Yesterday right wing radio host Ray Hadley asked Anthony Albanese, the leader of the Australian Opposition repeat after him: “There will be no carbon tax, ever.”
Personally I would have preferred, he had not been sick and that he had said to Hadley:
“Sorry but I’m not going to allow Australian Policy to be dictated by a Radio host, no matter how popular or well intentioned. If we get into government, we will do what is best for Australia, not what you think is some gotcha moment. Besides, as Peta Credlin has admitted, we never had a Carbon Tax; we put a price on Carbon, and we redistributed the money back to the electorate so they would not be affected by price increases. All the price rises that Mr. Abbott predicted to come from the carbon price turned out to be complete rubbish, and emissions came down. It turned out to be an inexpensive remedy for a problem which was scrapped for no reason.
However, as you know we do not plan to install another Carbon Price of that sort – we will just use the same mechanism of pricing that the government has installed, but we will try to stop it being a tax-payer subsidy to companies who may never reduce their actual emissions.
If we cannot make the government’s policy mechanism of carbon pricing work, then we may have to reconsider. After all we have just been told by two Coalition members that the Government’s targets are not even targets – this may imply they know that the government’s pricing method may not be able to work.
The question Ray, is whether you want Australia to continue with the highest temperature increases in the world, massive bushfires, massive droughts, and floods. We live in one of the most fragile ecologies on the planet, and all the government can do is make the conditions worse, and fail to help people after they have suffered the consequences. I pledge that we will not only try and diminish climate change, move away from fossil fuels, but be ready to help communities that suffer from the climate change we have known about for over 30 years.”
Something like that would have been better… although it would have had the media screaming.
