Wednesday, December 02, 2009

ETS a tax?

Well, a day into the new Liberal leadership and the predictable scare campaign starts: "the ETS is nothing more than new a tax!"
Well of course it's a tax, you dipshits - it's a tax on big polluters who otherwise wouldn't be forced to pay for the costs they impose on the environment [and others] in the search of profit!

The environment is a 'public good' - ie one which is freely available to all and which is not charged to users. But big polluters impose a big cost on the the environment [& us all] so an ETS - or a carbon tax, for that matter - work to impose a cost on them, so that they will no longer be able to make as much money by causing damage to the environment - ie they will have to bear some cost for the damage they cause, causing them to pollute less!

So Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce, to the extent that it will force them to consider the cost of polluting in their business decisions, yes it is a tax, and that is not a bad thing!

A

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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Of backflips, and conservative perversion

The Liberal Party's repudiation of their previous agreement to pass the Federal Government's ETS scheme is [apart from being treacherous in terms of breaking a negotiated settlement] both perverse and cycnical.

Perverse, because this deal - while possibly too generous to big polluters - was probably the best scheme that big business could ever hope for, and cynical because, to satisfy a core conservative constituency [ie the Liberal heartland] in the short term, they are dealing a blow to Australia's and the Liberal's long-term interests.

And the irony is that the Labour Govt's ETS is not that much different from John Howard's ETS policy at the 2007 election. As George Megalogenis writes in today's Australian, "no mainstream political party has ever obstructed the government on an issue that it itself had promised at the ballot box... no party has ever tried to double-cross the electorate in this way before".

The Liberal backflip is a perverse reaction, to keep conservatives and grumpy old men happy. They don't deserve to win an election for a long time, and certainly not under Tony Abbott.

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