Adrian Wollaston’s letter (Further Debate, October 27) prompted me to check out his statements. I typed in ‘Julia Gillard pensioners will receive more money than they need’ using Bing as a search engine and within 30 seconds I found the website which Mr Wollaston had such difficulty finding. On the Today program nine.msn in an interview with Laurie Oakes, July 17, Julia Gillard’s quote regarding pensioners was, “It will be more money than they need to address any price impacts from carbon pricing”. Scroll down 24 Q&As in the interview between Mr Oakes and the Prime Minister. There is also a 17-minute video clip of the conversation.
The United Kingdom’s Climate Change Levy is structured differently to our carbon tax and has been highly criticised as it hasn’t reduced emissions and is too complex.
I have searched a myriad websites to ascertain the amount of tax the affected companies will pay and it appears to be $23 per metric tonne with price rising to 2.5 per cent per year until 2015 when the plan will move to a market based emissions trading scheme (no mention of whether this included GST). It seems unnecessarily complicated and is sure to make life difficult for many tax accountants.
In the Herald Sun, October 20, 2010, there is an interesting blog “Spain fried by solar power” which shows the folly of trying to build an alternative energy industry which is not able to compete with a less expensive coal-fired plant. The Spanish government has locked itself into a 25-year contract with solar producers which was financially unsustainable. The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created. It’s not just because of the ‘Eurozone debt crisis’. The whole scheme was structured for disaster. The GST is easier to implement than the carbon tax as it is calculated on a percentage of the cost of goods or services. The carbon tax is calculated on something intangible in the future.
Sheep and cows do graze quite happily under wind turbines and are able to walk around the towers without being minced by blades. Birds and bats aren’t as lucky, as many protected species are injured every year because of collisions with the turbines. Wind-turbines are energy-intensive and expensive to manufacture and it takes many years to reap environmental or economic benefits. I am not against alternative energy sources to supplement the grid, but solar and wind energy are not sustainable on a large scale.
Lesley Chapman,
Lakewood
