Desperate Labor Clings to Carbon for Life

Bob Brown and Julia Gillard’s carbon tax is a monument to the irrationality that so often infects beleaguered governments. Rather than pursue considered policy processes that take into account the full potential impact on the nation, a government under pressure responds to trials with a haphazard approach.

Gillard’s government has already proved itself to be even more incompetent than its predecessor with a spectacular list of policy failures including the East Timor solution, the citizens’ assembly and the cash for clunkers scheme.

Two days ago, they released the details of their latest folly – a price on pollution called a carbon tax. Or that’s what they call it.

It is not a price on pollution or a tax on carbon. It is in fact a new tax on carbon dioxide; that colourless and odourless gas that is entirely necessary for life on Earth.

However, while carbon dioxide might be an important plant food, in this instance it has been declared the primary source of sustenance for Gillard’s big government.

To put it bluntly, the Gillard Government has run out of your money to spend. They have raised the nation’s debt ceiling twice already and have borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to pursue their wasteful programs. Even the socialist left faction of the Labor Party (of which Gillard is a member) knows that this cannot be allowed to continue. Left unchecked, national debt can bankrupt a nation or destroy a national currency within a very short time frame.

There are some notable examples of this malaise afflicting Western European nations with Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy all unable or unlikely to pay their outstanding accounts.

Australia is a long way from that scenario but then again, so were these other countries when the decline set in.

Our national challenge is how to return the budget to surplus and start repaying Labor’s debt. Where the Coalition favours more prudent expenditure and smaller government, Labor simply wants to tax you more.

Their most recent foray into the world of big tax and neo-socialist wealth redistribution is their so-called carbon tax.

It will ensure that no family escapes the burden imposed by rising electricity, food and transport costs while doing absolutely nothing for the environment.

While the tax may directly apply to only 500 companies, the flow-on effects will impact every small business and every electricity user, while doing absolutely nothing for the environment.

We will see the disappearance of the single competitive advantage that Australia has over virtually every other nation – cheap coal fired power, while doing absolutely nothing for the environment.

Gillard will in fact be closing down power stations in pursuit of some ridiculous and unviable green dream that we can fuel our industry and lifestyle through wind and sun power alone.

This fanciful ideal has been demonstrated as a green mirage in countries similarly afflicted by governments bound and blindfolded by the radical green agenda.

This leads me back to the Gillard Government. After the lies, denials and deceptions, how can anyone rely on what they say or do to be in our national interest?

How can we believe that a brand new tax will leave us miraculously better off? How will exporting jobs and industry overseas make Australia a more prosperous and productive nation? How will exporting emissions save the world from the dreaded carbon dioxide?

The answer to all of this, of course, is that it won’t. This tax is a grab for your money, plain and simple. Gillard and her brethren in the Greens want to impose a tax that will grow in its rapacious voracity while bribing you to accept it in its early stages.

You can guarantee that in the years ahead, as her tax receipts grow, as industry departs our shores and more families struggle under the Gillard legacy, the one-off sweeteners will be forgotten.

They will be replaced by the bitterness of having been deceived and conned by the most irresponsible and untrustworthy government in Australia’s history.