Don Campbell’s letter on the Carbon Tax starts off reminding us that Gillard lied to us.
He uses over-the-top phrases like “Destroy industry and jobs,” “destruction of the Australian economy”, “economic vandalism” and “toxic tax”. They’re all straight out of the Abbott hymnbook and only work on people who are able to suspend belief.
Don says “wind power requires large areas of land and animal habitat to be destroyed.” Ever visited an open cut coal mine Don? No fact anywhere in the world proves his over-the-top assertion. He may not be aware but sheep and cows can graze quite happily under wind turbines and have an uncanny knack of being able to walk around the towers without being minced by blades slowly spinning ten metres above their heads. As for the noise that Don mentions, he would do well to take into account that vegetables are deaf and it would take a small explosion to get a cow to stop eating. When the towers are built offshore it’s the same for the fish. They just have another place to hang out and do what fish do.
Don quotes Gillard as saying “Pensioners will receive more money than they need” and then voices mock indignation about what a rotten thing it was to say. The danger with putting something like that in quotes is that it is so easy to check these days. I Googled that quote and the only place in the world it existed was, yes, you guessed it, Don’s letter on the Port Macquarie Independent website. If that quote ever existed it would have been latched onto by every conservative blogger in Australia and it wasn’t.
Don tells us that Spain is cutting funding to renewable energy projects. Eurozone debt crisis ring any bells? Spain is cutting it’s expenditure on everything. Nice try though.
Don also quoted another rather intriguing figure that, in some EU countries, for every Green job created 3.1 other jobs are lost. I’ve seen that figure quoted often but still haven’t found where the figure actually came from. If you Google “3.1 jobs are lost” or any derivation of that phrase it would seem that anybody who has a gripe about something like Walmart’s effect on small business, US government versus the private sector or falling home prices, it will result in “3” jobs being lost. Pick a number, say it a lot and it gets quoted as a fact.
Don also says that the UK has decided not to go down the path of a “destructive” carbon tax. There’s that word again. Don missed the UK’s Climate Change Levy , Fossil Fuel Duty, Air Passenger Duty, Landfill Tax and the Road Tax which is levied according to a car’s CO2 emissions. Green Taxes make up eight per cent of the total taxes paid in the UK. Don didn’t pick a winner when he compared us to Britain.
Don says, “Compensation has been calculated without taking into consideration the impact of the GST ten per cent on top of the tax so, instead of the tax being $23 per tonne it’s more like more than $25.” Wrong again Don. Compensation is based on the projected CPI increase (0.7 per cent) and the CPI is based on final transaction prices which include GST. Don also might be interested to learn that the GST added nearly 400 per cent more to the CPI than the Carbon Tax will and the world, as we know it, didn’t come to an end.
If people don’t believe in Global warming that’s fine, but only a fool would believe that fossil fuels are going to last much longer and they will get very expensive long before they run out. The law of supply and demand will see to that.
Adrian Wollaston,
Lighthouse Beach
