Media release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 2 June 2011:
Greg Combet has decided to have a go at me for actually answering a straight question on Lateline last night.
The paradox of course is that Greg won’t answer a straight question. The paradox of course is that when I ask Greg a straight question the answer will be silence.
How much will your Green-Labor-Independent carbon tax, Greg, cool the planet? What will be the reduction in temperature from an $11 billion carbon tax imposed on a country that produces 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions?
You will never hear anyone in the government give a straight answer to this straight question. Until they are upfront with you, you should understand that they are trying to inspire guilt and faux righteousness in proxy for facts?
The fact that they ignore is that a carbon tax on Australians is a gesture. It’s a gesture whose only discernible effect will be to exacerbate the problems so clearly evident in last quarter’s record decline in GDP.
The tax will fall on people who can’t pass on the tax and become poorer as excess cash is taken from their lives. Why should these people be used to assuage the feigned guilt of people who are doing vastly better.
I also note that Greg Combet announces the support of financial market economists for a “carbon” price as some kind of victory.
If I were the prospective trader of carbon credits I would definitely find myself a suite of economists to bestow the beauty of me making squillions from punting paper on a colourless, odourless gas. It would be a splendid idea not because of what it is going to do to the climate but what it would do to change the renovations to my house. It would be a splendid idea because it would make the jacuzzi a real possibility.
So Greg Combet you support the people, and good luck to them, who have seen you coming and are going to make an absolute bucket load, and I’ll support the people who are going to have to pay for it.
Barnaby Is Right 
Go for it Barnaby!
They try to criticize you on so many levels but they can never argue against your logic. It must be extremely painful to the Greens and ALP to be trapped in an ideological time warp which prevents them from seeing through the irrationality and ineffectiveness of their plan that will take us all down the economic toilet basin.
“punting paper on a colourless, odourless gas.”
Actually, I take issue here. What is actually being punted on is government promises, in other words, government bonds.
The more I consider this the more I think it is nothing more than a push to ‘leverage up’ government bonds, giving risk free profits for those involved, including the government.
After the KRudd fiasco you’ve got to wonder why the government is pushing so hard for another tax.