The introduction of the CPRS Bill or the ETS, whichever you choose to call it, is a mechanism where the Government will collect in excess of $70 billion tax revenue in the first six years and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars thereafter.
The commission earned by bankers and brokers will amount to multiple billions of dollars and the financial imperative for them to support the scheme is overwhelming.
This new tax will not save the Great Barrier Reef; it is not going to end the droughts; it will neither contribute to Greenland freezing nor thawing.
It will have no effect on species extinction or any other calamity that is utilised, by those in support of the scheme, as a mechanism to advocate for its introduction.
In round about terms, the CPRS will lead to a 5 per cent reduction, on a nation that only produces 1.4 per cent of carbon emissions, from a species, humans, that are only responsible for approximately 3 per cent of emissions (the other 97% produced by natural occurrences such as volcanoes, bushfires and ocean degassing) for a substance, carbon dioxide, that is only 380 parts per million of the air we breathe.
This means the CPRS will change the air we breathe by 0.0000000978 of 1%.
The CPRS did not include all of agriculture at the start and neither will the amendments exempt agriculture.
Everything from fertilizer, to electricity, to steel, to transport, to dairy processing, to meat processing, to grain milling, will all still be in.
The National Farmers Federation has come to a remarkable philosophical point where they believe the ETS is just, as long as they are just excluded.
No doubt there are many people who agree to taxes when it excludes them.
For those not on the land, it will be a revenue collector for the Tax Commissioner.
Every food item you eat, every holiday you take, every house you build, in fact basically everything, will be affected by the tax and will increase the cost to you, the consumer.
The ETS is an insidious tax, in that you pay it in virtually every aspect of your life.
When you iron your children’s clothes, you will be paying it.
When the fridge runs through the night keeping the butter cold, you will be paying it.
When you turn on the television to watch the Saturday afternoon game, you will be paying it.
In the first week, over 11 and half thousand people have signed my online petition condemning the ETS. This is an amazing response.
From my time of lobbying on talkback radio, from 4BC, 2UE, 2GB, 3AW, 5AA, 6PR and even on the ABC, I have been overwhelmed at the resentment that this new tax has stirred in the Australian public.
The Australian Labor Party has premised the rebuttal of their argument claiming that I am a fear monger, whilst their debate comes embellished with every reference of every cataclysmic event and holding up those who dare question them as responsible for these events.
It is the Labor Party who has continued their obnoxious reference to rising sea levels, when the ETS will do nothing to affect sea levels.
One can only ponder how the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef would be remedied by a tax.
Proclamations of the extinction of species and the virtual cessation of life as we know it, is what I would call fear mongering and this is the endorsement Labor offers.
Although I am reticent to say so, for those who accuse me of being derelict because the National Party did not chapter and verse agree with their dire protestations of imminent global demise, I would say in the National Party’s defence that if you truly believe in the doomsday predictions of Al Gore and Professor Ross Garneau, then I suppose you should be supporting the Greens.
The Labor Party and Minister Wong have delivered Australia to a righteous twilight zone, where if everything they predict is right they haven’t gone far enough and so what they have delivered is of no real consequential effect, apart from the revenue raising capacity of a massive new tax.
Taxation itself is a regressive mechanism, not an inspiration mechanism. Henry Ford was not inspired by a tax; Bill Gates does not put his success down to a tax.
The only thing a new tax will inspire is tax evasion and the rest of the world will carry on precisely as it has before.
Unfortunately, the way to avoid this tax is to avoid Australia and that is what industry and opportunity will do.
I do not put much faith in the idea that once the tax is in place this philosophical prickle patch will deliver much long term comfort. Piece by piece regulatory instalments will come creeping further back into agriculture, on top of the sections already mentioned.
After five weeks of negotiation, Penny Wong has not been able to deliver one constructive pen-on-paper article of amendments.
We have had a verbal warrant that it will exempt agriculture and that there will be carbon offsets but no one can direct me to where we can read or closely examine this exemption.
With the end of Parliament drawing near, there is limited capacity for proper discussion of the amendments to the CPRS, which is one of the most major and obnoxious pieces of legislation in recent Parliamentary history.
This does not surprise me.
Everything about the ETS process has been misleading, mischievous and duplicitous and it appears that this will remain until the bitter end.
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