Antinuclear

Time to support the carbon tax and expose Abbott’s disinformation about it

Australia needs the carbon tax, The Age Editorial, June 30, 2012 ‘AFTER all,” Scarlett O’Hara assures herself in the concluding scene of Gone with the Wind, ”tomorrow is another day”.

It is advice Australians should take to heart, having been long assailed with dire forecasts that tomorrow, July 1, will not in fact be just another day. Instead, some would have us believe that it will be the beginning of our impoverishment and the end of civilisation as we know it, all because of the arrival of a Great Big New Tax. These claims are nonsense, uttered by people who think that if they repeat them often enough and without evidence, their fellow citizens will believe them
to be true.

For the record, here are the relevant facts about the carbon tax, which begins tomorrow. Yes, it is a pricing scheme aimed at reducing
emissions of greenhouse gases by shifting from coal-fired to cleaner
forms of power generation. And yes, that will involve an increase in
electricity prices. But the rise due to the tax will be only a small
part of the total rise in household power prices, which is chiefly due
to the cost of upgrading an ageing network – i.e. replacing poles and
wires. In Victoria, for example, the average electricity bill has
increased by 28 per cent over the past three years, and the Australian
Energy Market Commission expects it to rise by another third over the
next three. But the carbon price will be only a tiny portion of this:
in two years prices will only be 5 per cent higher under the carbon
tax than they would be without it…… eturned action to reduce
carbon emissions to the centre of public policy, as it should be; the
government’s credibility, however, has taken a battering in the
process.
Because of that battering, the government has become ever more
defensive, and resisting the campaign of disinformation about the tax
has become all the harder. But that is hardly reason to abandon the
fight. On the contrary, the government must reinvigorate its defence
of the tax, tomorrow and every other day.  http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/editorial/australia-needs-the-carbon-tax-20120629-21867.html#ixzz1zJkalWwK

June 30, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News