Carbon Tax, Stupid on so many levels.

Cartoon: by Bill Leak.

On what has been dubbed (among other descriptions,) Suicide Sunday, Gillard announced the details of her carbon tax she assured us would not happen in the life of her government.

The idea of a tax that is supposed to reduce energy demand by increasing the price is simply not going to work if the users of the end product are compensated through any mechanism. The sales pitch is that it is designed to punish the big polluters, especially those producing energy.

In reality, if ‘big polluters’ exist, it is not the companies producing the product; they are simply meeting a demand. In a competitive environment, this will be done as efficiently as possible including use of the latest fuel technology so they get the best return of product for every ton of coal.

Consumers are the people that such a move has to be aimed at if in fact it was necessary to go down that road. Power companies do not burn coal for the fun of it; they do it to supply industry and domestic consumers with their needs. To tax this sector and compensate lower income households is simply churning the money around.

Here is Andrew Bolt with business commentator Terry McCrann with their perspective:


Government documents reveal that an extra $382 million will be spent on a bigger bureaucracy for this carbon tax. The Government's document titled 'Securing a clean energy future' the government lists the money it will spend on a bigger public service over the next four years:

- $256 million for a Clean Energy Regulator

- $60 million to regulate synthetic greenhouse gases

- $25 million for a Climate Change Authority, which Bob Brown revealed this morning will be in charge of providing "upward flexibility" to the carbon price

- $18 million for more Productivity Commission reviews, and

- $23 million in miscellaneous governance expenses

Senator Barnaby Joyce makes the point:

They swindle money out of you with one hand, take their cut, give you some of your money back, then hand the rest of your money to their Green righteous causes. In the future, $3 billion a year of your money goes overseas for carbon credit abatement schemes.

Like those dodgy emails you get from the West African coast, only your government will actually start replying to them with your nation's bank account details.

It is not morally right to ask people to crawl through roofs wiring houses, to get skin cancer working in the sun on farms, to spend monotonous hour after hour behind a till in a shop or to stack brick upon brick at a construction site, so that the money they earn can pay their tax which their government, in an indolent way, then casts like confetti around the world.