Carbon Tax A Pledge Of Suicide.

Terry McCrann.
Weekend Australian ( 26.2.11 ).

Julia Gillard is embarked on introducing two new taxes.

The first is the big lie that last week was turned into a big tax: her Julia carbon tax, the tax you have when you promise not to have that tax. The second is the reworked resources tax.

One is designed to force us to cut our emissions of carbon dioxide. To stress, emissions of the life-enhancing gas, not the so-called carbon pollution of bits of grit subconcious image that Gillard and Co deliberately promote.

The other is based on the assumption that China, in particular, but also India will continue to increase exponentially their emissions of that very same carbon dioxide.

Needless to say, except it does apparently need saying repeatedly, the increase in their emissions will dwarf any reduction we achieve. Rendering any reduction by us utterly pointless.

Indeed, China for all its claimed commitment to aggressive world leadership in alternative energy, plans to get most of its electricity from coal-fired power. Not just today, but tomorow and, indeed, the day after tomorrow. Over the next ten years, it plans to install net new capacity of coal-fired power equal to 10 times our entire power generation sector.

To stress, that's net additional generation. Its existing coal-fired power sector is already 14 times our entire power sector. To the extent it does close down any - really - grit-emitting old dirty coal-fired generation, that means even more replacement plants. All fired increasingly by coal from ... you fill in the blank.

Our real "assistance" to increased Chinese CO2 emissions, though, won't be centered on shipping energy coals from Newcastle. But in pouring hundreds of millions of tonnes of iron ore and coking coal every year into Chinese, and increasingly, Indian mills. And not to forget our old customers in Japan and South Korea.

Gillard's proposed resources tax doesn't just assume huge increases in these exports but is designed to encourage their maximum expansion. Along with - dare I say it, carbon based - natural gas.

Does the Prime Minister have the slightest self-awareness of a certain hypocrisy, but even more an incongruity between her two taxes and the underlying hopes and realities they are based on ? That on the one hand, she has to turn every light switch in the country into a tax collection point, to cut emissions to save the Barrier Reef, if not indeed the planet ? Yet, on the other hand, she says a silent, secular, prayer that China and India go gangbusters emitting, to utterly swamp any such domestic emissions cuts; to save her budget from deficit ? And not just save her - or her successor's - budget; that the foundation of the entire Australian economy will rest increasingly on those increasing emissions ?

There is a further point of damning intersection with reference to China that has utterly eluded the Prime Minister. To say nothing of the massed brainpower of Treasury and our down under 21st century da Vinci, Ross Garnaut.

There she was at it again on Wednesday, saying that we had to move to a post-carbon economy. That "the global economy is shifting". That "Australia is at risk of falling behind the rest of the world". That "the longer we wait, the greater the cost to Australian jobs".

Somehow this message seems to escaped the Chinese. And the Indians. They are making every effort to move to a carbon economy. Indeed, that's precisely the reason for giving them a pass on their exploding emissions.

If indeed the future, and the jobs of the future, lie in a post-carbon economy, why wouldn't the very canny Chinese go straight to "that bountiful future" ? What idiots they are for trying to build the carbon economy that our down under smarties Gillard, Garnaut and ( Treasury secretary Ken ) Henry want to discard like yesterday's worn-out snakeskin.

So what is Gillard "saying" with her two taxes ? That we should feed the Chinese and Indian carbon addiction ? We should profit from the destruction of the planet ? Literally, in the case of the government's tax revenues ?

The truth is that Gillard and Co have taken policy into the realm of the surreal. She and her cabinet have moved beyond incoherence. Guided you have to say by a Treasury that has lost utterly any semblance of rational anaylsis and advice.

She makes KRudd, who had firmly established himself as a prime minister worse than Whitlam, look like the very model of prudent thoughtful judgement in comparison. His rush to lock in an Emissions Trading Scheme before the Copenhagen conference was ridiculous and mad. It would have left Australia right out there like the proverbial shag on the rock when Copenhagen collapsed without even the most basic binding commitments.

To say nothing of the whole bureaucratic imposition of the ETS. More complicated and more onerous than the GST and open to far more rorts than the building insulation fiasco. But at least before Copenhagen, some could argue the hope of some global agreement requiring an Australian commitment.

Not so now after both its failure and even more the gas-emitting farce of Cancun. Gillard doesn't even have that excuse. She embarks on this destructive absurdity knowing that the world-read: China, India and the US -are not going to follow.

If we had a Treasury that retained any of its traditional competence, it would be telling the government that an attack on carbon dioxide emissions is an attack on Australia's core and pervasive national comparative advantage.

Why are we among the biggest emitters per head of CO2 ? The biggest by far, if we include the indirect emissions from the use of our resource exports ? Because we benefit from our bountiful coal and iron ore. Gillard's attack on the so-called carbon economy is not just designed to hurt every Australian. Permanently. It is effectively a national suicide pledge. From the nation's leader. Incredible. Surreal. All-too real.