Tuesday 26th of November 2024
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vandal at work .....

vandal at work .....

Tony Abbott has sharpened the political choice by promising he would repeal a carbon tax. But it is a strategy with risks and costs.

It means that if the tax starts mid-next year, businesses won't know for about a year after that (assuming the Parliament runs full term) whether they have to live with the tax permanently.

Yet what business wants from politicians on both sides is certainty. With the prospect of the tax being rescinded, some businesses may delay investment decisions and the doubt could pay havoc with risk premiums.

Abbott's pitch is aimed partly at trying to ensure he is not left high and dry once the government gets its tax into place. Without the repeal promise, he could find the issue winding down before the election. By pledging to scrap the tax, he's guaranteeing the issue will be active in the next campaign.

In a 2013 poll, people would be making a judgment not just on how the government had behaved on carbon, but what was going to happen in future.

He rejects the comparison, but the Abbott tactic is a partial throwback to Kim Beazley's 2001 policy of promising to ''roll back'' (not scrap) the GST. Beazley undertook to remove the new tax from some items. Other issues overtook that election, but the ''roll back'' policy was seen as lacking bite.

Once a major tax like the carbon tax or the GST is in, people become used to it relatively soon. And once the hard work of getting such a structural reform bedded down has been done, it is reckless to try to turn back the clock. Abbott could find that when the tax has started, he comes under fire for wanting to disturb the new status quo.

At this early stage, it's nearly impossible to judge who's winning the ferocious carbon debate. The government had its reasons for putting out only a ''framework'' plan, but it is taking lots of flak, especially over the uncertainty about petrol. It would be wise to get its proposal on that item settled ASAP.

Abbott Vows To Repeal Carbon Tax

conclusions before analysis...

Climate change expert Professor Ross Garnaut says he hopes the "noise" of Australian politics does not derail the plan for a carbon price.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced last week the Government wanted to introduce a fixed price on carbon from July 2012 and an emissions trading scheme (ETS) with a floating price three to five years later.

The details of those plans are yet to be finalised.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has said a Coalition government would scrap the tax.

But Professor Garnaut, who released a paper on transforming rural land use in Brisbane today, says people should not criticise the plan so soon.

He says it is a serious issue with huge consequences for future generations.

"We won't get a good result if people are arguing they don't like conclusions before they've seen the analysis," he said.

"Let's focus on the facts, on the analysis, the policy conclusions that come from that.

"I think if that's the nature of the discussion in Australia, we'll end up getting a good result."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/01/3152185.htm?section=justin

boo .....

Imagine, for a fanciful moment, that Julia Gillard has invented the Easter Bunny.

Flanked by a brace of nodding cabinet ministers, one or two independent MPs and Bob Brown, she announces this exciting policy initiative in the prime minister's courtyard at Parliament House.

''Let me just make the point here, if I may, that this little furry friend will be a wonderful boost for hard-working Australian families in this great country of ours in terms of chocolate Easter egg outcomes for all our kiddies,'' she says.

The opposition, these days in a permanent lather of outrage, throws the levers to incandescent. The imagemeisters swing into action. In suburban Canberra, weary shopkeepers see Tony Abbott descending upon them again for yet another sleeves-rolled-up photo opportunity, this time stacking egg cartons for the TV cameras.

''There will be, um, a people's revolt against this, ah, latest shocking example of Labor's scandalous deceit and, er, endless extravagance,'' thunders Abbott, spraying adjectives like confetti. ''Julia Gillard never once mentioned rabbits at the election. Chocolate eggs will kick the guts out of the battling Australian egg industry.''

The Tea Party wing of the Coalition takes up the cry. Barnaby Joyce blusters that an Easter Bunny will be another crushing blow to the national public-private surplus debt deficit. Senator Cory Bernardi fears an Islamic plot to wreck Easter and our Christian traditions. ''Just like Colonel Gaddafi,'' say the Liberal frontbenchers Eric Abetz and Sophie Mirabella in chorus.

Seamlessly, the shock jocks and the Tory commentariat swing into line. Alan Jones rants that the stupidity - the insanity - of sending a Labor rabbit into kiddies' bedrooms is tantamount to child abuse, which is all you would expect from That Woman. Melbourne's village idiot, Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun, blogs that everyone knows the Left crucified Christ on Calvary.

The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen delivers a densely worded thesis arguing that Pontius Pilate was an unelected judicial activist running a radical agenda of social engineering. Her colleague Dennis Shanahan, of the Canberra press gallery, explains in a shower of mixed metaphors that the bunny is in fact a red herring to divert attention from Labor's capitulation to the Greens on euthanasia and same-sex marriage and predicts, once again, that here is the straw that will sink the Gillard government. In a fiery editorial the Oz charges that, anyway, it's the fault of the inner-city latte sippers at the ABC and the Fairfax press. And then, of course, there's the National Broadband Network . . .

This is what passes for conservative thought nowadays. It is all so predictable, although death threats to the independent MP Tony Windsor have added a new nastiness. Windsor is right to suggest there is madness in the air. Driving to Canberra this week, I broke the rule of a lifetime to listen to the Parrot on radio, in time to hear a caller named Stephanie gibbering about the leftist threat to the nation. It turned out she meant Joe Hockey and Senator George Brandis. ''Yes, yes,'' said Jones soothingly.

Mike Carlton