Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s carbon tax announcement represents one of the most brazen and fundamental pieces of political dishonesty in recent memory. That she chose to make the announcement surrounded by the Greens Senators and independent MPs upon whom her government depends gives us a telling insight into the factors at play.
If we look at the situation objectively there are only two possible explanations for such an announcement. The first is that Julia Gillard knowingly and deliberately told an enormous lie before the last election in a craven attempt to win over conservative voters. The second is that Bob Brown and the Greens are in charge and the Prime Minister has been reduced to little more than the public face of a Greens Government.
Judging from their public comments over the past few days, Senator Brown and his deputy Christine Milne both clearly subscribe to the latter view:
Senator Brown: This is a hybrid process for a fixed price to move to a cap-and-trade system which we actually developed from Professor Garnaut’s ideas some 12 months ago.
Senator Milne: It’s happening because we have shared power in Australia… It is because the Greens are in the balance of power working with the other parties.
This is cause for genuine concern. As representatives of a party that frequently struggles to attract even 10 per cent of the vote, Senators Brown and Milne are almost entirely exempt from the sort of scrutiny major parties have to deal with all the time. As such, they routinely get away with policy positions that would see most politicians laughed out of office.
If you’re Green you can advocate crippling the economy, turning off the lights, legalising drugs, closing down zoos and taxing the dead and not have it dent your credibility because, basically, nobody is really paying much attention.
That’s the great advantage of being Green. You don’t have to be a sensible alternative or even a competent one. As long as you’re not making too much trouble and the electorate believes you are safely on the margins, you’ll find that people are tolerant and willing to extend a fair bit of latitude. For the majority of the time, that arrangement works reasonably well. The far left gets somebody to vote for, and nobody gets hurt.
But, as we are currently witnessing, give the Greens a chance to exert some meaningful influence on government policy and things start to go awry. In addition to a massive increase in the cost of living courtesy of rapidly rising electricity, water, petrol and food prices, Australians now have to contend with the real danger that their mythomaniac Prime Minister has handed over the controls of government to a group of uninhibited economic vandals.
The ultimate insult in all of this is that while a carbon tax will have a huge impact on household budgets, it won’t make the slightest difference to the global climate. Although Australia emits a relatively high amount of carbon dioxide per capita, our overall emissions represent less than 1.5 per cent of the global total.
Total power generation in Australia is about 50 gigawatts. To put that into perspective, China currently produces well over 650 gigawatts, and within the next decade is predicted to boost that figure with an additional 400-500 gigawatts of purely coal-fired power. In this context, any suggestion that the national interest is best served by making it harder for Australians to pay their bills is so obviously disingenuous as to be offensive.
Almost as insulting is the suggestion that the Gillard Government’s towering duplicity is somehow comparable to John Howard’s introduction of the GST. The difference, for those who care to remember, is that when John Howard changed his position on the GST, he had the decency to take the policy to an election and give voters the opportunity to reject it. Gillard on the other hand, has shown no such integrity.
On the contrary, over the past few days the Prime Minister has had the audacity to suggest that voters who thought “no carbon tax” actually meant no carbon tax, had made of some sort of childish error of judgement. Last Thursday she offered this to the Parliament: “The Australian people have voted for change, they voted for a carbon price.”
The following day, on Sydney radio, it was this: “Pricing carbon is the right thing to do and I said that during the election.” And just this morning on the ABC we heard this: “Before the last election I consistently said we needed to price carbon.”
Apparently, without anyone having realised, we have moved into a new era of political discourse – an age of 21st Century surrealism, in which, when the Prime Minister denies having any intention of doing something, voters are to understand that she has every intention of doing it.
As erstwhile political fringe dwellers, the Australian Greens have generally been afforded a certain degree of benevolent tolerance for hypocrisy, sanctimony and policies in extremis.
The Prime Minister, however, would do well to remember that the same indulgence is unlikely to be extended to her.
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