Senator Joyce gets nearer to the heart of the matter:
UPDATE (thanks to wakeuptothelies)
LYNDAL CURTIS: Barnaby Joyce welcome to ABC News 24.
BARNABY JOYCE: Thanks Lyndal. Thanks for having me on.
LYNDAL CURTIS: The carbon price legislation is in the Senate, do you accept there is no way you can stop it from becoming law?
BARNABY JOYCE: I accept that it is now obviously very difficult but that does not mean it is the end of the battle that just means it is the start. I am not going to relent and neither is any body else. When this comes in we will continue to fight on because this is a ridiculous proposition, with the economic climate the way it is, we are going forward with a new tax and the bottom line is this, it does nothing to change the temperature of the globe. It is completely and utterly climate irrelevant, it is merely a tax, it is a gesture. It will certainly make you poorer, it is not the wish of the Australian people, they were never told they were going to get it but here it comes.
And if we just think of a bus analogy. If at the last election you bought a bus ticket which said you were going from Brisbane to the Gold Coast, they ended up at Birdsville and the bus driver says sorry you have got the Birdsville carbon tax.
LYNDAL CURTIS: But Julia Gillard never promised not to introduce a carbon price, in fact she spoke of introducing a carbon price, and gave a speech about it with the ill fated citizens assembly proposal. This government has always been committed to introducing a carbon price, and at the end of the day, and isn’t this at the end of the fixed price period an emissions trading scheme like the CPRS?
BARNABY JOYCE: This is absolutely not what they said at the last election they were going to do. They said quite conclusively. We have seen it ad nauseum, the shot of her on the Brisbane River, saying “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.
LYNDAL CURTIS: But she did not say no carbon price?
BARNABY JOYCE: This is semantics, absolute semantics. We can’t play this sort of game with the Australian people that’s how they lose respect for you. That’s why they end up in the chamber booing and hissing because people lose respect for the office. When you are the Prime Minister you have got to be fair dinkum. If you are going to play this little game of semantics with the Australian people and then bang a carbon tax on them, delivered to them from the powerpoint of every corner of their room, making the price of everything they do dearer, that will have no effect on the climate and then try some weasel words to get out of it. You really will stir them up.
And she stirred them up today, to the point where she took the Labor party down to 26 per cent. I tell you they will stay there and live there if they carry on like this.
LYNDAL CURTIS: Just to go to the Senate debate. Will you be trying to talk this debate out, will you do everything you can to try and talk as long as you can delay a vote in the Senate?
BARNABY JOYCE: Will I work as hard as I can to protect the Australian people from a ridiculous tax? Yes I will. Right at the start, I never agreed with the ETS.
The other part of this of course is the huge boon to the banks. I hope the Australian people realise this. Big banks get their biggest bonus ever courtesy of Bob Brown, it’s Bob Brown’s “Big Bank Bonus”. They are going to get billions of dollars in commission to trade a permit around the marketplace, ultimately with your Emissions Trading Scheme, because of a colourless, odourless gas, which some housewife, man on the land has to pay. Money does not grow on trees, they are definitely going to pay.
Then we give, what, $56.9 billion a year, by 2050, to send overseas to buy permits, these bizarre markets where they go to Russia, or to south-east Asia or the west coast of Africa and buy these incredible permits from these incredible permit markets.
LYNDAL CURTIS: You’ve constantly derided carbon as a colourless, odourless gas …
BARNABY JOYCE: … it is ….
LYNDAL CURTIS: … why then is the Coalition committed to spending some billions of dollars to try and bring emissions down.
BARNABY JOYCE: It is $3.2 billion and it is budgeted, it fits in because increasing the productivity of soil is good, whether you believe in global warming, it is a real outcome. If you develop a more efficient engine, that is going to be a good outcome regardless.
LYNDAL CURTIS: Isn’t the government doing some of that through its carbon farming initiative?
BARNABY JOYCE: No, what they are doing is bringing in a tax. They are bringing in a tax and if taxes cooled the planet, the place would be an icebox. It is absurd. Using the same logic, every time you increase income tax the place would get colder, every time you reduce income tax it would warm up a little bit.
I mean it is just this absurd analysis. Where they always, and the way they go about it, where they create fear and loathing and moral outrage. You will instantaneously combust if you don’t drown, and people say oh that sounds bad. People will die all round the world, there will be droughts, droughts, fire, flood and famine.
And then people say I feel bad about this, I must do something about this. But then when people ask the logical question, hang on, how does a tax have anything to do with those things you just said then …
LYNDAL CURTIS: Don’t taxes change behaviour?
BARNABY JOYCE: Yes, they do. They make you poorer. They make it so you can’t afford things. That is precisely what this is. Yet they’re now saying, well it doesn’t have that much of an effect. Well, if it doesn’t have that much of an effect, why are you doing it?
But, of course, it does have an effect and you’re dead right. It does make you poorer, it is a pricing mechanism to make you poorer so you can not afford things, you can not buy them and the nasty little pill about this is that the thing that people can’t afford will be their power. And there are people right now Lyndal who can’t afford their power. They don’t need any more motivation to be poor, the government has got them to a poor position quite alright right now.
LYNDAL CURTIS: You say the tax will make people poorer but the government’s also going to be giving some compensation, some tax cuts and pension rises to people. Are you happy going to the next election saying to people we will take those tax cuts and pension rises away?
BARNABY JOYCE: This is an absurdity. They must think we are all fools. They’re saying they are going to take all this money of you and then I am going to give you a little bit of your own money back and you will say thank you to me.
How about we just leave all the money in their pocket, that’s a much better idea. But this idea we can take the money off you, spinning it around a department, for which I hear there are 1,000 people at the moment in the Climate Change Department, I don’t know how they’re going, it was a bit cold this morning, they should have warmed it up this morning. But then the 1,000 people get paid an average of $140,000 per year. Tell that to the lady on the checkout.
The heart of the carbon “tax” matter is this.
It is not, and has never, ever been, about the climate.
It is all … and only … about legalising a new artificial “commodity” (carbon ‘units’), upon which the banking industry can create a new, highly leveraged, entirely unregulated derivatives casino.
Remember the GFC? With those “financial weapons of mass destruction” called “mortgage-backed securities” (ie, derivatives) at its heart?
Imagine a brave new world, in which banks are now empowered to create unlimited quantities of new derivatives, to trade using their HFT platforms, that have the power to “flash crash” and wipe out 98% of RIO Tinto’s share price in less than four minutes.
Think carbon pricing, think GFC1 … to the power of ten.
Barnaby Is Right 
Comments