Tag Archives: barnaby joyce

Barnaby: Greens The New Soldiers Of The Dark Age

11 Nov

Senator Barnaby Joyce writes another corker of a column for the Canberra Times (emphasis added):

This empire is collapsing as the Vandals approach

Curtin and Chifley are the Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus of the Australian Labor Party. Leader’s gifted with character and formed by the most precarious event of our nation’s history.

Keating never really blew my hair back. My initial vision of Keating, on the mentioning of his name, is a man proclaiming to the nation that “this was the recession we had to have”. He was generally the narrator more than the architect. He remains a doyen of the second floor of the Senate, the press gallery, and is now deified in musicals to bookstores, but I am always searching for the ardent navigator inside the incisive invective that the media continually proclaims to the world he possesses. He was good but he was Dean Jones not Bradman.

His forebear does, I believe, hold a far more intriguing narrative. Hawke, the drinker, the Rhodes Scholar, the charmer, the statesman, with an innate sense of the Australian people. Hawke was confident and his love of people put him at ease with the electorate and vice versa. Hawke is the triumph of the America’s Cup, the round of golf and a person who was genuinely Australian yet had that presence which resonated in the faces of other world leaders.

When I think of Kevin Rudd I see a man giving a press conference after being disposed of by Gillard. Later, I see a person being moved by the moment of the mosh pit at a concert in Perth, asking if they want to hear him sing, even though, by his own proclamation, he sung like a cow. My skin goes dank and clammy my shoulders buckle and I want to crawl under the table with embarrassment for Kevin.

Julia Gillard is the Romulus Augustus of the traditional Labor party, merely a figurehead of a fallen empire, there at the discretion and direction of the new soldiers of the Dark Age, who need a banner so they call it Green. Once they arrive in the capital you know the epoch is past and the philosophy is fallen. The Greens are the Vandals attracted by the trappings but lacking the competency to run the country which under their rule will pass to dust.

Julia says she wants 8000 new members but this may be a very telling exercise. Her leadership is soulless, her lieutenants are philosophically lazy and her army are mercenaries motivated by influence rather than cause. Get Up, The Greens, the clandestine conspirators, the ultimate benefactors of an ever diminishing union base, are her battalions. They are not motivated by going to the borders to fight for their true constituency for them their energy is directed to the internal archaic spoils of a lost Rome.

This week epitomised a nation that has lost touch with the fundamental concepts of serious management and been replaced by a creed formulated by the Magnus Opus of such wondrous works as The Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. It was tragically congruous that the carbon tax passed on the same day that the media was dominated in Australia by a trial of a case involving a certain doctor and the death of a certain singer in the United States.

So we are building a $50 billion second telephone network when we are only $32 billion away from our next debt ceiling, the point where on presentation of the nation’s credit card, the checkout attendant says “transaction declined, see bank for details.” We have a global economy that is progressing like a drunk on roller skates on the edge of a cliff. We have issues of tuberculosis in our northern neighbours, an inability to properly control our borders and the IMF predicts that China will overtake the United States as the biggest economy in the world, in purchasing power parity terms, by 2016.

Television is occupied with a voyeuristic indulgence; the trial of a doctor, for which everyone has an opinion but for which no one has any real knowledge.

From the questions on the carbon tax that I have asked Penny Wong there is no understanding of the intricate and long-lasting effects to our economy. Most Senators would not have read more than 10 pages of the 18 bills.

In voting for a carbon tax they are voting on the vibe that we can somehow affect the temperature of the globe from this, genuinely wonderful, town of Canberra, not on the stringent, analytical reality of what we are about to do as the Greens reboot our nation at their new year zero.

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Barnaby On Fire, Blight Of Greens Politics

10 Nov

Senator Joyce was on fire today, dear reader, in his speech to the government’s Quarantine Amendment (Disallowing Permits) Bill 2011 (emphasis added):

Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) (11:10): It is a pleasure to rise here in support of the sentiment of Senator Xenophon’s bill—who by reason of health is not able to be here today—though acknowledging that we will not be supporting it. But it is clear to state that we have heard a tirade—well, not a tirade, sort of a wet sponge from the Labor Party, about how the National Party has not been doing anything, but they spend their whole time complaining about the National Party and what it has done, which is fair enough.

What I can look at is the Labor Party’s record. You do not have to go too far from this town to see the effects of the Labor Party’s record on anything to do with biosecurity or anything to do with real and effective dealing with environmental issues—such things as African lovegrass, which is not that far from here, and serrated tussock. You have just given up on all these things. You do not care about them anymore. You apparently can cool the planet, but you cannot deal with African lovegrass. You can rejig the whole of the Australian economy on a colourless odourless gas, but you cannot deal with Asian honeybees. Apparently you are going to lead the world on changing an economy based on carbon dioxide, but you cannot deal with myrtle rust in your own country. It just goes to show how absurd the Labor Party have become.

I remember as a kid going in to see my dad when he was involved in the BTEC scheme—he was a vet—and spending days going out with him bleeding cattle. At a later stage he was in charge of that brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication scheme in northern New South Wales, out of Tamworth office. That was a great success. Australia got rid of brucellosis and tuberculosis. New Zealand still has it. It goes to show what a country can do when it is motivated.

But we are going to get nowhere with the Labor Party and the Greens. They are not really worried about the environment in the proper sense. What they are really worried about is the philosophy and the theatrics. They are really worried about social re-engineering; that is what they really want to do. I was listening Senator Milne’s discussion here today about quarantine and we started hearing about floods and fires and famines and all the incredible things that are apparently going to happen. But even their grand architect, Professor Flannery, says there can be seen to be ‘no discernible correlation‘ between changes in the extent of fires, floods and famines and global warming. It is one of these total absurdities that is trotted out here. What I did not hear Senator Milne or the Labor Party talk about is how they are dealing with biosecurity as it is at the moment. And of course we have no confidence in them.

You can bet your life that under this government, the Green-Labor-Independent government, fire blight will come in. It is just a matter of when. It is going to come. We have already heard today about the evidence that a quarter of the shipments have had issues pertaining to them. They are failing before they have even started. If someone said that in a quarter of your cars the brakes are going to fail then you would probably recall the cars. But they are going forward with the process under the current arrangements because they do not really care about the environment. They do not really care whether we wipe out the pear industry in Australia. They do not really care whether fire blight comes into this nation.

It is absurd. With all the trash of leaves and litter that is going to be coming in from farms, which will have fire blight, sure enough we are going to get fire blight.

What will the Labor Party do then? They will deal with it the same way they are dealing with African lovegrass, with Chilean needle grass, with St John’s wort, with the Asian honey bee and with myrtle rust. They will not deal with it because they do not really care. What they do care about are the theatrics. They care about people dressing up as koalas and parading out the front of this building. That is the Greens and the environmental movement—dress up as a koala and wave a placard. But when it comes down to dealing with the issue, when you really need the competency to grasp the issue and deal with it, they do not have it and they do not care about it. True environmentalism is actually looking after the environment in a hands-on and real way. Whatever happened to the production of an effective rust to deal with blackberries? That has gone nowhere.

I had the privilege the other day to visit the farm where Farrer developed a variety of wheat that took Australia into the 20th century. He developed it from a small plot down on the river. I saw at that point in time the sorts of competencies our nation had, the sorts of desires and the thrill that the government had to get behind people who were giants in this nation. But this government is not investing in them. This government is taking the resources out. This government is incompetent even when it comes to the health of our own people. What about the Indigenous people of Northern Australia? What happened to the tuberculosis clinics in the Torres Strait Islands? You care about the environment but you do not care about that part of the environment. That is another little thing you have moved out of the way. Let us not worry about tuberculosis coming. Let us not worry about the infection of the Australian people. If we get drug resistance in tuberculosis, we have no hope of treating it.

All you care about is the hugging and kissathons at the end of the vote. You do care about completely redesigning our nation’s economy, even though we see on television Europe falling over. The global financial markets are falling over and there is complete and utter culpability of what we did the other day. You just do not care and you step back from it. As I said the other day, it is part of the Vandals who have overtaken Rome. The philosophy is over; the Labor Party has finally been subdued. What we have in the Prime Minister is basically a manifestation of Romulus Augustus. It is all over and it is merely a figurehead. The philosophy is now occupied by somebody else. It is a sad day. The party that was once the party of Curtin and Chifley is now, what? What have you become? You are a vacuous type of shell.

Senator Milne: Madam Acting Deputy President, I raise a point of order on relevance. Until Senator Joyce arrived we were having a sensible debate in the chamber about the merits of a bill on biosecurity. I would ask that Senator Joyce direct his remarks to the bill on biosecurity.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Boyce): Order! Thank you, Senator Milne, there is no point of order. Senator Joyce.

Senator JOYCE: Thank you, Acting Deputy President Boyce. I was in my room happily listening to Senator Milne talking about fire, flood, famine, fear and loathing. This is what it always comes to, to make you feel guilty. It is what they always do. After they have made you feel guilty they say you should become righteous. The prospect of righteousness is always an amazing path to get there. The path to righteousness via the Greens and the Labor Party is a new tax. If you pay the new tax you are righteous and you are a wonderful person. Coal becomes righteous once it crosses the sea, apparently. If you burn it in China it is righteous. For uranium it is the same deal. It is righteous once it passes over water. It is an incredible position. I was wondering about this, so I found what Tim Flannery said:

Australia naturally has a high degree of variability in rainfall,—

I agree with him—

with long periods of intense droughts—

I agree with him—

punctuated by heavy rainfall and flooding,—

I agree with him on that too—

so it is difficult from observations alone to unequivocally identify anything that is distinctly unusual about the post-1950 pattern …

But that is apparently not what Senator Milne believes in. She believes in devastation. You have to make people feel scared before they bung a new tax on you. You have to make people scared before, via every power point in the house, you turn into a collection mechanism for the Australian taxation department.

Now we have Senator Larissa Waters saying that we are going to remove fossil fuels in the next decade. It is like a couple of days ago was year zero. We will all be heading out to the countryside to a new cultural revolution. We are going to sit down there and live on beetles and nuts and we will be righteous. We will be hungry, cold and miserable but we will be righteous. But that is what you do, and it makes abundant sense. Of course we can get rid of all fossil fuels in the next 10 years.

We do not need a car park anymore; we need a stable to put the horses in when we ride up here! This is the absolutely absurd position. The absurd position is evident in this. They do not care about the real environment debate—the one that takes acumen, planning and, as it says in the report, resources to deal with the issues. They do not care about that. They do not care about having a proper analysis of the statistical probability that fire blight will come in. They do not care about that.

The Greens do not care about putting their hands on the hotplate and saying, ‘I’ll bring down the government if you do not properly deal with fire blight.’ They do not care that they are not able to show anything that this Labor-Green-Independent alliance has done for the environment, bar one thing. I will give them one: they will probably get rid of rabbits on Macquarie Island. That is about it. That will be the piece de resistance. The removal of rabbits from Macquarie Island is about as good as it is going to get.

Unfortunately, I do not think that is going to stop us from getting fire blight. It is certainly not going to deal with African lovegrass. It is certainly not going to deal with Chilean needle grass. It is not going to deal with blackberry, St John’s wort, myrtle rust and the Asian honey bee. And it is not going to stop fire blight coming into our nation. When it comes to the real, on-the-ground, definitive environmental statement, they do not have one. They cannot formulate that outside this building. How can you possibly think about the proper environment when what you are really concerned about is the next manifestation of the conversation at the manic monkey cafe of inner suburban Nirvanaville? That is really what they are concerned about.

Ms Plibersek—this is the misleading way they carry on—said on 1 August 2011, ‘The thing that we need to remember about the reasons for doing this is that there is a serious threat to our economy.’ She was talking about global warming. She said that there was a serious threat to our environment of not acting. She said, ‘In environmental terms we are looking at losing the Great Barrier Reef.’ I do not know where it is going. I do not know where the Great Barrier Reef is off to. I reckon I could find it; it is just off the coast of Bundaberg. But Ms Plibersek says we are losing the Great Barrier Reef. And she says that we are losing Kakadu. Where is it off to? She says we are losing the ability to feed ourselves. What a load of rubbish!

I will tell you when we are going to lose the ability to feed ourselves. That will happen when those opposite shut down the Murray-Darling Basin. That is when we will lose the ability to feed ourselves. Listen to what they want. They want to take 7,600 gigalitres of water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. We will not have an irrigation industry. They want to shut down the thing that feeds 40 per cent of Australia.

How are they going to feed the horses that we have to ride to work because they also want to get rid of fossil fuels? This is a mad world; it is the year zero of the Greens. It is a new world and they are proclaiming it each day. Each day you read about it. We will not eat; we will not drive cars! We are going to go to 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions to take us back to 1910 levels.

So when we go through the doors in the morning—I suppose that now that we do not have a steel industry they will have to be made out of wood—how will it all work? Where is the economy that works like this? Where is this magical place? Where is this Xanadu that we are basing this on? I think it might be somewhere in the highlands of Tasmania—in a little, little house with a little, little fire that you see every now and then on the television!

Why are we doing this to the Australian people? Let us think of the other things. The Greens want to shut down rodeos. We cannot possibly have them! They are totally evil! We cannot have people out west enjoying themselves; it is immoral! As we return to being content hunters and gathers on the forest floor, we will not be allowed to have fossil fuel. We will have horses but if you leave the Greens long enough we will not be allowed to ride them—you can bet your life!

An honourable senator interjecting—

Senator JOYCE: The blacksmiths won’t. This is all part of the progression.

Senator Milne: I rise on a point of order. We are discussing a bill on a quarantine provision relating to fire blight and world trade. I ask that you ask the senator to be relevant to what is before the chamber.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Boyce) (11:26): Senator Joyce, I have been assuming that your comments were going to bring you back to the topic in hand. Could you please ensure that they do.

Senator JOYCE: Thank you very much, I will. Fire blight will come into the country under this government, this regime. What do we call the regime? Big Brother No. 1! Under this regime fire blight will come in. Without being jocular, if fire blight comes in we will lose the apple industry. We will totally lose the pear industry; it will definitely be wiped out.

We got to this position because the Prime Minister of Australia went over to New Zealand and it just seemed like a cool thing to say. She was moved by the moment. She was moved by the podium. She thought, ‘I’ve got to say something.’ She said, ‘Your apples can come in,’ and then she walked away, to the smell of burning flesh. This is part of the crazy government we have.

I don’t know; maybe if they have a change of leader they will change their position. I was watching the next contender for leadership—the former leader—sing the other day over in Perth. He was doing a marvellous job! He was being moved by the mosh pit! Apparently, he said that he sings like a cow. He was very tired. He asked the people whether they wanted him to sing. And I thought, ‘There’s my next Prime Minister. I’m feeling so comfortable about where we are! Things are looking A-okay!’

If we do not have a competent government occupying the treasury benches soon, on so many fronts—fire blight will just be one classic example—this nation is just going to start falling down around our ears. They have shown no competency. Whenever it comes to a test on biosecurity—we are not in the government; they are—they have shown no competency whatsoever in any way, shape or form on any of the major environmental issues and in the real environmental battles. There is not one thing that they can direct our attention to where they have shown a real interest in protecting the environment of Australia.

They are very interested in the social re-engineering of Australia. They have been usurped by the Greens and have now gone down the path of almost profane economics that will put the whole of Australia at threat. But they are doing nothing at all to deal with the real environmental problems.

We have had so many issues and so many battles. I can remember postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome. Now it is the fire blight issue. We have had, in the past, governments that were actually competent. The brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication campaign was the classic example of what happens when you have real, fair dinkum people who get out and do a job and bring about a result. We do not have that with this government. What we will end up with is the destruction of a large section of the agriculture of the southern basin, because this government, backed by the Greens and the Independents, will be responsible for fire blight coming into this nation.

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Barnaby Exposes Labor’s Renewable Energy Fraud

10 Nov

Media release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 9 November 2011:

Clean energy and the affect of yesterday’s vote

Prior to the passage of the carbon tax, the amount of renewable (or as the government likes to describe it ‘clean’) energy that would be generated by our nation by 2020 was 50 terawatt hours, according to a report for the government by SKM MMA.

Yesterday, the Senate passed over 1000 pages worth of law, titled the Clean Energy bills. On the passage of these clean energy bills, the amount of clean energy generated in Australia by 2020 will be 50 terawatt hours.

That’s right it is exactly the same amount. The clean energy bills will encourage exactly zero additional supply of electricity generation from clean energy sources.

So, now not only do you have the pleasure of being poorer, noting that it will have exactly zero affect on the climate, you will also have the pleasure of the clean energy bills producing absolutely no additional clean energy by 2020.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a clean energy bill doesn’t actually produce any new clean energy. It’s like all the democracy that existed in the Democratic Republic of Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, or exists now in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

As the consultants SKM MMA put it to the government in their report:

The level of renewable generation by 2020 is significantly higher only for the high price scenario, which suggests that in the absence of the LRET the carbon prices for the low price and core policy cases at that point ($13/t CO2e and $29.5/t CO2Figure 7e respectively) are not high enough to support widespread new entrant renewable generation.

(click here to download the SKM MMA extracts in pdf format)

Barnaby Joyce is an experienced accountant.

Meaning that, unlike World’s Greatest Finance Minister Wayne Swan, he can add up:

From Senator Joyce's office | click to enlarge

And as we have seen many times here on barnabyisright.com, when it comes to picking up on the important little details that reveal a fraud, Barnaby is the only one on the ball.

Oh yes, lest we forget to remind readers that in order to achieve this zero contribution of additional electricity from renewables, the government intends to set up Greens Senator Milne’s baby – the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

$10 billion of borrowed money.

To pour down the toilet of renewable energy “projects” that no sane investor will touch with a barge pole.

That’s why the government subsidy.

Because real business people (not rent-seekers) already know what Senator Joyce points out.

That “clean energy” cannot generate enough electricity to break even financially.

Unless propped up by the taxpayer.

“Clean” “renewable” energy is just another arm tentacle of the Great Global Warming Hoax.

A quasi-religious movement to enrich (1) bankers, (2) myriad rent-seekers, and (3) politicians (on retirement).

At the expense of (1) developed world citizens’ standard of living, and ultimately (2) national sovereignty (via government debt owed to foreign interests).

UPDATE:

Cough!

The Greens face widespread accusations of hypocrisy after demanding Australia abandon non-renewable energy sources, a day after voting for a carbon tax package underwritten by the continuing long-term use of gas.

The minor party, which helped design the carbon tax package, was unabashed last night, insisting Australia could be 100 per cent reliant on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy within a decade if only its politicians mustered the “political will” to do it.

A picture says it all, where words fail me –

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We Will Not Forget This Betrayal

8 Nov

Senator Joyce’s speech in the Senate today, to the Orwellian-titled Clean Energy Future bills.

Bills.

How apropos.

Enjoy the fire and brimstone (h/t to a special, anonymous source, who knows who they are):

Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) (11:20): Thank you very much, chair.

(Brown was trying to shut him down but it didn’t work …)

Senator Bob Brown: Mr Chair, I rise on a point of order. You know exactly what is happening here, which is that—

The CHAIRMAN: I have recognised a party leader, and that is in tradition with how the Senate has operated in the past. Senator Joyce is a party leader. He has the call over Senator Milne.

Senator Bob Brown: Yes. Given that recognition you have given, I ask you to ask the chair if that ruling by you is in order.

The CHAIRMAN: is practice and it is already documented by the Standing Committee on Procedure. Senator Joyce, you have the call. There is no point of order.

Senator JOYCE: It is a very sad day when Al Gore has more effect on the Prime Minister of Australia than the Australian voter. It is a very sad day when we have to cease this debate because the Greens have to go to Durban, where we now find out Leonardo DiCaprio will be there with Angelina Jolie, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bono. It is a very sad day when these people are more important than the people of Blacktown, the people of Ipswich, the people of the suburbs and the people of the regions. It is a sad day when we introduce a new, broad based consumption tax delivered to every house whether they like it or not, paid on the price of the heater that keeps them warm, paid on the price of the air conditioner that keeps them cool, paid on the food that sustains them.

It is a very sad day when we bring in a broad-based consumption tax which basically ignores the working families of this nation in favour of a conceit and a frolic. The biggest beneficiaries of this tax will be the big banks through the commissions* they will make on the future trading scheme over the will of working families and due to the actions of the Greens and the Labor Party, who have completely deserted their principles because they have now evolved into a higher being which lives in contempt of the Australian people.

This legislation is the height of foolishness for this nation, which as we speak is a mere $32 billion away from our next debt ceiling. When our nation’s credit card is presented, the attendant will say, ‘Transaction declined; please go see your bank.’ It is a very sad day when we start progressing down a path of reorganising our nation and our economy on account of a colourless, odourless gas. It is the height of foolishness

It is a very sad day when cheap power, one of our greatest competitive advantages, is given up. We have a choice here between cheap power and cheap wages; they have chosen cheap wages. They are opening the door so that those who compete against us can take away what remnants we have of a manufacturing industry. They will do it because they do not care. They have evolved into a higher organism; they do not care anymore. It is all theatrics—the theatrics of Bono, the theatrics of Schwarzenegger, the theatrics of Angelina Jolie and the theatrics of the Greens. That is what it is all about.

It is a very sad day when the weatherboard and irons and the bricks and tiles of the suburbs are subjugated to the will of the big banks. It is a very sad day when the Australian people find that they have been misled by a warrant which was made to them and on which they cast their vote—a warrant that said quite explicitly that there would be no carbon tax—and when the office of the Prime Minister is stymied and sullied and basically cast into the mud because of the will of a disparate corner of the chamber that has now, like a praetorian guard inside the Labor Party, taken control.

It is a very sad day when the minister responsible for the passage of this legislation is incapable of giving answers to any of the questions I ask because it does not matter—’you don’t need an answer anymore’; this is all about allowing Senator Brown and these people to have their time at Durban. It is absolutely absurd to believe that this legislation will do anything to the temperature of the globe. Nothing is going to happen to the temperature of the globe because of this legislation; it will stay precisely on the course that it is on now. Whether the temperature is going up, down or sideways, this legislation will make no difference. People will be poorer—that will definitely happen—but this legislation will do nothing for the climate, even according to the comparative analysis.

It is absurd to think that, with the passage of this legislation, Hu Jintao in China will suddenly wake up and say: ‘I’ve seen the light! I’m now going to participate in a carbon tax like Australia. I’m going to follow that lemming off the cliff.’ It is absolutely absurd to think that Manmohan Singh in India is saying to the Indian people, ‘No—you can stay on bikes; you can keep your standard of living so you can follow Australia.’ Is absurd to think that Barack Obama is tossing and turning in the middle of the night worrying about what our position is. We are doing this only to ourselves. It is the ultimate act of self indulgence.

The Labor Party have deserted their principles. The Labor Party have deserted the working families of Australia. The Labor Party should remind themselves of one thing: it is totally absurd for them to believe that the Australian people will not remember this at the next election. At the next election, they will be waiting for you. I have seen this before in recent political history. If you think they have forgotten, fool is you. They will remember it, and we will make certain that every day we come and present this argument to you. Between now and the next election will not be a reprieve; you will be constantly reminded of the deceit that each one of you have shown the Australian people.

It was not just Julia Gillard who got elected on a false promise. It is not just Julia Gillard who has let the Australian people down but every person who made warrant to the electorate that they were part of a government which would not bring in a carbon tax. Each one of them has gone to the electorate and basically not told the truth. Now, apparently, we believe in this chamber that it is not important to tell the truth; it is not important to be clear about key policy objectives prior to an election. How did we get to this position?

What was the debate that brought this legislation about? Why did you desert not only the principles of your own party but also the principles of the whole of the Australian people? Why do you think that there is that palpable frustration—that white fury—which will descend on you because of the decisions you have made? Are the Australian Greens going to save the Australian Labor Party the next election? No, they will not; they will crucify you at the next election. You have decided to walk away from faith, family and the Labor Party in order to allow the Australian Greens to run the agenda.

This legislation works on one false premise: you believe that carbon, as it is at the moment, is free—you believe that people get their power, their food and their fuel for free. People cannot afford things as it is now—they are struggling as it is now; life is hard enough as it is now—yet you have decided to desert them. You have decided to desert the people of Blacktown, to desert the people of Seven Hills, to desert the people of Ipswich, to desert the people of Rockhampton. You have deserted them for whom? You have deserted them for Dr Bob Brown, Al Gore, Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio—and Tony Windsor, as a part-architect of this legislation, obviously also holds responsibility. The Australian people will not forget this. You have given us an arrow in our quiver which we will use against you time and time again.

This is a very, very depressing day for Australia, and you watch at the end. The end of this will show absolutely, in cast iron, how out of touch this is. When this vote goes through you will see backslapping, hugging and a kissathon going on. What are you going to say to the person who lives with Black and Gold in their cupboard because they cannot afford the power as it is? What are you going to say to the worker who loses their job for some ridiculous concept of a green job? There are only two types of jobs in Australia. There are real jobs and cheap jobs, and you are about to give them cheap jobs and let our nation down.

* Barnaby is wrong on this vital point. The banks will make far, far more from their trade in carbon derivatives:

ANZ’s head of energy trading said the value of the derivatives carbon market would dwarf the $10 billion initially raised by the government, according to the AFR.

Learn all about the Ticking Time Bomb Hidden In The Carbon Tax.

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Sad Day For Australia: Barnaby

8 Nov

Greens leader Bob Brown hugs his deputy Christine Milne after the tax passed through Senate today. Photo: Andrew Meares

Media release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 8 November 2011:

It is a very sad day for most Australians that we are about to “move forward” with legislation to redesign our economy on a colourless, odourless gas that quite obviously will put up the price of power and put pressure on real jobs in the real economy.

It is a very sad day when we approve a new broad based consumption tax delivered to every house whether they can afford it or not via the power points above their skirting boards, via the heater that keeps them warm, via the air conditioners that keep them cool, via the power that cooks their food, via the washing machine that cleans their clothes.

It is a very sad day when a government seems oblivious to the economic turmoil of the world and belligerently sets the ship of state blindly into precarious waters where the carbon tax we pay will be far in excess of any other scheme in the world, and our own government fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of the world has no such scheme at all.

It is a very sad day when the Australian people are taken for granted, deceived with a platitude addendum that “don’t worry about it; they are just simple souls, who’ll forget about our deceit and get over it.”

It is the height of conceit to think that other nations such as India or China, which the IMF states that by 2016 will be the largest economy in the world, will somehow be influenced by the legislation of our nation at the expense of their people.

We are more guided by Al Gore than by common sense and the chambers of this building have become fascinated with a highly naïve view that disregards the reality that we are merely 32 billion dollars away from our debt ceiling, the point at which on presentation of the nation’s credit card the checkout operator will say “transaction declined – see bank for details”.

One would think that we would be doing everything we can at this juncture to make our nation’s economy strong; to dispense with wondrous thoughts and replace them with utter pragmatism. We should look to the core requirements of core Australians which is to keep control of their cost of living and, more to the point, do nothing to exacerbate the loss of real jobs that require cheap power as their only competitive advantage over other nations who have cheap labour in abundance.

Yet today will end in a back slapping, hugging, kiss-a-thon that will be the bitterest of pill for those away from Parliament House who make the ultimate payment on this absurd tax.

Barnaby is right.

UPDATE:

And he fights on –

Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said his party would not stop fighting against the carbon price even after it became law later today.

“We can’t give up on this, it is just insane,” he said.

“The Michael Jackson trial is Hollywood and this carbon tax is pure Hollywood.

“It works on the premise that we can somehow affect the climate, and it is absolutely bumpkin.”

 

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Barnaby: Labor Is Rudderless, Clueless, Hopeless

4 Nov

Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:

The Qantas chief, Alan Joyce, has been hanging around Parliament House for the past few weeks, not because of an impending aviation calamity, but apparently because he likes the decor and the coffee. Well, that is what you would have to believe if you are to believe the Government.

To say the Qantas lockout and fallout came as a surprise does not pass muster especially now in light of the abundant leaks from key Labor Party ministers, all protecting their jobs in the shadow of this fiasco, so as to quarantine themselves from the political fallout in the rumoured leadership change.

Julia Gillard wrote the Fair Work Act when she was Industrial Relations Minister in 2009. Section 431 allows the minister to demand the parties come to the table and avoid the massive damage which has happened to the nation’s airline and our nation’s image. The Government had at its disposal the mechanism to avoid the travel chaos over the weekend. However, Gillard was not convinced of her own competencies in writing the Act or her Government’s capacity in administration of her own Act. She claims that section 431 could not be used because it has not been used before. Well, why did you put it there? It appears she did not even source legal advice until Saturday afternoon. Breathtaking!

Our nation’s Government is not on auto pilot – it is rudderless, clueless and hopeless. The Qantas dispute is a metaphor for the Government’s day-to-day management as we lurch from crisis to crisis. It is the same management style as the live cattle debacle which brought about a middle-of-the-night closure of the live cattle trade that we did not need while creating an immense diplomatic issue with our largest neighbour. From overreaction to no reaction at all; in fact with the Qantas issue to a position where we are in a desperate search for a government pulse. The vision of flying back into Canberra this week, on a very crowded Virgin flight, was one of a government fascinated in cooling the planet while we raced past $215billion in gross debt. Qantas planes sat forlornly on the tarmac as a new aviary for swallows. But then the Qantas debacle is not a new pattern for the Government.

During the election last year Gillard promised to implement whatever the Murray-Darling Basin Authority decided. After the authority released a plan that was a dud, the Government backed away, and started blaming us for introducing the Water Act. Now the Murray-Darling Basin draft plan is about to be released and the Government will have to display a competency, completely absent at the moment, to avoid the public furore which occurred last year.

Coal seam gas is an issue that has to be addressed in a more complete manner, as demanded by public concerns, but no senior Labor Party members are offering any solutions. At the moment they seem more obsessed with CO2 than H2O.

Labor has provided the apogee of its political engagement with Australians with the carbon tax even though Canada is running a thousand miles from any similar action, and Europe has a scheme which is little else than tokenism supported by a volatile and at times fraudulent carbon market, where the scams associated with carbon credits would make pyramid scheme marketers blush. China is improving the carbon intensity of its economy by pulling down dirty little coal-fired power stations and building massive new coal-fired power stations. Absurdly, we will pay China for the carbon credits it generated in its country under our carbon tax with money borrowed from them.

Yes, the carbon tax legislation was finalised with a back-slapping, clapping, kiss-a-thon mirrored in the big banks with a salivating let’s go out to lunch on Bob Brown’s big bank billion dollar bonus as the commissions on the permits transfer money from the suburbs to the centre of town.

In a political team when it becomes apparent that the halfback cannot pass, the five-eighth cannot catch and the coach is a plant from another greener team, then the crowd of supporters dismally dwindles to a core of the loving family members, the morbidly curious and those recently removed from the closest pub.

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Australia On Target To Hit Debt Ceiling By Mid-2012

2 Nov

Click to enlarge | Source: Australian Office of Financial Management (AOFM)

Your humble blogger met Senator Joyce for the first time on 1 July this year.

On introducing myself and mentioning this blog, Barnaby’s very first words to me … were words of humility.

He immediately referred self-deprecatingly to his now-famous warning in late 2009 about the risks of rising US Government debt leading to “possible” default.

You remember. His was the warning that no one wanted to hear; that drew the wrath and mockery of Rudd, Swan, Tanner, Chris Bowen, then Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, and of course, all of our lamestream media economic “experts”. Ignorant, arrogant, foolish ridicule, that prompted the launch of this blog.

Barnaby was quick to volunteer that his warning about US debt was nothing special; rather, in his opinion it was simply obvious that the rising trajectory of US Government debt must eventually run smack into their debt ceiling.

As we all know from the early August kerfuffle over raising the US debt ceiling, a political crisis that threatened to blow up the world economy … Barnaby was right.

Since this blog began in early 2010, we have seen time and time again, that when it comes to matters financial, Barnaby is the only one on the ball.

Doubtless a big contributing factor is that he is an experienced Chartered Accountant, and not a lawyer cum union hack, or a career political hack with an Arts degree.

In May, for example, Barnaby was the first to rail against the Green-Labor minority government quietly sneaking in a budget provision to raise Australia’s debt ceiling by 25%, to a quarter of a Trillion dollars ($250 Billion). Even though no one is supposed to dare question Wayne’s authority:

As Treasurer Wayne Swan was congratulated by colleagues after Tuesday’s budget speech, Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten introduced draft laws allowing the government to increase the amount it can borrow from $200 billion to $250 billion.

The proposed legislation would also remove a requirement that the Treasurer explain why the extra money is needed.

In recent weeks, Barnaby has upped the ante in continuing to make good on his pledge to never rest in pointing to the dangers of rising government debt.  And fair enough too, when they’re continuing to borrow on the national “credit card” at a staggering rate.

Indeed, Wayne and Co have blown out our total Gross Debt Outstanding by over $7 billion a month in September and October, to a new record $215.6 Billion.

Which begs the question, “When will we run into our new debt ceiling of $250 Billion?”

That is, the new one Wayne set only 5 months ago, in May this year.

The chart above tells the story.

Our debt trajectory suggests that our Green-Labor government will bang into our new debt ceiling around mid-2012.

Unless something goes pear-shaped first, of course.

Like, say, a big fall in our Terms of Trade? Due to a big fall in the price of our biggest export, the iron ore sold to Chinese steel mills, perhaps?

Steel China Iron Ore Fines cfr main China port USD/dry metric tonne (MBFOFO01:IND)

Oops.

Like, say, a 32 month low in the latest measure of Chinese manufacturing? (h/t ZeroHedge)

China Manufacturing PMI prints at 50.4, down from 51.2, when consensus was expecting an increase to 51.8. This is the lowest print in 32 months, and the lowest since February 2009. But wait, before concluding that this is very bad news, uh, ahem… well, sorry, we haven’t taken the CNBC spin school yet. It’s bad news and the hard landing is coming. We leave the spin to the professionals.

Click to enlarge

Oops.

And there’s a lot more “oopses” where they came from. Including internal “oopses” … like Australian house prices and sales both falling … and the Reserve Bank starting to cut interest rates again; which means trouble’s afoot, and they are hoping their action will prompt you to be a complete idiot and start borrowing and spending like a drunken sailor Green-Labor politician.

Dear reader, the signs are all there that a real SHTF moment draws near once again, a la 2008.

Only worse.

Much worse.

Can you say “stimulus”?

Wayne can.

Do you think our government will stop spending more than they bring in from taxing us when they smack into our new debt ceiling?

Not if new Treasury Secretary and former student of US Federal Reserve chairman “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke has anything to do with it.

We already know his views on endless debt.

Here’s what happened back in June, when Barnaby kicked up a stink over our government jacking up Australia’s debt ceiling on the sly:

On Wednesday in Senate Estimates, our [new Treasury Secretary] Martin Parkinson was challenged by Senator Barnaby Joyce over this utterly incompetent and reckless Labor/Green government’s decision, just before the Budget, to sneak in new legislation to raise our debt ceiling too.  By $50 Billion – a 25% increase. To a new all-time record debt level of $250 Billion.

Just like America. The only difference is the scale.

And what did Mini-me Parkinson have to say?

Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce wanted to know what would happen if the government was prevented from lifting its gross debt ceiling by a further $50 billion to $250 billion, as proposed in the budget.

“I couldn’t imagine that parliament would be so foolish,” Parkinson replied.

It would have “serious ramifications” for the operation of government.

So, dear reader, you already know what is going to happen in this country.

Green-Labor are firmly on course to bang up hard against our new debt ceiling, in 2012.

Even without another round or two of “stimulus” borrow-and-spending, to prop up the economy.

The all-knowing genius of Treasury Secretary Mini-me Parkinson will (of course) support the government in raising the debt ceiling even higher.

Our interest-on-debt bill of $1.59 million per hour will rise even higher.

And at some point … sooner rather than later, your humble blogger would suggest … the great external debt-driven forces of the USA, Europe, and/or China, will send the wave that collapses our own financial house of cards.

You can bet your falling house price on it.

“If you do not manage debt, debt manages you”
~ Barnaby Joyce, February 2010

Barnaby is right.

UPDATE: 12:41am

Ummmm, what was that I was saying? … “the signs are all there that a real SHTF moment draws near once again, a la 2008. Only worse. Much worse” …

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou plunged the euro and stock markets back into crisis on Monday [evening, northern hemisphere time] with a shock announcement that he would put a hard-fought rescue deal to a referendum…

All of Europe’s main stock markets registered sharp falls at the new risk of Greek default and contagion, with the German blue-chip DAX 30 stocks index slumping by more than five percent, French shares were down over four percent and London’s stocks fell more than three percent.

Athens witnessed a meltdown as stocks plunged 6.31 percent amid warnings that a rejection of a deal that is deeply unpopular in Greece would force it to leave the 17-nation bloc which uses the euro single currency.

“This is a referendum, in which they’re effectively voting on Greece’s euro membership,” Alexander Stubb, the Europe minister for Greece’s fellow single currency member Finland, told the commercial MTV3 network.

In a sign of the deep unease in European capitals, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were to hold talks by phone.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, another leader under pressure as a result of the eurozone crisis, registered his sense of shock and annoyance.

“There is no doubt the Greek decision to hold a referendum on the European Union’s rescue plan is having a negative effect on the markets,” he said. “This is an unexpected decision that generates uncertainties after the recent European Council and on the eve of the important G20 meeting in Cannes.”

Italian stocks plunged 6.12 percent, led by big falls for banks…

In an online commentary, the Moneycorp currency broker said Papandreou had presented Greeks with “the ultimate Hobson’s Choice”.”

“They could either have their financial eyes ripped out by austerity measures or by the chaos that would follow the total bankruptcy of Greece and the wipe-out of its financial institutions,” it said.

Nicola Rossi, an opposition senator in Italy, warned the mounting cost of borrowing for the government in Rome had the potential to further scupper attempts to safeguard the euro.

Under last week’s deal, the eurozone plans to increase the stockpile of cash in a bailout fund to some one trillion euros but many observers suspect that it will be an insufficient firewall if a country of the size of Italy collapses.

“The Greek government’s decision has unleashed havoc on the markets. It wasn’t very well thought through,” Rossi, an economist, told SkyTG24.

“The problem is that Italy is the weak link in the euro chain so we are under particular scrutiny.”

“We all know that when our borrowing rate is close to seven percent our debt risks becoming unsustainable. The situation is extraordinarily serious.”

And from Bloomberg:

Greece’s referendum poses a threat to financial stability in the euro region and increases the risk of a “disorderly” default, Fitch Ratings said. Papandreou’s grip on power weakened before a confidence vote on Nov. 4 as six senior members of the ruling party called on the prime minister to step down, state- run Athens News Agency reported, without citing anyone.

“The risk of a Lehman-style disorderly default now looms a bit larger than before, including some residual risk that Greece may leave the euro zone if it rejects the offer of orderly debt relief in exchange for harsh new spending cuts and reforms,” Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Joh. Berenberg Gossler & Co. in London, wrote in a note…

The cost of insuring against default on sovereign debt surged the most in almost four months with the Markit iTraxx SovX Western Europe Index of credit swaps linked to 15 governments jumping 29 basis points to 333 basis points. Contracts on Italy soared 46 to 498 basis points, France was up 16 at 192 and Germany climbed 10 to 94 basis points.

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“Quite Obviously, Banks Are Going To Love This”

31 Oct

Barnaby railed brilliantly against the Clean Energy legislation in the Senate today.

Truth embracers … please enjoy (my emphasis added):

Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) (12:17):  I think it is important to start by saying that the climate change debate is an ongoing debate. One moment ago we had the argument about caution, and I accept that, but to say that everything is concluded is ridiculous. That should not be accepted, and to start off I would like to quote Professor Judith Curry, who has put out a paper recently saying that, although carbon dioxide levels are rising—she does not refute that—the temperature is not following the same path and whatever is driving issues pertaining to temperature rise it is not, to her mind as someone with immense experience in this field, being driven in the form of carbon dioxide, as others presume it is. Also, I would like to look at other issues such as those in the latest work by Donna Laframboise, who has clearly pointed out—and I think this is important—that a third of the so-called ‘peer reviewed sources’ from the IPCC have not actually been peer reviewed. These sorts of issues need to be put on the table because people are getting away with making categorical statements that are not actually correct.

It is also very important to put on the record that those with a strong interest in a financial and pecuniary gain from a carbon trading permit system have been the greatest advocates of it. Quite obviously, banks are going to love this. Big banks are about to get a big bonus, a massive bonus, because they have the capacity to collect commission from trading permits. So this is a big bank bonus that people are going to have to pay. When they say, ‘Oh, it’s only the major emitters who have to pay this,’ there is an assumption that they absorb the costs. But they do not and they pass the costs down by the powerline to every house in Australia, so through the skirting boards of every house every person pays for this. They pay for it through every fashion and through every mechanism of their life, from when they heat their house during winter and when they cool their house during summer and when they cook their dinner and when they vacuum their carpet to when they watch television. No matter what they do this new broad based consumption tax will be collecting money from them.

This is a broad based consumption tax for which we have something that is completely new in this country, a mechanism to put up tax without it ever going through the parliament, so without it ever going through both houses of parliament. That is something that I never thought we would be voting for. The Climate Change Authority will just say that in their war against the climate—and these people are always warring against people and things—they have to take more action, so they will make a recommendation which becomes a regulatory instrument—that means it does not have to be voted on—and they will just jack up the tax rate. And where do they want to take the tax rate to? It will be for an 80 per cent reduction in emissions. It takes you back to the levels we were at in 1910, so you would have come to here on a horse! How are we going to have an economy then? That is $131 a tonne. We are starting at $23 a tonne and it goes up to $131 a tonne. What works? Where will we be? What we are doing to our nation with this is just so insane. This is the most peculiar thing that I have ever seen. Why? Because you have got a choice. You can have cheap wages or cheap power if you want to be on the manufacturing side of production in a global economy where they move products around. So if you say, ‘I’m going to have dear power,’ are you going to have cheap wages or are you going to shut the show down? They talk about green jobs. Where are they? Where are these mythical green jobs that are going to come over the horizon? Where are these jobs? Where are they right now?

Are you relying on this? Are you going to take the person who is on a substantial income? There are only two types of jobs in this world. There are jobs that pay well and jobs that pay very, very badly, and where you are going to end up now is with the jobs that pay very, very badly.

It is the most annoying thing. When I think about the metaphors from the past weekend the first vision will be flying down here on a Virgin airliner and seeing all the Qantas planes parked on the tarmac and becoming new homes for swallows because apparently we can cool the climate but we cannot actually manage to keep planes in the air. The second will be us debating a mechanism in this chamber by which, apparently, single-handedly we can change the temperature of the globe from a room in this building. And the final vision will be one of Kevin Rudd dancing in Perth. This is the manic, mad world that we have now arrived in. This is it.

The Greens, to their credit, have taken over the show. They are driving the agenda. They have said, to quote Senator Milne: ‘This is the beginning of a new wave of thinking’, and it is—their thinking. They are running the show. That is the new wave of thinking. It is completely naive, and in some instances the reality of what happens to our country and where the semblances of power will be moved to will be almost sinister.

I have just listened to them discussing a four-degree temperature increase. That is very similar to what Peter Garrett said when he was talking about six-metre sea rises by the end of the century. Six metres! Even the IPCC says that at best it could be 60 centimetres. This is always their way. First of all, make you fear; make fear and loathing. Make you scared. Make you upset—impending doom. Then moralise: ‘We mustn’t have this. We must moralise. You must be better than that. You must be righteous. You must be good.’ Then there is the third part of it. The third in the troika of course is to create the mechanism behind it. To feel good, to be righteous, to stop all these terrible things happening, you must have a new tax. A new tax will absolve you of all your sins. A new tax in this Greens confessional will make you righteous, like them. A new tax will allow you once more to assuage your guilt and you will now be an honourable person.

But whenever we take them to the prickly issue of how much this tax is going to cool the temperature of the globe, obviously the answer is nothing. Not one person, not the most ardent supporter of global warming, says that this tax will do anything. It does nothing to change the temperature of the globe. It is merely a gesture. And the inconvenient truth is this: they never admit that this does nothing to actually change the climate. It will most definitely make you poorer. It will most definitely put manufacturing out of production. It will most definitely change the whole scale of the social dynamic and where the power is situated. It will most definitely bring in a new tax that does not need to go through the parliament. But it is not going to affect the temperature.

If we had a tax on malaria, as mad as that is it would actually cure people of malaria. It would actually save someone’s life. If we had a tax on polio we could actually do something. As mad as it is, you could actually do something. But we have a tax that does nothing; it just makes you poorer. Again, you will be sending $56.9 billion a year overseas to buy carbon permits—$56.9 billion to Prince Umfufu from western Nigeria. If you just send him your bank account details he will send you some carbon permits. It will be the greatest scam on earth. Even by 2020, it will be $3.2 billion a year. I want you to ponder on what you could buy with $56.9 billion a year, the roads you could fix for $56.9 billion a year. This is the greatest social engineering exercise and it goes beyond social engineering just in our own country. This is the divesting of the wealth of the Australian people to send overseas, and we are just sitting back.

It is going to happen because Mr Windsor did a deal with the Labor Party and there are ramifications of that deal. I will go through the document. You have to understand that in the legislation the government are talking at times about sending people to jail for 10 years for breaches. They do not care about it. This is the new insane world, the world where the Greens now bring in the guillotine and do not give you leave to speak. They are now also bringing about a whole new sort of world. There are real ramifications for people in this legislation. People will be dealing in something that formerly was free. A colourless odourless gas that you are all breathing now and that was formerly free is now going to be something that is monitored, checked and charged for, and if you do not do the right thing they can send you to jail. Why are you letting them do that to your country? It is just the most peculiar thing that we have sat back idly and let this happen. It has become enmeshed. Everything that was formerly free that was given to people by nature, by God, by whatever blows your hair back that you think is associated with you, they are now charging you for. Vegetation is now owned by the state. Water is now owned by the state. And now you have the ownership of air; it is now owned by the state. Why are we doing this to our country? What is the purpose of all this? Why are we getting sucked into this?

By 2050 how much this will affect the Australian economy is equivalent to the size of the Australian economy now. By their own modelling, we will go back from our opportunity size by what the actual size of our economy is at the moment. So when you go out the door and look around and say, ‘This is the size of the economy’, that is how much you are going to compromise for something that is not actually going to fix the temperature of the globe. What does this affect? Let us just look at this building. It is going to affect steel. We will really struggle to compete and have a steel industry in our nation. People say, ‘I believe in manufacturing.’ If you believe in manufacturing, why would you bring in a tax against one of the most vital inputs? Underneath us is concrete. This will destroy the concrete industry; we will not have a concrete industry. Things were brought here on trucks. I know the TWU brought these seats here. I know that Senator Sterle brought these seats here. It is on transport. It is on the transport of things to here.

You say, ‘It’s not on agriculture.’ Yes, it is. It is on fertiliser. It is on power. It is on wire. It is on steel. It is on everything. And, ultimately, it can come in on agriculture. It said so in the document itself.

Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves? To be honest, I think this has been a great mechanism by the left wing, led by the Australian Greens, to bring in a sense of guilt and then behind that guilt place the new agenda of where they want things to go. There are contrarian views out there. There is a massive number of contrarian views out there by reputable people such as Professor Judith Curry and even by one of the lead scientists for the IPCC, Professor John Christy. He is an atmospheric scientist. He is a person who actually studies the atmosphere. He said, ‘Yes, the world is warming but not nearly as much as we thought it was initially, and there is nothing you can do about it.’ Certainly in Australia there is nothing we can do about it—but we just ignore that.

So what is the purpose of this tax? What is the purpose of this social re-engineering exercise? Let me go back to the issue of democratic right—the right of the Australian people. The Australian people said that they did not want this tax. Other people might have said that they wanted it; however, you must respect the right of the Australian people. If an election means anything, then one of the warrants that you give on your formative policy positions should be respected. You have to stand behind it, otherwise the whole purpose of politics and what people say to you behind a camera on election night is a farce. It means that you cannot believe anything. You might say, ‘I believe in global warming’—sobeit. But the issue is that, if a person makes a promise, if they make a statement, you expect as a matter of honour that that office is respected and they keep their word, because if they do not keep their word then you cannot trust anything that is said here. It all becomes irrelevant. Why did we let our nation get to a point where we just basically allowed somebody to say something and then completely and utterly abscond from their promise? Why was their absconding from that promise then endorsed by the Greens and by others? Why would we do that? It makes the whole position farcical.

Australia, by the way, is not actually going to reduce carbon emissions with this tax. We will just end up buying credits from overseas. The carbon credit market is one of the most volatile in the world. It is the worst investment situation you could ever put yourself in. What are we putting in there? We are putting our whole nation in there.

The government says that without this tax you will not have certainty. I will give you a classic example of certainty, and here are two arguments for it. I am certain that under a coalition government the price of carbon permits in 10 years time will be zero, because they will not be there. The price will be zero. You can plan on that with absolute certainty under a coalition government. Pick any one of those who support this tax and ask: ‘What will the price on carbon be in 10 years time? What will its price be in eight years time? Yet a certain group of people say that this is their argument for certainty. I think it is the most uncertain thing we could ever be involved with. How are we going to manage this? Who are the arbiters? The arbiters on how long you can be sent to jail if you get it wrong are all in here. And for what? We will be sending people to jail for something that was formerly free, that was just there, that was just part of it. No-one ever thought that breathing in and breathing out had an implicit cost. They have not decided at this point in time to charge for it, but they were thinking about charging for animals on farms. Do not think it is not beyond them. They were thinking about that. They pushed away from it. They were going to start charging for cows and sheep. These are the same people who believe that cows, sheep and people are all sort of equivalent. So I suppose it makes sense in the long course of things that you would have to start charging people. Every time you breathe in, as Senator Williams will tell you, that is 386 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and every time you breathe out it is 40,000 parts per million. There must be an implicit cost there. You are not morally righteous: you are warming the globe as you breathe. This is absolutely and utterly absurd.

Of course, it is worse for regional Australia because the further you go the more for transport you pay: the greater the distance, the higher the cost. Electricity in the regions will also be at a higher cost. For what? So that we can assuage the moral righteousness of a certain group of people who, by making you feel guilty, have now managed to manufacture a tax and enmesh it in every corner of your life. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been gullible and have swallowed it.

I would say that always the first job of the fourth estate is to be sceptical. What is the crime of scepticism? The job of the fourth estate is to be sceptical. One of the philosophical virtues of the fourth estate is its scepticism. We do not need a fourth estate if people are not sceptical. If people just take whatever we say as the truth, scepticism is purposeless. I get terribly annoyed when it is said that a certain media house is not complying with an edict given to them by the Labor Party and the Greens—the fourth estate dare be sceptical; they dare to question. Of course they have to question. That is their job. But the more questions that are asked, the more answers we seem not to be provided with.

We are going down this absolutely manic path at a time of total and utter economic uncertainty and when really the only thing we should be focusing on is how we quarantine ourselves from the turmoil of Europe. We know that Europe is just another report away from another market fluctuation and a downturn. How do we quarantine ourselves from the loss of manufacturing jobs to South-East Asia? How do we quarantine ourselves from the exposures that we are currently creating? What are we doing that is prudent? What are we doing that is actually putting our nation in a strong place? Are we being conservative and provident, or are we on a frolic that is highly dangerous. Is it something that we can rewind from? I might remind you that last week the government extended the debt by $200 million on Friday and then on Sunday they just flicked in, under ‘Australian government securities outstanding’, another $1.7 billion.

We are now at $215-plus billion in gross debt. Our ceiling is $250 billion. We have just extended our ceiling because we bashed through it, otherwise the whole place would have shut down when we got to the limit of our overdraft. Now we are only $35 billion from the next ceiling and we are borrowing about $2 billion a week. If they do not extend the ceiling, we have got big problems. In an environment like that I would not be going down the path of a carbon tax. I would be doing everything in my power to try and make the business as strong as possible. I would be doing everything in my power to make sure we have the money in the future to support hospitals, to support manufacturing jobs and to support agriculture. I would be doing everything to batten down the hatches. If we go down this path, we are doing everything in our power to make the future of our nation a very scary place.

Barnaby is right.

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Trading Carbon Permits Is “The Greatest Scam On Earth”

31 Oct

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Debate on the government’s carbon tax has got off to a spluttering start in the Senate.

A package of 19 bills is being considered by the upper house for the first time, following its approval by the House of Representatives this month.

As debate was due to start today, Opposition senate leader Eric Abetz moved to suspend standing orders to allow debate of a motion aimed at delaying consideration of the bills until after the next election.

The Australian people were entitled to a say because the government had been “grossly misleading” by stating there would be no carbon tax before the 2010 election, he said.

Labor and the Australian Greens used their numbers to defeat the motion 35-31.

It is crystal clear then.

Labor and the Greens do not believe in heeding the will of the voters.

Understandable really.

Because both parties are party to “the greatest scam on earth”:

Nationals senate leader Barnaby Joyce predicted the carbon price would be worth nothing within 10 years.

“Because they won’t be there,” he told Parliament.

“You can bank on that with absolute certainty under a Coalition government.”

Senator Joyce also described the trading of carbon permits as “the greatest scam on earth”.

Indeed.

As we have seen in previous posts, carbon “permits” do not even exist.

They are nothing more than numbers. Electronic digits, in the government’s Australian National Registry Of Emissions Units computer:

Division 2—Issue of carbon units

94 Issue of carbon units

The Regulator may, on behalf of the Commonwealth, issue units, to be known as carbon units.

95 Identification number

A carbon unit is to be identified by a unique number, to be known as the identification number of the unit.

98 How carbon units are to be issued

(1) The Regulator is to issue a carbon unit to a person by making an entry for the unit in a Registry account kept by the person.

(2) An entry for a carbon unit in a Registry account is to consist of the identification number of the unit.

(3) The Regulator must not issue a carbon unit to a person unless the person has a Registry account.

There you have it, dear reader. From the government’s own Bill, now before the Senate.

There is no such thing as a physical carbon “permit”. No printed bits of paper.

Just electronic digits.

I wonder, will the Regulator and/or their staff manually type up the 15 million Identification numbers that constitute each of the carbon “units” to be issued each financial year?:

101 Limit on issue of carbon units

(1) The Regulator must ensure that not more than 15 million carbon units with a particular vintage year are issued as a result of auctions that were conducted by the Regulator during a financial year …

No chance.

It will all be done automatically:

296 Computerised decision‑making

(1) The Regulator may, by instrument in writing, arrange for the use, under the Regulator’s control, of computer programs for any purposes for which the Regulator may, or must, under this Act or the regulations:

(a) make a decision; or

(b) exercise any power or comply with any obligation; or

(c) do anything else related to making a decision or exercising a power or complying with an obligation.

These computer-generated numbers – 15 million of them per year – will have a “value” in dollars.

Because the government says so … in their new laws passed in the Parliament.

The Clean Energy Act 2011 demonstrates that the ALP and the Greens are playing their part in “the greatest scam on earth”.

Barnaby is right.

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Making Man Subservient To Vegetable Matter

27 Oct

Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:

Problem solving: let’s be practical and pragmatic

It would seem that the fear of a shark attack is becoming well grounded in recent weeks. If one is concerned about the attacks of a 30kg pit bull terrier, then a 1200kg shark three to four metres long deserves very special attention.

It is terribly traumatic to the family of a victim when these attacks lead, as they often do, to the brutal death of a loving and well-loved person. A very small section ofavery vast ocean is responsible for the interaction between sharks arid humans.

Preventative management is not environmental vandalism. Now I hear people are very reticent to state the obvious, which is where sharks and humans swim in the same water, and human lives are in danger, the sharks should be culled. Of course this idea has the glittering environmental illuminati, in some sections, in apoplectic uproar. Their argument goes like this; we are just another animal and if sharks want to eat us because we look like seals then that is their right.

I am not suggesting that we should patrol the entire coast and shoot every shark on sight, but in areas of dense population there is a hierarchy of needs and human life rates higher than the shark’s.

It is not just sharks that have usurped the greater cognisant dignity of homo sapiens. Bats in Queensland have also lately evolved to a higher level. In Charters Towers it goes like this, man builds park, bats infest park, bats stay, man goes.

In a children’s school in NSW an infestation of bats produced this bullet of logic from the local member Janelle Saffin. She suggested that “a long-term solution” was to move the school rather than the bats. Bats are also part of a process that spreads Hendra virus for which there is no cure, although millions are being spent on research. Janelle, they are bats not angels hanging upside down in trees defecating on all below.

Man is not just subservient to animals, we now have a movement to make man subservient to vegetable matter as well. In many areas. when bushfire season approaches you are allowed to sweep up the leaves but you are uot allowed to remove the trees. Houses must be iuciuerated for the right of trees to buru uuimpeded during a bushfire.

When you fly over many farms these days you see trees stuck right in the middle of cultivation like a cultural totem pole that dare not be touched. The Greens appear to have borrowed the logic from some Pythonesque version of Catholicism where every tree is sacred.

Maybe my opinions have been brutalised by the fact that I grew up in a family where my father was a vet.

It was all care and kindliness but to a limit that did not intrude on the greater dignity of people. Excessive heroic efforts to preserve an animal’s life, through expensive drugs, had to be seen in the opportunity costs of a human’s life somewhere else in the world, which we generally have scant regard for. In our family, a strong moral string was pulled when people started to treat animals with anthropomorphic virtues that reflected an inspired storybook fantasy rather than physiological reality.

These views also intrude into policy where the correct concern for the brutalisation of animals in the live cattle trade became extended so that no form of live cattle trade could take place. The advocates utilised the sensation to extend their cause to their ultimate goal, which was to end the trade at the expense of diplomatic relations or the protein requirements of Indonesians.

Sharks do not read Shakespeare nor have a continued endearing affection to their sons or daughters and if they weigh over a tonne it would be best if they are not swimming in the same surf as your mother aud father.

Bats cau reside iu their millions across national parks and farmland.

They do not need to live at your school or at the Royal Botanical gardens above your picnic blanket.

If there is an overarching requirement that the world needs at the moment it is the absolute necessity for both our actions and our discussions to be pragmatic.

Meetings in Europe about repaying debt do not repay debt; repaying debt repays debt, the alternative is default and calamity.

The triumph of theory over practicality is a multi-faceted, self indulgent mirage.

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