Anti-reform tax will change Australia forever

When Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd kissed to celebrate the passing of the carbon tax, they betrayed all Australians.

STRAIGHT after Julia Gillard, renegade Nationals and Greens MPs Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Adam Bandt, respectively, passed the 18 CO2 tax and policing bills, the prime minister and the man she toppled, Kevin Rudd, kissed publicly.

After those same bills passed the Senate, Greens leader Bob Brown and his deputy, Christine Milne, hugged publicly.

That kiss and hug delighted all Greens and their backers, a huge swath of Labor MPs and even some Liberal ones, such as Malcolm Turnbull, for example.

All those named above, except perhaps Mr Bandt, who the Liberals don’t intend to preference first at the coming election, will spend the rest of their lives drawing big taxpayer-funded salaries followed by indexed pensions, so they and their spouses or partners will never be burdened by the CO2 tax they all cherish.

The same can’t be said of the children of those among them with offspring, nor can it be said of their children’s children, and beyond.

The suicidal CO2 tax they’re imposing upon Australia will forever be perversely felt by workers and aspiring workers via jobs that could have been created but simply won’t materialise.

Embedded in those 18 CO2 taxing and policing bills is a permanent job-killing slug, unlike any an Australian administration has ever devised.

It is far more damaging than moves by Ben Chifley-led Labor in the late 1940s to nationalise Australia’s private banks because as Ms Gillard said, Labor and the Greens have made it “Abbott proof”, so it can never be abolished.

This inevitably reminds me of the warning by Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, made 30 years ago, that Australians were destined to become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

How prescient he was. 

So far ahead of the Rudds, Gillards, Browns and Milnes, who keep carping about Australians being destined for a so-called clean energy future and endless prosperity.

Like heck we are.

The coming tragedy will look even more farcical when those looking back to the cause of our ‘white trash’ status recall that a former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and his leftist successor, Julia Gillard, were so delighted at having presided over this that they kissed immediately after the responsible legislation was passed.

Consider some of the following inevitable outcomes.

Firstly, before the Senate’s clerk could pack-up the 18 CO2 bills to send to the governor general, we learned that methanol manufacturer Coogee Chemicals, which has a plant at Laverton, in Ms Gillard’s electorate, and had been planning a $1 billion facility in rural Victoria, Queensland or NSW, near the seat of Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, had canned that idea.

That project would have created 150 highly skilled jobs and earned billions in foreign exchange.

Methanol is a plastics industry feed stock, which means Australia will now increasingly and forever be importing it.

What’s next? Take your pick.

How about the cement industry, cornerstone of the housing and construction sectors?

Expect all Australian cement manufacturers to slowly mothball operations and our huge annual cement needs being met, in all likelihood, by China.

This will be done by importing clinker, which needs to be crushed for cement dust at building and construction sites.

Anything else? 

There are many other examples confirming Lee Kuan Yew’s warning.

As this column has warned several times, the world is approaching peak oil output, which means liquid fuel needs will be increasingly met by output from coal-to-liquids plants. But imposition of a CO2 tax makes these uncompetitive.

That’s another way of saying there’s no way anyone will outlay the huge capital sums required to erect such facilities.

Collie’s estimated 2 billion tonnes of coal reserves have the ability to meet Western Australia’s automobile, heavy trucking, tractor, and aircraft fuel requirements for more than a century.

Apart from the fact that the Barnett government sat on its hands and allowed Wesfarmers-owed Premier Coal deposits to slip into Chinese hands (after Griffin Coal’s reserves were snapped up by an Indian energy conglomerate), forget about Collie ever meeting WA’s liquid fuel needs. And the Gillard-Greens CO2 tax is equally to blame. 

What this means is that we’ll not only be increasingly importing oil and refined fuels, but could face rationing in the event of an international emergency anywhere between the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

That’s a huge swath of territory, from the eternally unstable Islamic world, across Pakistan and India, South-East Asia, the contested South China Sea, up towards the Korean Peninsula.

With most of Australia’s crude oil and refined fuels sourced from or via these regions, our national economy and our auto-oriented lifestyles face precarious times.

What economic and strategic geniuses like Ms Gillard, Senator Brown and Mr Combet can’t grasp is that their “Abbott proof” CO2 tax is a huge red sign saying ‘stop’ to a range of potential projects with older ones – like, for example, cement and steel manufacture – slowly shutting down.

Now, when you’re not establishing industries and shutting down older ones a point inevitably arrives where you’ve de-industrialised yourself.

That’s now Australia’s future, which means, and sorry for being so blunt, we’re on the road to becoming the poor white trash of Asia.

It’s as inevitable as night following day.

Here’s the bottom line of this de-industrialising policy that inevitably arises from being struck by deep greenish madness.

The leftist apparatchiks now overseeing Australia – Ms Gillard, Senator Brown and Mr Combet, primarily – constantly spruik on our TV screens about how they’re such great and farsighted reformers.

But like Ms Gillard’s infamous 2010 election pledge that: ‘There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead’, that’s a bald face ... untruth.

And the man who makes this point best and most concisely is Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson, who said the following.

“The carbon tax is not an economic reform. 

“The economic reforms of the past generation had a golden thread of increasing the international competitiveness of Australian industry.

“Past structural economic reforms on both sides of politics were unambiguously directed at increasing the productivity and competitiveness of industries like yours, and that cheque has been cashed in.” 

Those crucial 56 words should be remembered, like that kiss, that hug, and Lee Kuan Yew’s ‘poor white trash’ warning.

What the Hawke Labor financial, business and economic reforms of the 1980s did was precisely what Mr Anderson says – they enhanced “the international competitiveness of Australian industry”.

The Gillard-Brown-Combet CO2 tax does the exact opposite.

They’ve instead laid the basis for the immediate imposition of uncompetitiveness across all Australian industries and sectors by first and foremost boosting energy and other resultant costs.

That’s not reforming. It’s deforming. It’s job depriving future generations. Anyone claiming otherwise is simply telling bald-faced ... untruths.

Thanks to that trio and their Greens, Labor and Liberal hangers-on in federal parliament and elsewhere, Australia is now on track to precisely the future Lee Kuan Yew warned awaits the once lucky country.