Australia, the Stupid Country

Will we really pay Nigerians billions to let us keep our lights on?

Andrew Bolt

Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 08:46am

 

How utterly insane is this Government to plan to send $57 billion a year overseas, just to buy permission to keep our coal-fired power stations running? Terry McCrann explains:

BY 2050, Australia will be sending $57 billion a year overseas just for the right to keep our lights on, as a direct consequence of Julia Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax and consequent emissions trading scheme.

Let me make it perfectly clear. We won’t be getting anything tangible back for that $57bn.

It doesn’t buy us windmills or solar panels made in China. It doesn’t buy us technology or licensing rights. It’s not even a (carbon dioxide) tax, that would at least generate revenue for the government. It just sends money to foreigners for “permission” to keep a few of our coal-fired power stations operating.

That is to say, it will be an entirely artificial cost, imposed on all Australians, by this Gillard-Brown government, with not the slightest offsetting benefit. It has the same economic consequences as taking $57bn and just shredding it. Every year.

This extraordinary “fact” is in detailed Treasury modelling of the proposed carbon dioxide tax.

It’s astonishing that a government could blithely commit to throwing away—it’s not even like foreign aid—$57bn a year of our national income.

It’s even more astonishing that the formerly credible Treasury department could conclude that throwing away that money every year would have almost no negative impact on our economy.

And even more startling yet that all this is of no interest to the media or the broader commenteriat.

I am not aware in the weeks that have elapsed and all the hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of learned commentaries on the issue, that anyone other than Henry Ergas in this paper on August 3, has even noted, far less discussed, this bizarre and simply insane aspect of the carbon dioxide tax.