Both the Government and the Coalition are publicly committed to a 5% emissions reduction target. Tony Abbott claims he will get there via ‘direct action’ and avoid the ‘great big new tax on everything’ – his characterisation of Labor’s ETS.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is warning voters that the coalition’s approach to climate change will be very costly.
He says the policy, to be unveiled by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on Tuesday, will be a large tax with very little environmental impact.
‘One huge mega tax from Mr Abbott to fund his approach to climate change,’ Mr Rudd told the Nine Network.
When in doubt, muddy the waters?
According to the Abbotariat, the big problem with the Government’s approach is supposed to be that the public doesn’t, on the whole, understand the detail of the ETS. Kevin Rudd is betting that no one understands what Abbott’s proposing either. Labor’s line will be that Abbott’s claims that he can fund over 10 billion dollars of policy (according to the Department of Climate Change’s costings) through unspecified efficiencies are spurious, and that he would have to raise revenue to fund his promises. Labor, supposedly, won’t, because the ETS is meant to be budget neutral.
All this is fairly complex, but we won’t see much of that complexity debated in the public arena during an election year. Kevin Rudd’s playing one of the oldest tricks in the book – make your opponent deny something you claim they’re going to do, and hope that:
(a) they’re perceived as less trustworthy; and/or
(b) obfuscating the issue will make everyone discount it because neither side can be believed.
It’ll probably work.
There’s the added bonus of niggling at Abbott to make him sound more shrill – how will he react to the audacity of the claim that the Liberals have a secret tax agenda? If the government has its way, by ranting and raving. You can bet the commentarial noise machine will be.
This is the Latham play. In 2007, the Liberals tried to incite Kevin Rudd to lose his temper in public. He didn’t. Will the ‘political pugilist’ Abbott take the bait?
I know I can’t wait for Barnyard to bray again! It might make me watch Lateline again…
Isn’t the counter argument to ‘no new taxes, it’ll come out of savings” to ask what they’re going to cut?
$10 billion is a lot to rip out of health, education, defence, etc etc etc.
I’m sure they’ll make that argument, too.
It’s one way of putting Abbott on the spot.
1. They accuse him of wanting him to put up taxes;
2. He denies it, and talks vaguely of efficiencies;
3. They say he either wants to cut spending on *insert essential service* or put up taxes, because he won’t be able to cut spending on, etc.
The ABC being a political player by their use of headline wording …
Savings will pay for Abbott’s climate policy
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/31/2805932.htm
No new Coalition taxes to fund climate change policy
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2010/s2804838.htm
The headlines don’t reveal that they’re actually claims being made by the Opposition. They present the statements, unattributed, unqualified, as FACTS.
I no longer trust the ABC. The political pandering is bald-faced and blatant.
All mass media in Australia is now unindependent “mainstream” media singing for the same masters.
Exactly Rx. That’s why when supposedly serious commentators such as Bernard Keane praise the ABC’s news coverage as ‘independent’, you’ve got to ask independent of what?
Rx: Is that worse than this in your opinion?
“Mega tax will fund Abbott’s climate policy: Rudd”
Also from the ABC.
Abbott’s problem is simple and insoluble. He has no credibility, neither personally nor as Party Leader. (Do he and Minchin really think Turnbull will be a quiet little backbencher?) Rudd has been really smart on this, but in reality all he has to do is sit back and watch Abbott implode, and the Federal Liberals along with him.
No 6 Mole,
I noticed that headline.
Mega tax will fund Abbott’s climate policy: Rudd
It clearly identifies the claim as opinion, attributable to Rudd by name.
In the examples I quoted, the claims made are NOT attributed, are presented as “fact”:
Savings will pay for Abbott’s climate policy
No new Coalition taxes to fund climate change policy
Who made those claims? The headlines don’t reveal. The headlines don’t even reveal that they ARE claims.
Do you see the difference?
The thing that bothers me is that Abbott is actually correct – we could easily get a 5% GHG reduction and make a profit doing so. But because he’s Abbott, he’s managed to get even that wrong… instead of coming right out and saying “you know that ceiling insulation rebate? It works. So we’re going to do a whole heap more of that stuff, and it’s going to whack 5% off Australia’s GHG emissions”. Not Abbott though, he talks about efficiency meaning “cut services” and “GHG reductions” meaning “subsidise polluters”. Dickhead.
The sticky point here is the electricity generators. There’s a nasty tangle of ownership and political influence that makes this stuff less easy. But for the Coal-ition it shouldn’t be that hard – mostly the generators are owned by state Labour governments, and supported by unions… two groups that I didn’t think the Coalition was beholden to. Best bet IMO would be to pull the NSW PPP trick – sell the suckers off then shaft them afterwards.
The real scandal is that both sides of politics are promising to reduce emissions by a lousy 5% by 2020. We would have to reduce our 2007 emissions by 9% to match the US per capita.
Abbot would have been a lot smarter to offer larger reductions and cost estimates for what he is actually planning to do. The annual cost of reducing emissions by 0.5% pa would have been petty cash.
Alternatively, he could have been more exciting and promised regulations to reduce the average fuel consumption of new cars to 5 litres/110km. (Would reduce emissions by about 5% by 2020. It would be a bit hard for Rudd to argue that encouraged people to import smaller cheaper cars so that oil imports could be reduced would actually be a cost to the country.
Rudd is clearly enjoying this one. Was that a smile as he faced the cameras and upped the ante on Abbott? Can’t you see them rolling around in the Cabinet room? What’s bigger than a great big tax? A mega tax! Easy peezy! I bet the drinks trolley was called in early.
I hope it had Big Kev’s preferred herbal tea or he might have bawled out the trolley dolly!
Malcolm, this year please just focus 100% of your energies on holding Wentworth. Then come back and do us proud by rebuilding a respectable Liberal Party and a loyal and effective opposition out of the election wreckage.
I am not sure how Mal could possibly be involved in “rebuilding a respectable Liberal Party” given his very dubious behaviour around Ozcar, that he managed to somehow get off the front page because ‘everybody was tired of it’.
Nor does his previous business form or asylum seeker commentary inspire confidence in this man as rebuilder of what is now a quite loathsome rump organisation.
Which ever way you look at it, it will cost money and that money comes out of the public purse which in turn is provided by taxes. It is all semantics really.
I’m just waiting for the super-colossal-gigantic-OMG-I’ve never seen a tax so big -tax.
Politics is very sad sometimes.
The so called public purse is not provided by taxes.
Moz is 100% right, the government could just spend money to achieve GHG emission reductions without putting a price on carbon or raising taxes.
Not that this would necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way of achieveing reductions, and not that this neo-liberal dominated political family of ours would even acknowledge that.
The government’s claims are, of course, blatant smears. But then these particular smears do have the rare advantage of being true.
Simply put, controlling activities you don’t like by banning them costs the economy an awful lot more than by taxing them. Of course there are cases where you should be willing to bear that cost anyway (eg no-one’s proposing just to tax asbestos), but unless the opposition intends actually banning all carbon emissions full stop that’s not the case here.
And Andos, Rudd’s already derided the coalition’s approach on GHGs as “soviet style central planning”. Abbott is a conservative, not a neoliberal.
If this tit-for-tat approach to debate is the level that they are prepared to descend to in an election year god help us all.
robbo – I think the word ‘debate’ is used with more positive connotations than it warrants. Taking up a position you don’t necessarily hold and arguing it doggedly to try and ‘win’ some kind of game is part and parcel of debating, yet people use the word as if it could describe a genuine process of reasoned discussion which might have real-world results; say, convincing participants of something they don’t already believe, or giving a rational and well-understood basis for public policy. Debate can’t do these things, and it’s not meant to – it’s just a forum for exercising rhetoric, like StoushGym™ without the filthy limericks.
I’d like it replaced in public discourse with ‘argument’, but unfortunately that word’s suffered the opposite fate.
Fine@15: “I’m just waiting for the super-colossal-gigantic-OMG-I’ve never seen a tax so big -tax.”
…If what he means by ‘impact’ is ‘otherwise we’ll have to collect it in taxes’ then $100 billion is an early starter in the S-C-G-OMG-INSATSB-tax stakes.
Said Intergenerational Report,2010 available @
http://www.treasury.gov.au/igr/igr2010/default.asp
Jeebus, is Abbott a freakn’ Taxasaurus Rex, or wot!!1!?
How long before that levy-heavy Emir of Excise takes another Toll!1!!?
Wot an impost-or! When duties call, its Abbott who says “charge”!
&c.
Hahaha, yes. Great work, E.
Derrida: they’re all bloody neo-liberals; and ‘Soviet-style’..? That’s just name calling! I expect Rudd to come up with better lines than that, geeze. There haven’t been any communist baddies in James Bond for years!
This whole thing is ridiculous. Firstly, neither Rudd’s ETS nor Abott’s regulations directly involve a tax (perhaps in a round-about way they could see other taxes increased). Secondly, ‘tax’ is not a dirty word. A carbon tax, properly fraimed, would work better than either proposal – you’d think with all this talk of carbon related taxes that one of the players would actually be suggesting a carbon tax, but No. Thirdly, either way the reduction targets are too low to save Australia from economic and ecological ruin – like 2 dim twits down a rabbit hole.
The most efficient, just and enfoceable system would be a well crafted carbon tax. It should be adjusted quarterly by an independent body, similar to what the reserve bank does with interest rates. The tax would move up and down in line with the economic and
Scientific situation. Money raised should primarily go to consumers. Also exports should be exempt – let the importer put on their own tax/ETS. Likewise we should put a carbon tax on goods we import, that way we tax what we consume and only what we consume (China could well like that idea for themselves).
@FDB But if I argue with you I must take up a contrary position!!!
Kev: I’ve had enough of this!
Tone: No you havent!
Barnyard: Have we started yet?
</python>
John D – They’re both fiddling while the environment ‘burns’ – its just a debate about what degree of burns we’ll end up with. Such is politics
If Tone and Barnyard want to play with the big boys and girls then they are going to have to lift their game. People are starting to shake their heads…
Its really not good enough just saying re the CPRS, “huge big tax, boo!”, even though Chris Toolman, Glenn Milne, David Burchell and Peter van Onselen are wetting themselves at the manliness of it all. That sort of school-yard nonsense does not constitute adversarial politics for grown-ups, in an election year.
The sad truth is that Tone is just playing a downunder version of Repug politics straight off YouTube, qua Glenn Beck and the rest of the american right-wing noise machine. Sad really. Especially as Obama has just wowed the US political class by confronting the Repugs in their own retreat and answering their “concerns” head-on in a 90 minute unscripted Q&A, mostly by saying “man, that’s just not true…”. Memo Rudd.
After watching the alien swivel-eyed Lord Monckton polluting our media for the past week, courtesy of some old farts in Noosa, we really need some more “Oh shit” moments happening re global warming out there in voterland, Fran Kelly, looking at you dear (here’s a tip, leave the atmospheric graphs alone for a while and interview a few biologists about the disappearing birds and bees in our own backyards).
Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce are dragging the Opposition, and the rest of us, into a black bog of denialism and stupidity. Meanwhile, time is slipping away for our grandchildren, bring on the DD.
Too right Grace- no shilly-shallying with this pox on the future known as Abbott and Minchin.
Rudd shouldn’t get auto-wedged into a do-nothing position either – he should take them on. Much bigger risks attend his current position of talking big and acting small.
FDB @ 19
Filthy Limericks foreva!
Bring ‘em into Federal politics? Nuh, the lazy so-and-so’s would get staff to compose ‘em, or plagiarise.
grace @ 27, I don’t get why we let Monckton into the country. After all, we exclude my namesake …
Seriously, why isn’t this fucker being mocked to within an inch of his life?
DI(NR)@30: you have put your finger on it…either Lord Monckton is so seriously weird he is unmockable, or more likely australians have forgotten their talent for ridicule. The problem is, talk-back radio, where his support has bloomed courtesy of Alan Jones etc, is a humour-free zone, populated as it is by sad old farts who worship the droppings of the idiot english ruling class.
DR (nr) @ 30,
Well, people are publishing photographs of him and allowing him to appear on TV. He looks like he’s escaped from the holding cells in Torchwood. (Yeah, I know that’s unfair, but all’s fair in love and war, and this is war.)
Look guys, Tone is only doing what oppositions should do, and that is oppose. At last the voters are getting an genuine alternative, which is what they never had when the last leader that we were trumpeting as the greatest thing since sliced bread was opposition leader.
This is seriously the unmitigated tripe that was passed off as political analysis this morning on the only source of independent news in Australia.
And I didn’t hear the word ‘honeymoon’ once. Seems that only applies to Labor politicians.
Sorry, wrong thread.