Monday 23rd of December 2024
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the end is nigh .....

the end is nigh .....

from Crikey …..

Sunday, Carbon Sunday: pollies on message for the pollution tax

Crikey intern Sarah Homewood writes:

CARBON TAX, GREG COMBET, JULIA GILLARD, TONY ABBOTT

On Sunday - dubbed "Carbon Sunday" by the opposition - the carbon tax will finally begin. It therefore seemed an opportune time to take a look at what lines the government and the Coalition will be spinning come next week.

The basic gist from the Coalition: this will cost us billions in jobs and living expenses.

The official Coalition message earlier this week, as revealed by Bernard Keane yesterday in Crikey, was: "The world’s biggest carbon tax will add $4.6 billion to the costs of electricity generators, risk critical investment in the sector and drive up the electricity prices of every Australian household and business. The carbon tax will drive up electricity prices and put jobs and investment at risk."

Abbott vowed to mark "Carbon Sunday" by "talking to families, the forgotten families of Australia whose cost of living pressures will be going up and whose jobs will become less secure under the carbon tax": "There is not a single problem in this country which is going to be helped by the carbon tax and all of our economic difficulties will be made worse by the carbon tax."

Not that Abbott's the only Coalition pollie pushing the anti-carbon tax message across the media. Greg Hunt, the Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage, penned an opinion piece for the ABC today, outlining how from Sunday everything we do will be affected by the carbon tax:

"This is how it will work. From midnight when you're in bed, your heating system is slugging you with a carbon tax. When you get out of bed and turn on the light, you will be slugged the carbon tax. When you shuffle into the shower, your gas hot water will be slugged by the carbon tax. When you get out of the shower and dry your hair with the hair dryer, you will be slugged with the carbon tax."

And so on.

Meanwhile the basic gist from the government appears to be: declare the Coalition's message a "scare campaign", note the handouts to working families and tell everyone it's going to be OK.

Julia Gillard will be on a media blitz for the next fortnight selling the benefits of the scheme, joined by Minister for Families Jenny Macklin and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet. ALP Secretary George Wright told a caucus meeting this week to press the message of Abbott's "negativity".

Last night Combet went on Lateline to help sell the carbon tax message. When asked to respond to the claims being made by the opposition leader about the cost of the carbon tax being faced by everyday Australians, Combet replied:

"Oh, well, Tony Abbott's running a - you know, quite a fraudulent scare campaign in relation to carbon pricing. He's a good scare campaigner, there's no doubt about that. But we are about to move from fiction to fact and his claims are going to have to be tested against people's lived experience.

"He's said the price impacts will be unimaginable. They will not be. It'll be an average of 0.7 per cent increase in the CPI and people will get an average of $10.10 a week in cash."

It’s not just politicians who are stepping out in force to voice their opinion about the carbon tax. On Sunday the No Carbon Tax Team are holding rallies in both Sydney and Melbourne in order to demand an election, with its website declaring:

"We will not be had for fools; this tax must be and will be repealed. Bring your banners, your loud voices as we let the Gillard Labor Party know they have no mandate for this tax and we demand an election as our democratic right."

The Melbourne rally guest speaker is none other than the king of shock jocks himself, 2GB presenter Alan Jones.

Stay tuned for Monday's Crikey, where we'll take a look at how the media covered the first day of a carbon tax.

 

but not the NBN...

Nearly two years after Tony Abbott vowed to tear down the beginnings of the national broadband network and to "demolish" it, the Coalition now says it will not roll back or cancel it, if it comes to power at the next election.

Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband Malcolm Turnbull told IT Pro firmly this week: "No, the Coalition will not cancel or roll back the NBN. The NBN will continue to roll out but we will do so in a cost-effective manner in particular in built-up areas."

As the idea of a faster, ubiquitous always-on affordable internet matures in the minds of Australians, and more people show support for the infrastructure project, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Opposition to continue its original stance. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has repeately slammed the $36 billion project as a "rip off" and a "white elephant".

At the same time, a rollback is rendered more impractical with every metre of fibre optic cable NBN Co lays, and with the increasing number of NBN-packages released by internet service providers (ISPs) in those markets where new services are made available.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/we-will-not-cancel-the-nbn-turnbull-20120629-217f3.html#ixzz1zAZsUC3b

bound for oblivion .....

This may be the last piece of cross-platform content you get from me. Not because La Stupenda is poised to rampage through Fairfax in a Wagnerian orgy of cleansing fire and sword, although I suppose that remains a possibility.

The immediate peril is the carbon tax juggernaut that descends upon us tomorrow. If Abbott and the doomsayers are correct in their prophesies, all we hold dear in this country will be crushed beneath its wheels.

As he has predicted, the steel city of Whyalla will be the first to go. Visiting the place last year, he declared that ''Whyalla will be wiped off the map by Julia Gillard's carbon tax. Whyalla risks becoming a ghost town, an economic wasteland if this carbon tax goes ahead.''

I don't think this will happen in one fell swoop tomorrow. It may take a few days. But surely by the end of the week there will be misery and desolation: tumbleweed blowing down silent streets; piteous columns of refugees streaming from their abandoned homes, trudging along pushing dog carts bearing a few treasured possessions - here a home theatre system, there the Nick Scali three-piece cream leather lounge suite - and all bound for oblivion.

The blight will spread across the nation, rather like the 19th-century Irish potato famine, I expect. We cannot predict where it will strike, for it will be swift and indiscriminate. We can be certain that great retail empires will fall in ruins and our mining barons will be forced to scrape by on their few remaining billions, but it is the unpredictable that is so frightening.

Already the carbon tax has seen Australia crash out of the Wimbledon singles. And I hadn't realised little warm puppies and soft fluffy kittens would die in their thousands until Abbott visited an RSPCA animal shelter on Tuesday to tell us so.

All you can do is bunker down and prepare for the worst. I have soap, candles and kindling piled up in the garage, along with supplies of tinned pate de fois gras and a carton of Krug if things get really bad. But when the batteries in the laptop expire I'm afraid you will have to do without me.

The one ray of light in the encircling gloom is that, like ancient Rome, our end of days might come in riotous debauchery. The Reverend Fred Nile MLC warns in his latest jeremiad that the O'Farrell government is ''willingly giving the city over to vice and hedonism''. It is worth quoting.

'Between February and March this year, we had the NSW government giving the green light to the homosexual community for the public screening of illegal hardcore pornography, material that any other citizen would have been arrested and charged for. Then in April we had the government allowing members of the public to strut around naked in the Museum of Contemporary Art,'' he said. ''On both occasions I raised concern regarding the government's willingness to wave [sic] the rule of law and on both occasions I have been dismissed.''

I don't know where I was, but somehow I missed all the excitement. The gay porn would have been fairly predictable, but the nude art exhibition sounds like a jolly romp. As long as the central heating was working.

Public nakedness is good for us all. It should not be confined to canape-munching socialites at art galleries but spread about for hard-working families to enjoy. I call upon Rodney Cavalier, the chairman of the SCG Trust, to declare an all-nude day at the cricket this summer.

Mike Carlton