But as the 18 carbon tax bills head for a vote in the Senate before the end of the year, Tony Abbott gave his “pledge in blood” to dismantle the tax in government.

Ms Gillard said 160 million tonnes of carbon would be cut from the atmosphere by 2020 under her carbon tax.

“You'll be able to see the biggest polluters changing their conduct and behaviour,” Ms Gillard told ABC Radio.

Ms Gillard says Mr Abbott will be unable to dismantle the tax because it would involve taking associated compensation measures from pensioners and families.

But Mr Abbott said he was more determined than ever to axe the carbon price if he became prime minister.

“We will repeal this tax, we will dismantle the bureaucracy associated with it,” Mr Abbott said.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/carbon-plan/green-light-for-carbon-tax-red-flag-for-industry/story-fn99tjf2-1226164561315

Isn't it about time for the news-commentariat to put a woodplug in Tony's gabber?

Not at the Australian where the little dump is promoted like a god, because like the said wooden puppet, the scribes have no idea about the value of what is being achieved. Nor do they want to really know... They only care (a misnomer in this case) about the biffo, they desire the demise of Julia for which they fretting like rabid dogs to congratulate themselves for it and that Tony — their man — gets the job to make the rich richer and the poor poorer... It's the way the social structure should be... Uncle Rupe should rule the world and every one should bend over.... Amen

The little shit should never become PM.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3571524.html

Two leaders, both alike in dignity,

In fair Parliament, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break a new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

If Shakespeare had been sitting in the Press Gallery in this day and age, his canon play script would have undoubtedly begun in this way. For the current political climate would have served his interests as a playwright well.

For one, the tragic condition runs deep in the characters of his would-be play. The vile grudges that have befallen our parliament play within the veins of two people.

---------------------------

No mister. The vile grudge only runs as old rancid sap in Tony's woodchips. Rudd is not vile like Abbott... Rudd would know he has to have Julia of Arc to fight the present battle, until Abbott is fully defeated... Otherwise he would have been defeated himself by Abbott, that dark prince of the ignoramuses.

Shakespeare would see this straight away. Tony's relentless attacks on Julia are beyond the pale and, guess what, there has been very little return fire from Julia... She has kept the pointing back to a bare minimum. Meanwhile, despite some shortcomings, Rudd is far more intelligent than Abbott and far less hypocritically voracious. To bring them both to such crass level in this essay is cheap and quite crappy.

Julia stands miles ahead of Tony but the Murdoch media loves to present an equal or superior Tony — when he is basically an idiotic little opportunistic shit who understands zip except for the performance of Machiavellian machinations, for which the media makes sure he has a coterie of followers who are as bigoted and as ignorant as he is.

Rudd knows to be gracious... while Abbott has one speed: he's most despicable in his grubby attempts at power grab.

Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe’s new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.

“In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.

Across the nation, too, belief in man-made global warming, and passion about doing something to arrest climate change, is not what it was five years or so ago, when Al Gore’s movie had buzz and Elizabeth Kolbert’s book about climate change, “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” was a best seller. The number of Americans who believe the earth is warming dropped to 59 percent last year from 79 percent in 2006, according to polling by the Pew Research Group. When the British polling firm Ipsos Mori asked Americans this past summer to list their three most pressing environmental worries, “global warming/climate change” garnered only 27 percent, behind even “overpopulation.”

This fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon. True, public enthusiasm for legislation to tackle climate change has flagged somewhat throughout the developed world since the recession of 2008. Nonetheless, in many other countries, legislation to control emissions has rolled out apace. Just last Wednesday, Australia’s House of Representatives passed a carbon tax, which is expected to easily clear the country’s Senate. Europe’s six-year-old carbon emissions trading system continues its yearly expansion. In 2010, India passed a carbon tax on coal. Even China’s newest five-year plan contains a limited pilot cap-and-trade system, under which polluters pay for excess pollution.

The United States is the “one significant outlier” on responding to climate change, according to a recent global research report produced by HSBC, the London-based bank. John Ashton, Britain’s special representative for climate change, said in an interview that “in the U.K., in Europe, in most places I travel to” — but not in the United States — “the starting point for conversation is that this is real, there are clear and present dangers, so let’s get a move on and respond.” After watching the Republican candidates express skepticism about global warming in early September, former President Bill Clinton put it more bluntly, “I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/whatever-happened-to-global-warming.html?_r=1&hp

Please note that climate change is not a question of polling populations... It's a scientific reality that is unfortunately denied by many religious believers and other ignoramus ningnongs like our own little rotten wood puppet Abbott...

The electricity industry is warning power prices will have to go up if the Coalition carries out its threat to dismantle the carbon tax.

The Coalition is ramping up its warnings to businesses not to invest in Labor's carbon pricing scheme before the next election because it will scrap it if it wins power.

But Prime Minister Julia Gillard has accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of bluffing with his threats to repeal the scheme.

Either way, the Government says the uncertainty the Liberals are creating is locking in higher power prices.

The interim chief executive of the Energy Suppliers Association, Clare Savage, agrees.

She says the sector is committed to a carbon price and will seek to buy forward permits to support future electricity contracting to keep prices for consumers as low as possible.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-18/liberals-creating-uncertainty-over-carbon-pricing/3577392

THE average household will be much better off than the Gillard government has calculated after pocketing carbon tax compensation, according to independent modelling.

The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling has found that tax cuts and higher government pension and family payments will leave households an average of $2.40 a week ahead after the carbon tax, rather than only 20¢ as estimated by Treasury.

Using more recent household expenditure data, the study found the average household would pay $8.50 a week in higher prices because of the tax (lower than Treasury's estimate) but gain $10.90 in tax cuts and benefits (more than Treasury assumed).

Unlike the Treasury modelling, the study reveals which households are winners and which losers.

It shows that low-income families with children (the bottom 20 per cent) are on average $6.30 a week ahead, middle-income families $1.30 ahead and high-income families (the top 20 per cent) are $6.30 a week worse off.

All single parents with children come out ahead, low-income earners by $5.60 a week, middle-income households by $11.80 and high-income families by 50¢.

In total 69 per cent of households will be better off, 16 per cent worse off by less than $5 a week, almost 10 per cent worse off by between $5 and $10 a week, and almost 5 per cent worse off by more than $10 a week.

and why the Libs (conservatives) did not like the school programs or the NBN or the whatever good?

--------------------

From Paul Krugman

...

But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges?

John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious “preference for wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like the promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, “Solyndra! Waste!” Spend money on a weapons system we don’t need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition.

To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting the private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again.

But there are also darker motives behind weaponized Keynesianism.

For one thing, to admit that public spending on useful projects can create jobs is to admit that such spending can in fact do good, that sometimes government is the solution, not the problem. Fear that voters might reach the same conclusion is, I’d argue, the main reason the right has always seen Keynesian economics as a leftist doctrine, when it’s actually nothing of the sort. However, spending on useless or, even better, destructive projects doesn’t present conservatives with the same problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/opinion/bombs-bridges-and-jobs.html?hp

see toon at top

Australians the world's wealthiest


Despite the doom and gloom [what gloom and doom? asks Gus, only a couple of little annoying characters, Tonicchio-the liar and Joyce-the-tantrumic], there are reasons to be cheerful. As measured by median wealth levels, Australians are the wealthiest people in the world, says the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2011, which measured the wealth of the world's 4.5 billion adults.

It found Australia's median wealth, the mid-point between the wealthiest adult and poorest, was $US222,000 ($213,800), the highest in the world.

Average wealth was $US397,000, the world's second-highest after Switzerland with $US540,000.

It is the median figure that is more meaningful because it says more about how a country's middle class is doing.
Wealth in Australia is more evenly distributed than in other countries, particularly compared to the US, which has median wealth of about $US53,000.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/luxury/australians-the-worlds-wealthiest-20111101-1mt2r.html#ixzz1cPYwd7kL

see toon at top...

Well, that's that then. After four years of the most bizarre mutual reversal and repositioning imaginable for any policy area, Australia now has a fully-legislated emissions pricing scheme.

And will have, for as long as this government survives, which is not exactly something you would take to the bank.

It's kind of obvious, but it's worth repeating: if Tony Abbott wins the next election and becomes prime minister, his biggest and most urgent tasks will be those of the demolition variety. All that over-developed Abbott musculature, painfully amassed over countless early morning feats of man-craziness, will be required in full for the wrecking job that awaits him at The Lodge.

Scraping back the carbon tax. Prising the permits from the paws of the polluters. Wrenching the seed funding from myriad alternative energy entrepreneurs (a deceptively tricky proposition; just because someone's proposing to generate baseload power from potato peelings doesn't mean they're necessarily going to take dispossession lying down). Digging up the National Broadband Network. The backbreaking grunt work of returning all that money to all those mining companies. Dismantling the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

All this before you even consider the work involved in designing stuff to take the place of all this wreckage. Or how to pay for the new stuff (a task even more Herculean than the elimination of existing policies, and one for which shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has rather mercilessly been volunteered).

Don't get me wrong; it's entirely Mr Abbott's right to campaign against anything he pleases, and he is serving an important democratic purpose in doing so. No-one in a democratic system can seriously take issue with the legitimacy of someone who proposes an alternative approach.

But if dismantlement becomes the singular, or even the principal purpose of an incoming government, experience tells us that trouble soon follows. Look at the Gillard Government, haunted by its silent task of erasing certain telltale traces of its immediate predecessor. Any government that defines itself overwhelmingly by what it is not, rather than what it is, creates a hollow at the core of its being, especially once its enemy has been eliminated.

And that is the strange, almost maniacal equation at the core of Australian politics right now: Two protagonists who cannot stop talking about each other. What would Julia Gillard have to talk about if the irresponsible, innumerate wrecker Tony Abbott were not available for constant reference in her press conferences and radio interviews?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-08/crabb-carbon-legislation-abbott-demolition/3652544?WT.svl=theDrum

--------------------------

Annabel, Annabel, Annabel... You know better, I hope, but can't say much more on the ABC where balance is the king of bland... Julia Gillard, despite a couple of iffy policies, is far more able, far more astute, far more elevated than Tony and far more stable. Having to deal with Tony — and a media in love with Tony — is not a piece of cake. It skews the polls... Fighting all this is energy draining. But Julia has the power to sustain resistance against a near sociopathic mad Abbott. He's a brat who smashes everything and them blames someone else for it... Against such relentless moronic Abbottic behaviour, a Rudd would soon loose the plot and collapse like a soufflé... If Julia did not have to fight Abbott, Australian politics would become liberated from a gigantic dead-weight called Abbott... She would shine like a guiding star into the future... This is why I don't hesitate to call Tony and his supporters: IDIOTS......