Antipodean
trends: Australia seeks global allies to combat President Obama carbon-tax initiative:
[Australian Prime Minister Tony] Abbott’s conservative Liberal-National coalition won a landslide victory in Australia's elections last year, on a limited government platform that included repealing the country’s carbon tax and cutting green energy and global warming spending.
Abbott’s government is set to slash global warming spending by 90 percent over the next four years. Efforts to repeal the country’s carbon tax have also moved forward as Labor Party Senators have begun to buckle under pressure to get rid of the tax.
“The carbon tax is an act of economic vandalism,” Abbott said in March. “You can’t trust [Labor] anywhere near an economy.”
A study from last year by Dr. Alex Robson, an economist at Griffith University found that after just one year, the carbon tax increased taxes on 2.2 million Australians while doing nothing to decrease the country’s carbon emissions.
Robson’s study also found the carbon tax raised electricity prices 15 percent while the country’s unemployment rate shot up by 10 percent after the carbon tax was implemented.
11 comments:
Repurposing a slogan: Burn, Baby, burn.
Eric Hines
As an owner of many trees, I stand to benefit from this carbon tax scheme... er, program. The Aussies are just jealous because all they have is desert, heat, and flies.
As an owner of many trees, I stand to benefit from this carbon tax scheme
Not so much. With no CO2 in the air, those trees all will suffocate. If they don't freeze first from all that greenhouse heating that's not occurring anymore.
'Course, you'll be able to charge for that really neat amusement park ride--that stumpy ice skating rink.
Eric Hines
... all they have is desert, heat, and flies
Well, and the most poisonous anything and everything anywhere.
Clearly the Australians didn't wait long enough for the tax to work. Or they didn't place the tax high enough. Or they didn't do it right. Because just like Communism, it will work, it's just that everyone who has ever tried it did it wrong.
Right? [/sarc]
Maybe, as we lose our "special relationship" with Great Britain, we can cultivate a new one with Australia.
In a way, we have one already. Australia is the one country that's always been with us in our foreign wars. Great Britain split ways with us during the Suez thing, but never Australia.
There's a natural affinity, too. Australia was populated by thugs and criminals. In the US all who disagree with the administration are thugs and criminals.
Eric Hines
More seriously, America served as England's Botany Bay until the Revolution in 1776 forced a new choice. Both Australia and the U.S. show the effects of their past as a repository for misfits and troublemakers.
Most of the population of Australia is on the west and east coast, sort of like America's voting lines.
Australia has been with us all the way. I never recognized that until I made an Australian friend and started paying attention and reading Aussie history.
PM John Howard gave some of the best explanations for our ousting of Saddam and his nation's participation that I ever heard: direct, clear, and eloquent in that rough Australian way.
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