NEW WEEK, ANOTHER NEW LABOR FIASCO
05-July-2011
When the sun rose yesterday morning, optimistic Federal Labor MPs must have woken up thinking, “Monday morning – time for damage control”, their more pessimistic comrades would probably have been thinking “a new week, a new fiasco”.
The weekend announcement that some motor vehicle users will be exempt from a carbon tax on petrol proved to be yet another example of the Gillard’s Government shocking ineptitude and deviousness.
It rivals the desperate knee-jerk reactions that were the East Timor “solution” (now abandoned), the Malaysian “solution” (still not finalised), the ban on all live cattle exports (which is killing an industry vital to northern Australia), and indeed the carbon tax announcement itself.
All bold announcements designed to apparently “fix” a problem – each so hastily conceived and so poorly executed that they create many more problems than they purport to solve. It’s a bit of a nostalgic throwback to the days of Kevin.
And it really begs the question - Is this Government even remotely capable of having a well-thought out, detailed policy position?
Within hours of the announcement, Gillard’s office first said they weren’t sure if the exemption applied to diesel, then later said they thought it did – much to the embarrassment of Mark Dreyfus, the Gillard Government’s own Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency who said it only applied to petrol before doing his own backflip.
And you’ll notice the devious trickery in the official announcement which stated, “families, tradies and small businesses” would not have to pay a carbon tax on petrol. Of course, that still leaves larger businesses, truckies and other industries – who will of course pass their costs on to families, tradies and small businesses.
Then another Labor Parliamentary Secretary Richard Marles admitted that Labor could increase petrol excise if the Productivity Commission recommended it. What a tricky backdoor way to collect more money from those exempt “families and tradies”.
And to add to the fiasco, de facto PM Bob Brown has declared that there is no way petrol can remain exempt from the carbon tax scheme long-term. He’s at least being truthful. And as of this week, he’s got even more power with the numbers in the Senate to ensure this is the case and further dictate Labor’s political agenda.
Who really believes that this hasty petrol exemption is anything more than a PR exercise by a desperate Government to blunt the ever growing public opposition to the carbon tax?
And the irony is that exempting petrol really makes a mockery of the need for a carbon tax at all.
If Labor is really fair dinkum that a carbon tax is vital to help cut emissions, why exempt petrol when car and light commercial vehicles are responsible for around 12.6% of all greenhouse gas emissions?
If you really believed that reducing Australia’s carbon dioxide levels would have an impact on the global climate, why would you completely exempt such a significant proportion of emissions? And there will be more desperate exemptions to come.
The fact is, Labor’s carbon tax won’t change the global climate. Professor Garnaut himself projects that the increase in CO2 emissions from China will be one hundred times the decrease we will make in the coming decade.
So why is this pointless tax happening?
Well, why are the boats still arriving on our shores? Why is Indonesia looking elsewhere for their cattle while Australians are losing their jobs?
Because this inept Labor Government rushes to make announcements, fails to think them through, and is not capable of managing a detailed, well-reasoned policy.
But don’t take my word for it, let’s see what new and exciting fiasco the coming week brings…
End.