Wednesday 11 March 2009

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme 2009 bills before the Australian Parliament [transcripts]


Not since someone convinced the late Billy McMahon that trying to sound like a quavering, falsetto Winston Churchill was a good idea has a politician sounded as false as Kevin Rudd did when uttering his political sh#tstorm comment.

Or so I thought until I heard the Federal Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, on ABC TV Four Corners on Monday night trying to explain the government position on a national carbon emissions trading scheme or as government likes it to be known, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

With remarkable gravitas this politician is wrecking not only the Murray-Darling Basin with her lack of political steel, but is now condemning Australia to repeat the mistakes of others by giving away too many free carbon credits and setting emissions caps too low.

And for what? Why to ensure the comfortable profitability of the big national and multinational companies operating across Australia.

This is what a Senate estimates committee meeting was told on 23 February 2009:
Mr Comley -Senator Milne, the issue here is actually that the ET policy has explicitly two objectives, which is laid out in the policy position, and that is to reduce the likelihood of carbon leakage but also to provide transitional support to these industries. If you only had one of those objectives and it was purely a carbon leakage objective, then, other things being equal, you would have less generous assistance than is provided under the policy. But just to illustrate an example of why that last limb is there, you could have a situation of industry of someone who is undertaking quite a lot of capital investment, they then are faced with a carbon price which they may not have anticipated-some may have; some may not have had-and it may be that they do not change location at all. When you look at studies of carbon leakage all you observe is if that firm moves, but there could potentially be, with no assistance, a significant change in profitability. So the policy is a balance of the pure carbon leakage argument with a transitional argument, which is not uncommon to policies such as tariff reforms where you do not change them overnight. So it is the balance of those two that led into the ET policy.......

Mr Comley-I think the argument that industry is only raising the carbon leakage argument is not the experience I have had in consultations. It is both the carbon leakage and the question of the level of profitability for particular firms.

The Rudd Government through the Department of Climate Change has invited comment on its legislation. If you don't want to see the major polluters laughing all the way to the bank as they do the least emissions reduction possible while increasing price to the consumer at every opportunity, this may be your last chance.

How to make a submission here.
So controlling of your right to make a submission is the Prime Minister and Ms. Wong that they have supplied a 2-page template to be used in making a submission.
Posted by clarencegirl at 00:15
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