Saturday, June 30, 2012 7:56:35 PM
Dodgy Australian opposition anti-carbon tax campaign designed
to blame ALL future electricity cost increase on the carbon tax.
Day one of the carbon tax [July 1, TODAY IS DAY 1 (auctd1)]
Greg Hunt ABC Environment 29 Jun 2012
Before you even make it to the shower, you'll be paying
the carbon tax. Credit: Sam Davis (ABC)
ON SUNDAY 1 JULY, the carbon tax starts. In case you are wondering, it is an electricity tax, a gas tax and a food tax. It isn't however an environmental tax because our emissions go up, not down.
So, instead of waking up in a utopian green world where all that has been wrong with the world has been corrected, you'll simply wake up in a world where your power bill goes up. The Prime Minister may pretend that your power bill won't go up and your job remains secure. Or that her broken promise from the last election will have been forgotten. It's a world viewed through rose coloured glasses and not connected to the reality that families and businesses will be facing as they start paying for the world's biggest carbon tax.
You may sleep through the midnight change over to a carbon tax world, but that won't stop the new costs starting to gradually mount up and by the time you've had breakfast, you will have been slugged by the carbon tax a dozen times.
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.
When you turn on the kettle for a cup of coffee, you will be hit by the carbon tax.
If you like a sugar with your coffee, that's bad luck, Mackay Sugar is a big polluter.
If you have milk with your coffee, bad luck again, dairy companies are listed as big polluters.
And when you take the milk out of the refrigerator - you pay twice, for the electricity and the refrigerant.
If you enjoy a bit of Vegemite on your toast, that's bad luck again, Kraft is a big polluter.
When you cook the toast in the toaster, you pay the carbon tax on the electricity.
If you decide instead to have cereal, remember you are paying carbon tax on the milk and the electricity to heat up the milk in the microwave.
So when you've finished breakfast what's next? If you are planning to spend Sunday cleaning up the backyard and taking a load of rubbish to the tip, then once more you will be digging into your pocket to pay increased dump fees due to the carbon tax.
A trip to a shopping centre will also cost you. The major retailers have included a carbon tax clause into their leasing contracts so the cost is passed through. The shoe store, the hairdresser or the cafe will be paying more and so will you. The alternative is that they will have to cut costs elsewhere and that will mean staff.
Fed up by all of this and want to escape on a holiday? Well you will also pay on your airline ticket with Qantas estimating the cost of the carbon tax will be over $100 million. And forget taking to the water rather than the sky, the Spirit of Tasmania has also added a carbon tax levy to its tickets.
In the same way the Prime Minister said "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead", she has also claimed it is just the big polluters who will pay. The first statement we now know was dishonest, and the second has repeated that behaviour. Every Australian will pay the carbon tax every day. And that is why the bill adds up to $36 billion over four years.
Greg Hunt is the Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage.
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/06/29/3534827.htm
Note, nothing in Greg Hunt's dealt with other contributors to the future rise of the cost
of electricity .. this one does .. and suggests the Gillard carbon tax will contribute 5%,
Australia needs the carbon tax
June 30, 2012
Opinion
'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.
That is the big picture. There are local variations, but they still don't make a blame-it-all-on-the-tax stance credible. Network upgrades are the main reason for power costs increasing across Australia, but the market commission says that in Victoria an even bigger cause is the charges imposed by electricity retailers, which have risen by 68 per cent since 2008. And, as The Age reported yesterday, a further complication is that energy consumption is now expected to fall in Australia even without the introduction of the carbon tax. The decline of manufacturing, consumer responses to rising power prices, including the take-up of rooftop solar panels, and a decrease in use of airconditioning systems because of recent mild summers have all changed energy use, and the Australian Energy Market Operator expects consumption to fall this year. That may make it easier for Australia to reach its greenhouse-gas emission target, but it could also slow necessary investment in new transmission networks and gas powerplants.
Does this mean the carbon tax isn't needed after all? That isn't true, either. The introduction of this tax resumes Australia's public policy response to what former prime minister Kevin Rudd referred to as the greatest moral challenge of our time. When Mr Rudd uttered that judgment, the Labor government was able to rely on broad popular support for an emissions trading system, something that the Howard government, too, had intended to introduce if it retained office in the 2007 election. That support has now dissipated, in large part because of the timid handling of the issue by Mr Rudd and his successor, Julia Gillard. Mr Rudd shelved the emissions-trading legislation, and Ms Gillard notoriously promised during the 2010 election campaign that there would be no carbon tax, only to abandon this promise in negotiating Greens support for her minority government. That has returned 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.
AFL's [ link added for 'unusual?' sports fans .. http://www.afl.com.au/ .. lol ] larrikins live on
IT'S an image long cherished in the stories we tell about ourselves - the typical Aussie as a bit of a larrikin, rebellious but having a sense of fun, outspoken and direct, yet rarely mean or nasty. C.J. Dennis and Banjo Paterson celebrated his (and yes, it is a male image) laconic humour and took pleasure in the shock that accompanied his embrace of the limelight. Just when we thought our globalised culture had consigned larrikins to history along came David Danger, a passionate member of the Melbourne Football Club who, in the best tradition of larrikinism, made public his views on Tom Scully's defection to Greater Western Sydney.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. my insert ..
Scully money protest just fun
CAROLINE WILSON June 27, 2012
WHEN David Danger went to the MCG on Sunday he was armed with his usual passion for the Melbourne Football Club and a stash of fake cash aimed at lampooning Tom Scully, the young player who had deserted his Demons.
He could not have predicted that waving a paper bag full of home-made notes - that he also had pinned to his jacket - almost had him evicted from the stadium and at the centre of a security and civil liberties storm.
The MCC and AFL yesterday claimed that MCG officials had tried to remove the Victoria Police employee from the ground after he had used obscene language, but yesterday Danger - seeing himself on television and being widely accused of having a foul mouth - moved to set the record straight.
''At no point did I use an obscenity,'' said the 16-year Melbourne member, who works in the Victoria Police infrastructure and IT department. ''I am not happy with the way I have been portrayed by the AFL spokesman Patrick Keane as well as the MCG spokesman Shane Brown.
''The whole idea that I was swearing seems to be a ruse or cover-up for the fact that I was waving Scully money and wearing a jacket covered in notes, and they actually wanted to quash that.
More .. http://m.smh.com.au/afl/afl-news/scully-money-protest-just-fun-20120626-210lb.html ..
chuckle, first i've heard of it, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was all a bit of fun - a chance to express disgust at the role money plays in the game, making loyalty increasingly a concept of relevance only to supporters. The appropriately named Mr Danger took on the establishment and broke the stuffiness associated with the members enclosure by wearing a jacket adorned with home-made notes sporting images of Greater Western Sydney coach Kevin Sheedy, AFL chief Andrew Demetriou and Tom Scully himself, and waving a bag of the ''money''. In a staggering development - some might even call it ''un-Australian'' - this almost had him evicted from the stadium.
The overreaction by security officers and some football officials was astounding. C.J. Dennis [see reply] would have had great fun with this comment from a players' agent: ''To some this was comical, witty at best, but for the future of our game it was alarming. These actions highlight the detachment the average fan has with the direction our game is headed.'' The language is 21st century business-speak but the sentiment echoed the reaction to C.J. Dennis's Larrikin Luke, who knew all about ''winning from all respectable folk a very respectable frown''
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/australia-needs-the-carbon-tax-20120629-21867.html
========
Carbon Tax begins, war of words escalates
http://media.smh.com.au/news/national-news/rinehart-delivers-ultimatum-to-fairfax-3416029.html
..and other tidbits of 'now' Australian politics .. note: at this time i don't know if the video will change ..
For those interested it is my hope to kinda keep in touch with some of the political, economic
and social repercussions in Australia of the Julia Gillard carbon tax introduced i Australia July 1 2012 .
Oh .. it just occurred to me that it's fair to say the carbon tax legislation is a result
of compromise, with unhappy people and fierce critics on both sides. Kinda like President
Obama's Affordable Care Act he, with some immediate effect, signed into being, March 23, 2010.
What’s Changing and When .. http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/
.. about everything is changing, all the time .. the Gillard Carbon Tax and the Obama ACA are compromise ..
to blame ALL future electricity cost increase on the carbon tax.
Day one of the carbon tax [July 1, TODAY IS DAY 1 (auctd1)]
Greg Hunt ABC Environment 29 Jun 2012
Before you even make it to the shower, you'll be paying
the carbon tax. Credit: Sam Davis (ABC)
ON SUNDAY 1 JULY, the carbon tax starts. In case you are wondering, it is an electricity tax, a gas tax and a food tax. It isn't however an environmental tax because our emissions go up, not down.
So, instead of waking up in a utopian green world where all that has been wrong with the world has been corrected, you'll simply wake up in a world where your power bill goes up. The Prime Minister may pretend that your power bill won't go up and your job remains secure. Or that her broken promise from the last election will have been forgotten. It's a world viewed through rose coloured glasses and not connected to the reality that families and businesses will be facing as they start paying for the world's biggest carbon tax.
You may sleep through the midnight change over to a carbon tax world, but that won't stop the new costs starting to gradually mount up and by the time you've had breakfast, you will have been slugged by the carbon tax a dozen times.
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.
When you turn on the kettle for a cup of coffee, you will be hit by the carbon tax.
If you like a sugar with your coffee, that's bad luck, Mackay Sugar is a big polluter.
If you have milk with your coffee, bad luck again, dairy companies are listed as big polluters.
And when you take the milk out of the refrigerator - you pay twice, for the electricity and the refrigerant.
If you enjoy a bit of Vegemite on your toast, that's bad luck again, Kraft is a big polluter.
When you cook the toast in the toaster, you pay the carbon tax on the electricity.
If you decide instead to have cereal, remember you are paying carbon tax on the milk and the electricity to heat up the milk in the microwave.
So when you've finished breakfast what's next? If you are planning to spend Sunday cleaning up the backyard and taking a load of rubbish to the tip, then once more you will be digging into your pocket to pay increased dump fees due to the carbon tax.
A trip to a shopping centre will also cost you. The major retailers have included a carbon tax clause into their leasing contracts so the cost is passed through. The shoe store, the hairdresser or the cafe will be paying more and so will you. The alternative is that they will have to cut costs elsewhere and that will mean staff.
Fed up by all of this and want to escape on a holiday? Well you will also pay on your airline ticket with Qantas estimating the cost of the carbon tax will be over $100 million. And forget taking to the water rather than the sky, the Spirit of Tasmania has also added a carbon tax levy to its tickets.
In the same way the Prime Minister said "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead", she has also claimed it is just the big polluters who will pay. The first statement we now know was dishonest, and the second has repeated that behaviour. Every Australian will pay the carbon tax every day. And that is why the bill adds up to $36 billion over four years.
Greg Hunt is the Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage.
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/06/29/3534827.htm
Note, nothing in Greg Hunt's dealt with other contributors to the future rise of the cost
of electricity .. this one does .. and suggests the Gillard carbon tax will contribute 5%,
Australia needs the carbon tax
June 30, 2012
Opinion
'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.
That is the big picture. There are local variations, but they still don't make a blame-it-all-on-the-tax stance credible. Network upgrades are the main reason for power costs increasing across Australia, but the market commission says that in Victoria an even bigger cause is the charges imposed by electricity retailers, which have risen by 68 per cent since 2008. And, as The Age reported yesterday, a further complication is that energy consumption is now expected to fall in Australia even without the introduction of the carbon tax. The decline of manufacturing, consumer responses to rising power prices, including the take-up of rooftop solar panels, and a decrease in use of airconditioning systems because of recent mild summers have all changed energy use, and the Australian Energy Market Operator expects consumption to fall this year. That may make it easier for Australia to reach its greenhouse-gas emission target, but it could also slow necessary investment in new transmission networks and gas powerplants.
Does this mean the carbon tax isn't needed after all? That isn't true, either. The introduction of this tax resumes Australia's public policy response to what former prime minister Kevin Rudd referred to as the greatest moral challenge of our time. When Mr Rudd uttered that judgment, the Labor government was able to rely on broad popular support for an emissions trading system, something that the Howard government, too, had intended to introduce if it retained office in the 2007 election. That support has now dissipated, in large part because of the timid handling of the issue by Mr Rudd and his successor, Julia Gillard. Mr Rudd shelved the emissions-trading legislation, and Ms Gillard notoriously promised during the 2010 election campaign that there would be no carbon tax, only to abandon this promise in negotiating Greens support for her minority government. That has returned 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.
AFL's [ link added for 'unusual?' sports fans .. http://www.afl.com.au/ .. lol ] larrikins live on
IT'S an image long cherished in the stories we tell about ourselves - the typical Aussie as a bit of a larrikin, rebellious but having a sense of fun, outspoken and direct, yet rarely mean or nasty. C.J. Dennis and Banjo Paterson celebrated his (and yes, it is a male image) laconic humour and took pleasure in the shock that accompanied his embrace of the limelight. Just when we thought our globalised culture had consigned larrikins to history along came David Danger, a passionate member of the Melbourne Football Club who, in the best tradition of larrikinism, made public his views on Tom Scully's defection to Greater Western Sydney.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. my insert ..
Scully money protest just fun
CAROLINE WILSON June 27, 2012
WHEN David Danger went to the MCG on Sunday he was armed with his usual passion for the Melbourne Football Club and a stash of fake cash aimed at lampooning Tom Scully, the young player who had deserted his Demons.
He could not have predicted that waving a paper bag full of home-made notes - that he also had pinned to his jacket - almost had him evicted from the stadium and at the centre of a security and civil liberties storm.
The MCC and AFL yesterday claimed that MCG officials had tried to remove the Victoria Police employee from the ground after he had used obscene language, but yesterday Danger - seeing himself on television and being widely accused of having a foul mouth - moved to set the record straight.
''At no point did I use an obscenity,'' said the 16-year Melbourne member, who works in the Victoria Police infrastructure and IT department. ''I am not happy with the way I have been portrayed by the AFL spokesman Patrick Keane as well as the MCG spokesman Shane Brown.
''The whole idea that I was swearing seems to be a ruse or cover-up for the fact that I was waving Scully money and wearing a jacket covered in notes, and they actually wanted to quash that.
More .. http://m.smh.com.au/afl/afl-news/scully-money-protest-just-fun-20120626-210lb.html ..
chuckle, first i've heard of it, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was all a bit of fun - a chance to express disgust at the role money plays in the game, making loyalty increasingly a concept of relevance only to supporters. The appropriately named Mr Danger took on the establishment and broke the stuffiness associated with the members enclosure by wearing a jacket adorned with home-made notes sporting images of Greater Western Sydney coach Kevin Sheedy, AFL chief Andrew Demetriou and Tom Scully himself, and waving a bag of the ''money''. In a staggering development - some might even call it ''un-Australian'' - this almost had him evicted from the stadium.
The overreaction by security officers and some football officials was astounding. C.J. Dennis [see reply] would have had great fun with this comment from a players' agent: ''To some this was comical, witty at best, but for the future of our game it was alarming. These actions highlight the detachment the average fan has with the direction our game is headed.'' The language is 21st century business-speak but the sentiment echoed the reaction to C.J. Dennis's Larrikin Luke, who knew all about ''winning from all respectable folk a very respectable frown''
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/australia-needs-the-carbon-tax-20120629-21867.html
========
Carbon Tax begins, war of words escalates
http://media.smh.com.au/news/national-news/rinehart-delivers-ultimatum-to-fairfax-3416029.html
..and other tidbits of 'now' Australian politics .. note: at this time i don't know if the video will change ..
For those interested it is my hope to kinda keep in touch with some of the political, economic
and social repercussions in Australia of the Julia Gillard carbon tax introduced i Australia July 1 2012 .
Oh .. it just occurred to me that it's fair to say the carbon tax legislation is a result
of compromise, with unhappy people and fierce critics on both sides. Kinda like President
Obama's Affordable Care Act he, with some immediate effect, signed into being, March 23, 2010.
What’s Changing and When .. http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/
.. about everything is changing, all the time .. the Gillard Carbon Tax and the Obama ACA are compromise ..
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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