters its final weeks of deliberations on the shape of the carbon pricing package and before the imminent release of a Productivity Commission report into relative carbon prices overseas.
A sensible treasurer waits until after his Productivity Commission reports back, before shooting off his mouth. If the PC report sinks what he says, it will probably be quietly buried. Watch this space.
The modelling will show renewable energy is expected to soar under a carbon price. Renewable electricity sector generation (excluding hydro-electric power) is projected to be 1700 per cent larger by 2050.
WHAT? Just how the hell are they going to build all that with the manufacturing sector crippled by the penalty it needs to pay for the CO2 that is generated in the course of manufacturing the technology, IF it's built here, and the national debt spiralling into unheard-of depths if it's bought off the shelf? Note the exclusion of hydroelectric power - this is the price of political union with the Greens, to whom it is as much anathema as is nuclear, and who will have a large balance of power in the Senate in less than four weeks. I fear for my country.
Declaring that placing a price on carbon pollution is the "most cost-effective way to decouple economic growth from emissions growth", Mr Swan will confront the opposition's campaign against the carbon tax, arguing that "most of our most important reforms were once described as a potential disaster for our economy".
Oh, it will decouple it alright. Economic growth will go into a death-spiral while emissions will continue to rise, because there is no hope in hell they can provide enough solar and wind to run the country (especially with all the people they're letting in - they expect to have an extra ten million by then) and they will have to fall back on coal and gas. It's either that, or go nuclear.
"But in time they reaped big dividends for the country, helping secure two decades of uninterrupted economic growth," he will say.
This is NOT the same thing, and they bloody well know it's not. The other economic reforms of which they speak did not cut to the fundamental heart of the thing which makes our civilisation what it is - electrical power. Strangle electricity and you strangle civilisation - it's that simple. Most of the people who are publicly in favour of this are wealthy enough to keep their heads above water without affecting their standard of living. "Bugger the rest of you, I'm all right thanks, Jack." Well I'm certainly all right, but I know quite a few people who are NOT going to be, and I don't want to see them "buggered". Sure, they're going to give a lot of it back as "compensation", but how do you "compensate" a pensioner who dies of heat-stroke because they know their "compensation" cheque won't arrive in time to pay the electricity bill, and elect not to use the air conditioner in high summer (40-plus degrees CELSIUS for days on end)? I'm not kidding - this happens EVERY FUCKING YEAR in Australia, to the point where emergency departments trot out treatment protocols, and it's only going to happen more often now.
The Treasurer will argue that tax reform opened up opportunities for businesses to take advantage of China's boom and that the superannuation guarantee had achieved a rise in national savings and retirement incomes, setting a platform for dealing with the global financial crisis and the pressures of an ageing population.
I'll say it again - THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING. Also, Swan's and Rudd's way of dealing with the GFC was to play class politics and shove money into the pockets of people who spent it on foreign goods when they spent it at all, preferring in many cases to do the sensible thing and clear some of their debts - something neither Swan nor Rudd seems to understand is a good idea.
"The Liberal Party knows direct-action policies cannot entrench fundamental economic and behavioural changes, but they don't care," Mr Swan will say.
For "behavioural changes" read "we will make electricity so fucking expensive that candles will be a gateway drug to dynamo-powered torches."
In Sydney yesterday, Tony Abbott moved to exploit a Galaxy poll showing 73 per cent of voters believed they would take a hip-pocket hit from the carbon tax, 58 per cent opposed the move and 64 per cent believed Julia Gillard should call an early election to seek a mandate to introduce it.
And rightly he should, because the people polled at least, and possibly the population of which they are claimed to be representative, are fucking furious that the PM swore up and down upon every little hair on her head that she would NOT do what she is doing now, and that any attempt by Tony Abbott to claim that she would was "fearmongering."
I guess that makes it a fully justified fear, then.
"It is pretty obvious a lot of people in our community feel badly ripped off by this government. In particular, they feel badly ripped off by this government's attempt to sneak a carbon tax through a parliament that has no mandate for it," the Opposition Leader said.
This, I believe, is correct. Trouble is, Gillard knew that a Carbon Tax would sink her at the last election: she BARELY sneaked through, and that only with the help of some highly interesting fellow travellers, plus one doctrinaire fanatic whose boss (Bob Brown, the leader of the Greens) is possibly the reason she has elected/been obliged to backflip. Why? Because loss of Greens support means automatic loss of government, and a thrashing at the polls that will put Labor out on its arse for at least two terms and possibly three (which is approximately how much time it will take the Liberal/National coalition to fix the damage done).
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet cited weekend rallies in favour of carbon pricing, support from senior economists, eminent Australians and climate change adviser Ross Garnaut as evidence of support for carbon pricing.
None of these "eminent Australians" is a climate scientist or an engineer, as far as I know. That makes Mr Combet's call an appeal to authority, which is an automatic sign of a lost argument.
"I know the Galaxy poll of course is suggesting people have a considerable degree of concerns about the issue," Mr Combet said. "The government understands those concerns."
Just what the hell do we have to do to make him acknowledge what that poll is telling him? It's telling him that the Australian people think HIS PLAN SUCKS, and maybe we should prepare a plate to print that in 72-point type, affix it to a baseball bat and (metaphorically) apply it to his head over and over again until he gets the message.
He said Mr Abbott's claims were "absurd, unsubstantiated and ridiculous".
Oh - does he mean like the claim that Mr Abbott made before the election - you know, that the Labor Government would introduce a carbon tax if it got back into office? If that's "absurd, unsubstantiated and ridiculous", I'll take Abbott over Combet (or any of these Labor/Green muppets) any day. His predecessor Penny Wong's first act as Climate Change Minister should have been to walk out of the Senate and into the Lower House chamber and slam Kevin Rudd's head repeatedly into the dais until he agreed to nuclear power, and her second act should have been to fire the bureaucrats and administrators from her department and replace them with engineers and industrial chemists. Likewise Combet with Gillard, although she's got the excuse that she's pretty much the Greens' puppet until she develops the moral backbone to do the needful, break the coalition with them and go to the polls all over again (with the grim expectation that she WILL lose).
If she does that, she should wait until after the new Greens senators take their seats and have had time to nail their colours to the mast (you will find those colours a combination of green with a strong tinge of red). Then she should ask for a double dissolution which will wipe them out and take the albatross off Labor's neck when it (one day) returns to power.
One thing is for certain - at the next election, Labor is going to take a hiding. And even if it's not a full senate election, the sitting Green members who are there now (and vulnerable at the next half-senate poll) are probably for the high jump. After that, we might get someone sane like Martin Ferguson in charge of the Labor Party - at that point, and with most of the thumb-sucking special snowflakes cleaned out, Labor might be prepared to rethink its ideological opposition to nuclear power and help the Coalition push it through over the heads of the screaming, fanatical "Greens".
Just how much in the way of hydro, tidal, ocean-thermal and nuclear power could have been bought for the $150bn worth of deficit spending the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government has done since November 2007? And how many Australians (including immigrants, refugees, etc) could have been employed on those projects? THAT is how you build national wealth and "decrease carbon emissions" along the way - not by shuffling money around and making atmospheric CO2 levels an end in themselves (if they are even an end anymore). THAT is something the Chinese and the Indians understand perfectly, which is (among other reasons) why the Chinese built the Three Gorges system and the Indians wanted to buy our uranium to feed their power reactors. Mind you, the Chinese are also building coal-fired power stations at a rate which will match Australia's entire output every YEAR - or to put it in perspective, if Australia reverted back to pre-European conditions TOMORROW and stayed that way, the "accomplishment" in "emissions reduction" would be wiped out in twelve months; certainly less than twenty-four.
The Treasurer - in a major speech aimed at boosting the government's carbon tax plans and cutting down Tony Abbott's cost-of-living attacks - will release modelling that shows average annual growth in real national income per capita will be 1.1 per cent until 2050.
Modelling is only as accurate as the assumptions you feed into it. This government has made a botch job of everything since it's been elected, and hasn't even managed to deliver a surplus budget yet. This despite declaring, three years ago, its intent to keep the budget "in average surplus over the cycle."
The Treasurer will declare that national income will continue to increase under a carbon tax, telling the National Press Club: "This means a carbon price will only reduce growth in GNP per person by about one-tenth of one percentage point."
Carried by the mining sector and what's left of the manufacturing sector until both become uncompetitive, and maybe by the farming sector if the impact of this tax doesn't drive it to the wall.
The Treasurer will argue that carbon pricing is "the next crucial frontier" in economic reform, likening it to the abolition of tariffs and the introduction of compulsory superannuation.
Oh, so THAT'S what it's about. When things like this are said, I really have to doubt whether it's about saving the planet at all - or whether it ever was.
Arguing that as Treasurer, "I refuse to let this country become an old-world, high-polluting, technological backwater", Mr Swan will release the modelling showing real national income per capita will be 16 per cent higher than current levels by 2020, an increase of more than $8000.
This government has had since late 2007 to begin an extensive, integrated program of constructing every "renewable energy" option known to humanity, not to mention the option Britain is currently going for in order to slash CO2 emissions - nuclear power. What we should have seen is something on the scale of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme (look it up). What we've got is... nothing like that.
By 2050, the increase is about 56 per cent, more than $30,000.
So unrealistic as to be unbelievable. This is a carrot dangled before the people they have browbeaten into fear and ignorance - a great big money carrot. It's a political bribe with no hope of realisation; because if they get it wrong (as they have got everything else wrong), just how much will thirty thousand
"That's before you take into account the long-term benefits of carbon pricing - like protecting tourism icons such as the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu, or the agricultural wealth of the Murray-Darling Basin," Mr Swan will say.
No point in protecting the Murray-Darling basin if you're going to bankrupt half the bloody farming sector!! As for the Reef or Kakadu - sorry, but service industries like tourism just DO NOT MAKE THAT MUCH MONEY. And much of that tourism is international tourism, which (funnily enough) creates heaps more of those "carbon emissions" Mr Swan and his fellow-travellers want to see reduced!
Although the numbers to be unveiled by Mr Swan relate to a carbon price of $20 a tonne, it is understood Treasury has modelled a range of figures and that the government is yet to make a final decision on the starting price.
A painless foot in the door - or wedge in the castle wall - that can be ramped up and up and up without the need to consult Parliament, is what I'm predicting. Our only hope, funnily enough, may be the rampant lunacy of the Greens - who (as with the ETS) will not come to the party unless the starting figure is set ruinously high, even for those who believe in this mad scheme.
Mr Swan's speech comes as the government's multi-party climate change committee enters its final weeks of deliberations on the shape of the carbon pricing package and before the imminent release of a Productivity Commission report into relative carbon prices overseas.
A sensible treasurer waits until after his Productivity Commission reports back, before shooting off his mouth. If the PC report sinks what he says, it will probably be quietly buried. Watch this space.
The modelling will show renewable energy is expected to soar under a carbon price. Renewable electricity sector generation (excluding hydro-electric power) is projected to be 1700 per cent larger by 2050.
WHAT? Just how the hell are they going to build all that with the manufacturing sector crippled by the penalty it needs to pay for the CO2 that is generated in the course of manufacturing the technology, IF it's built here, and the national debt spiralling into unheard-of depths if it's bought off the shelf? Note the exclusion of hydroelectric power - this is the price of political union with the Greens, to whom it is as much anathema as is nuclear, and who will have a large balance of power in the Senate in less than four weeks. I fear for my country.
Declaring that placing a price on carbon pollution is the "most cost-effective way to decouple economic growth from emissions growth", Mr Swan will confront the opposition's campaign against the carbon tax, arguing that "most of our most important reforms were once described as a potential disaster for our economy".
Oh, it will decouple it alright. Economic growth will go into a death-spiral while emissions will continue to rise, because there is no hope in hell they can provide enough solar and wind to run the country (especially with all the people they're letting in - they expect to have an extra ten million by then) and they will have to fall back on coal and gas. It's either that, or go nuclear.
"But in time they reaped big dividends for the country, helping secure two decades of uninterrupted economic growth," he will say.
This is NOT the same thing, and they bloody well know it's not. The other economic reforms of which they speak did not cut to the fundamental heart of the thing which makes our civilisation what it is - electrical power. Strangle electricity and you strangle civilisation - it's that simple. Most of the people who are publicly in favour of this are wealthy enough to keep their heads above water without affecting their standard of living. "Bugger the rest of you, I'm all right thanks, Jack." Well I'm certainly all right, but I know quite a few people who are NOT going to be, and I don't want to see them "buggered". Sure, they're going to give a lot of it back as "compensation", but how do you "compensate" a pensioner who dies of heat-stroke because they know their "compensation" cheque won't arrive in time to pay the electricity bill, and elect not to use the air conditioner in high summer (40-plus degrees CELSIUS for days on end)? I'm not kidding - this happens EVERY FUCKING YEAR in Australia, to the point where emergency departments trot out treatment protocols, and it's only going to happen more often now.
The Treasurer will argue that tax reform opened up opportunities for businesses to take advantage of China's boom and that the superannuation guarantee had achieved a rise in national savings and retirement incomes, setting a platform for dealing with the global financial crisis and the pressures of an ageing population.
I'll say it again - THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING. Also, Swan's and Rudd's way of dealing with the GFC was to play class politics and shove money into the pockets of people who spent it on foreign goods when they spent it at all, preferring in many cases to do the sensible thing and clear some of their debts - something neither Swan nor Rudd seems to understand is a good idea.
"The Liberal Party knows direct-action policies cannot entrench fundamental economic and behavioural changes, but they don't care," Mr Swan will say.
For "behavioural changes" read "we will make electricity so fucking expensive that candles will be a gateway drug to dynamo-powered torches."
In Sydney yesterday, Tony Abbott moved to exploit a Galaxy poll showing 73 per cent of voters believed they would take a hip-pocket hit from the carbon tax, 58 per cent opposed the move and 64 per cent believed Julia Gillard should call an early election to seek a mandate to introduce it.
And rightly he should, because the people polled at least, and possibly the population of which they are claimed to be representative, are fucking furious that the PM swore up and down upon every little hair on her head that she would NOT do what she is doing now, and that any attempt by Tony Abbott to claim that she would was "fearmongering."
I guess that makes it a fully justified fear, then.
"It is pretty obvious a lot of people in our community feel badly ripped off by this government. In particular, they feel badly ripped off by this government's attempt to sneak a carbon tax through a parliament that has no mandate for it," the Opposition Leader said.
This, I believe, is correct. Trouble is, Gillard knew that a Carbon Tax would sink her at the last election: she BARELY sneaked through, and that only with the help of some highly interesting fellow travellers, plus one doctrinaire fanatic whose boss (Bob Brown, the leader of the Greens) is possibly the reason she has elected/been obliged to backflip. Why? Because loss of Greens support means automatic loss of government, and a thrashing at the polls that will put Labor out on its arse for at least two terms and possibly three (which is approximately how much time it will take the Liberal/National coalition to fix the damage done).
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet cited weekend rallies in favour of carbon pricing, support from senior economists, eminent Australians and climate change adviser Ross Garnaut as evidence of support for carbon pricing.
None of these "eminent Australians" is a climate scientist or an engineer, as far as I know. That makes Mr Combet's call an appeal to authority, which is an automatic sign of a lost argument.
"I know the Galaxy poll of course is suggesting people have a considerable degree of concerns about the issue," Mr Combet said. "The government understands those concerns."
Just what the hell do we have to do to make him acknowledge what that poll is telling him? It's telling him that the Australian people think HIS PLAN SUCKS, and maybe we should prepare a plate to print that in 72-point type, affix it to a baseball bat and (metaphorically) apply it to his head over and over again until he gets the message.
He said Mr Abbott's claims were "absurd, unsubstantiated and ridiculous".
Oh - does he mean like the claim that Mr Abbott made before the election - you know, that the Labor Government would introduce a carbon tax if it got back into office? If that's "absurd, unsubstantiated and ridiculous", I'll take Abbott over Combet (or any of these Labor/Green muppets) any day. His predecessor Penny Wong's first act as Climate Change Minister should have been to walk out of the Senate and into the Lower House chamber and slam Kevin Rudd's head repeatedly into the dais until he agreed to nuclear power, and her second act should have been to fire the bureaucrats and administrators from her department and replace them with engineers and industrial chemists. Likewise Combet with Gillard, although she's got the excuse that she's pretty much the Greens' puppet until she develops the moral backbone to do the needful, break the coalition with them and go to the polls all over again (with the grim expectation that she WILL lose).
If she does that, she should wait until after the new Greens senators take their seats and have had time to nail their colours to the mast (you will find those colours a combination of green with a strong tinge of red). Then she should ask for a double dissolution which will wipe them out and take the albatross off Labor's neck when it (one day) returns to power.
One thing is for certain - at the next election, Labor is going to take a hiding. And even if it's not a full senate election, the sitting Green members who are there now (and vulnerable at the next half-senate poll) are probably for the high jump. After that, we might get someone sane like Martin Ferguson in charge of the Labor Party - at that point, and with most of the thumb-sucking special snowflakes cleaned out, Labor might be prepared to rethink its ideological opposition to nuclear power and help the Coalition push it through over the heads of the screaming, fanatical "Greens".
Just how much in the way of hydro, tidal, ocean-thermal and nuclear power could have been bought for the $150bn worth of deficit spending the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government has done since November 2007? And how many Australians (including immigrants, refugees, etc) could have been employed on those projects? THAT is how you build national wealth and "decrease carbon emissions" along the way - not by shuffling money around and making atmospheric CO2 levels an end in themselves (if they are even an end anymore). THAT is something the Chinese and the Indians understand perfectly, which is (among other reasons) why the Chinese built the Three Gorges system and the Indians wanted to buy our uranium to feed their power reactors. Mind you, the Chinese are also building coal-fired power stations at a rate which will match Australia's entire output every YEAR - or to put it in perspective, if Australia reverted back to pre-European conditions TOMORROW and stayed that way, the "accomplishment" in "emissions reduction" would be wiped out in twelve months; certainly less than twenty-four.