Post#197 It's A Tax, Not A Price! (Carbon Tax And Why Barry Cassidy Is Wrong About It.) )

"Labor will tax you, Liberal will encourage you". said the Liberal Party's campaign slogan from the 1980's. They didn't anticipate the new mode of taxing: calling it a price. I've been listening to the Labor Ministers chanting the word "price" as they try to sell the new impost. I think it's to help Julia argue that she didn't breach her promise to not introduce a carbon tax.

A price, dear Julia, is what you pay for something you choose to do or receive. Where statutory coercion is involved, it's a tax. Taxes are also known as levies, duties, excises, imposts, charges, fees. These terms all carry connotations of compulsion and properly admit to being what they are; the state taking away your property without your consent.

I've got all the carbon I need and I don't want to buy more at any "price".

I heard Barry Cassidy on Insiders on Sunday last offering a lame apologia for this rip-off and arguing that  popular animosity will subside. He used the GST as the analogous model for this. Barry, you're dead wrong. The only connection is what happened to the Australian Democrats because of it. The GST we have today is not the GST of 1985 (aka Consumption Tax aka Option C) proposed by Paul Keating. Nor is it the GST of John Hewson which was famously denounced at the 1993 election. It's not even the GST Howard and Costello took to the 1998 election. It's a hybridised, Coalition/Democrat GST. The Democrats moderated the impact of the GST and gave themselves a gold star and an elephant stamp for being such constructive negotiators. The only problem was that their constituents didn't vote for it. They didn't care about the moderation of it. They didn't want it in any way, shape or form. This betrayal of their constituency to kiss Coalition arse was the doom of the Democrats. It was the second step, after the defection of Cheryl Kernot to Labor, on the path to oblivion. In the subsequent elections, the Democrats disappeared from the Australian political map.

It's the lying that does it, Barry. We won't forget and we won't forgive.

Post#178 Vive le Carbone!!! And Death to the Carbon Tax!!!

The craic is that the Australian Labor Party is gone for all money at the next Australian Federal Election. The carbon tax is the main drag anchor on the ALP's chances and is the most obvious of the self-inflicted wounds they're carrying. The decision to call an early election in 2010 and the various follies of their first term had already reduced the ALP to reliance upon a trio of independent members. Messrs Oakeshott, Wilkie and Windsor have been able to wring some results from the ALP for their personal causes but it seems implausible that any of them would die in a ditch for the carbon tax. Like the Greens, they really have nowhere else to go. Their bridges are all now thoroughly burnt with the Coalition. That's what puzzles me most about the course of this government. It's obvious that the kudos of global warming as a matter of public importance has slipped. Whatever the truth of the matter, it's blown out as a political motivator.

Any community has a limited capacity to stay fired up about anything and the height of public hysteria about an issue is the immediate prelude to a cooling-off. This would probably differ if the issue was an enormous asteroid on a course to imminent collision with the Earth, but when it's a slow-burner in the background, people adjust to live with it. The importance of an issue is not in contention, it's simply that anything other than an adrenalin-provoking terror loses its force. AIDS is a good example of this. It's just as lethal as it always was but has faded into the background. You could scan quite a lot of media without ever noticing its existence. Global warming is now also a mature crisis and has had its glory days. Anyone attempting to persuade people to take pain to deal with it is going to have to make a damn good case. The ALP has done nothing of the kind. The decision to adopt the carbon tax has been made without the legwork necessary to demonstrate any merit.

There's a simple test for this policy which I've proposed before:

First: Demonstrate that it's possible to disconnect ourselves from the carbon  fuels that we rely upon and how.

Second: Work out a fair time to allow for conversion to the new energy source/s.

Finally, ask why we need a tax to achieve it. The answer will always be that if the first two can be done, the answer to this question is that we don't.

If the answer to the first question is that it isn't technologically feasible, no amount of taxing will make it happen.

I recently wrote "Return to Sender" on the government's carbon tax propaganda pamphlet and posted it back to them. Apparently many others are doing the same. Someone else applied a traditional recycling technique as shown in the photograph below:




From http://saynocarbontaxaustralia.blogspot.com/

 The ALP deserves the odium they've incurred. They'll deserve the kick when they get it.