The Carbon Tax: What’s your take on it?
I don’t see that as a realistic scenario. If you would like me to make such an extreme and difficult decision, you will have to explain yourself further. Why would quitting snowboarding be a necessary sacrifice for the good of the planet?
I work for one of the “Dirty” companies that poisons the environment!!!!
Yes that’s right!!!! I make steel!!!! The very same thing that you find in the car that you drive to the snow and the lift towers and cables that transport you to the top of the montain, to the piston bullys that shape the terain parks and down to the screws in your bindings and edges on your board!!!! They are all made from steel!!!!
Then we have to add all of the other fossil fuels that are reqired to power everthing in the whole process, from the oil that’s used in your car to the petrochemicals that are used in the plastics of your gear!!!! The list can go on!!!!
And at the end of the day it is all purely for our enjoyment!!!!! And at the expense of our environment!!!!!
To be honest, I would probably live in the mountains.
id do this if i had to make a choice. work my guts off in the summer as a builder/labourer/what ever job came up in the mountains during summer (may as well make use of this builders licence i have) then in winter pretty much board,board,board all winter.
Point taken. However I never said taxing carbon was the solution. I’m very wary and undecided about it.
That said, the state of the planet won’t improve unless sacrifices are made. I honestly believe we are heading down a very dangerous and sad path. Would I be willing to change the way I live for the greater good? Yes I would. Would I support an environmentally conscious company over another? Of course. Would I pay money and make sacrifices for environmental initiatives? Sign me up!
It’s possible to build a snowboard and offset all carbon emissions in the process. It’s possible to change the way we do things. It’s possible for everyone to make a small difference. Passing the buck isn’t going to get us anywhere. Changes need to be made or our planet will be the one that pays.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/07/12/3267115.htm?section=business
a link to an article, which despite the headline, has points for both sides…just something that seems relevant and has some facts in it.
I’m with rider on this one, just because its difficult, or costs money, doesn’t mean its not worth a go. The idea of the carbon tax is that by 2015, it will turn into a fully fledged emissions trading scheme, so that companies like Bluescope can still make their steel, but they also have to put energy and money into figuring out how to do it in a manner that has the least possible harm to the environment, which in the end can’t be of too much harm to anybody…yes as rider said, there are always questions about how governments of any persuasion will be able to manage and implement these things but at the moment its a choice between a government that will try and one that won’t.
The other point is that in all of this, the renewable energy market is given a massive leg up, which is of no danger to anybody, and only good things can come out of that.
Also, would just like to thank mizu and everyone for being able to have a sensible and enjoyable discussion on this topic. On a side note, is anyone willing to take bets on when they reckon Mizu’s exclamation point button on his keyboard is gonna give out? 
oh and on the topic of Peter Garrett - yes on the surface I think it seems that he has sold out massively…however I have to say that I reckon that even if he (disappointingly!) has to keep quiet on some things or make compromises, we all know who he is and what he believes in. I would much rather have him in parliament doing his best to wangle and make small changes wherever possible, than not have him there at all.
Unfortunately, whilst ever humans are on this planet, we are going to see changes in our environment!!!!
The only true “Enviromentally Friendly” snowboard is the non existing one!!!!
And as humans, we are not prepared to give things such as snowboarding up!!!! Surfers have long claimed to be one with our planet, yet the manafacturing process of making a surfboard is one of the most environmentally unfriendly things that go on!!!!! And again, Its not out of necessity but out of our selfish want for pleasure!!!!
What has this got to do with the ETS you say????
Taxing our industries in order to give people money, and take our mining and metals manafacturing overseas will not put any less CO2 into our atmosphere whatsoever!!!! However if we all reverted back to how we lived 2000 years ago, then we might have a chance!!!!
Sorry to sound so bleak, but it ain’t gonna happen!!!!
As long as they don’t introduce an exclamation point tax I’ll always have a spare keyboard incase of an emergency!!!!!
you can run an underground exclamation point militia if that ever happens, i put my hand up as sargeant at arms.
we can go around at night and modify the keyboards of politicians so that when they boot up their computers in the morning, the keyboard will instantly keep producing exclamation poins on the screen.
If we get enough pollies computers to do it, they will tax themselves so much they will drop it!
viva le revolucian’
Its a crock of shit as far as I’m concerned. The big polluters have been given an out from it anyway in the form of buying credits etc for their emissions the cost of which will flow through to goods and services. I like the way I live and will continue to do so for as long as I can afford to, unfortunately I fit into the category of income earners who are asked time and time again by the govt to bend over and get fisted for the greater good. WTF should I agree to what seems to amount to redistribution of the wealth. Why should I be penalised cause I’m smart enough, motivated enough work hard enough to earn a good wage to pay more tax?
What really pisses me off is the god awful shit that tax dollars get spent on. If I had my way my tax dollars would be spent on roads and infrastructure, healthcare, education and thats about it. Welfare would be a hell of a lot harder to get, violent offenders who weren’t born here would be deported regardless of citizenship, illegal immigrants would be packed up and sent home no questions asked, about the only thing I would raie would be the old age pension, FFS if you paid tax till the age of 65 you should get more than $200 a fortnight to live on.
Just out of curiosity, did you guys come to Australia to further your education and employment prospects in order to have a higher standard of life???
I’m 100% Australia to, my partner is Swedish and studying here…....she pays up front and pays her own way and somehow manages to scrape by, I doubt she will be able to afford to go snowboarding more then once this year, so Australia is not really some land of milk and honey that shes jumped on board, In Sweden she would get her degree for FREE and be paid to do a degree like nursing. Her standard of living is some what lower to tell you the truth, Which brings me to the amazing conclusion that it must be my sexy arse that keeps her here! hahahah (although she loves it here and there a hell of a lot of advantages….the weather, many mates and also we are WAY better at sport 
and the surf isn’t minus 10 and crap )
I can understand where you are coming from Mizu, and I can see your point, everyone needs steel and uses steal and cant live without it, even those trying their hardest not to but its about finding some sort of balance. I noticed a bit of a support package for the steal industry this morning to, didn’t get all the details. For me its more about reducing our impact in areas where we can i.e changing to renewable energy, so that the remaining industries we cant change so easily can still operate.
No one seems to be able to be able to tell me why the GST had so little impact on the economy but this will. An economist on the news was saying that the Carbon tax is the equivalent of adding 2.5% in price to everything..GST was 10% and I didn’t even notice it.
I can understand the weather, but surely your arse can’t be that sexy!!!!!
With the GST, it replaced a whole heap of little taxes that used to be on goods but not services!!!!!
The GST was to catch the people that dodged paying tax every time that they on-sold goods and services!!!!! This tax also was applied to everyone!!!!!
The carbon tax is aimed solely at the “polluters”!!!!! Yet like I said before, we all use steel, coal fired power etc etc!!!!!
A levy much like the Medicare Levy or the GST, would have been the fairest system imho!!!!! We all took the advantages that the industrial revolution brought us, but are somehow quick to wipe our hands of it when the negative environmental outcomes play on our consciences!!!!!
i found this interesting open letter to Ju-liar Gilllard; excuse the length.
One question still left unanswered, PM, is this: how will your carbon policy affect global temperatures?
You have cut the reach of your policy from “1000 of the biggest polluters” to 500. You have cut petrol from the policy. You are over-compensating about four million low-income families and compensating millions more with tax cuts and welfare payments to pay for the costs of a carbon tax.
We understand you’re watching polls showing dwindling voter support for tough action on climate change. But if you accept that human behaviour is responsible for warming the planet, you have to fundamentally change human behaviour - not just from 500 companies - to reduce global warming. Can one be serious about global warming if one is not serious about changing human behaviour beyond 500 companies?
Looking forward, your policy involves Australia adopting an emissions trading scheme in 2015. The European Union operates one of the world’s oldest carbon markets yet its ETS has recently been denounced as “dodgy” by the Hartwell Group of international economists, historians and climate scientists. The group’s spokesman, Gwyn Prins, from the London School of Economics, said: “There’s not credible evidence that it’s had any affect in accelerating reductions in carbon dioxide in Europe.” The recession, not the ETS, has reduced emissions in Europe. Are you really so clever in Canberra that you can feel confident about reducing emissions when the EU has failed?
Staying on environmental benefits, Australia is responsible for less than 2 per cent of global emissions. Isn’t it the height of political hubris to imagine that anything 22 million people - in a world of almost seven billion - do will lead to less global warming? After all, your Climate Change Commissioner, Tim Flannery, told us in March that “if the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow . . . the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop for several hundred years, perhaps over 1000 years”.
On Monday night you said that your policy will cut 160 million tonnes of carbon a year by 2020, the equivalent of taking 45 million cars off the road. Nice imagery, but here’s the reality. China’s annual emissions last year were 8.33 billion tonnes, up 10.4 per cent and growing. Treasury can work out how many millions of cars that is. Doesn’t this mean that your tax is environmental symbolism?
And why are you confident about a global agreement on climate change? Remember you and the Rudd government were wrong about an agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. The US, under a Democrat President, has rejected a cap and trade policy. Chinese factories continue to churn out solar panels for guilt-ridden Westerners: there is no sign of real action to reduce its emissions. Canadians recently elected a government opposed to a carbon tax. And even Greens deputy leader Christine Milne was pessimistic last week about action at the UN Climate Change Summit in Durban in December. Do you know something the rest of the world doesn’t?
Please explain why no other comparable country with resource-rich and trade-exposed industries is imposing an economy-wide carbon tax? Richard Branson is a climate change action man. He set up a climate change war room about two years ago to battle what you regard as the new enemy: carbon. He has offered a $US25 million ($23.6 million) prize to scientists to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Yet, in Australia last week, Branson said that a carbon tax made no sense because any tax needs to be global so you don’t disadvantage individual countries and companies.Why do you assume this will not hurt the Australian economy?
Another question, PM. Your backbenchers may be asking you this one in private. We would like a public answer. Why should Australian voters - let alone your backbenchers - believe that you can deliver good policy here? Your past record is scant. As a member of Kevin Rudd’s kitchen cabinet, you were closely associated with the mistakes of the former government. Think pink batts, wasteful school buildings program. The Computers in Schools policy you promoted as education minister was a good idea but many schools couldn’t set up the computers because they didn’t get funding to install and run them. Your East Timor immigration policy didn’t go anywhere. We’re still waiting to see whether the Malaysian solution works. And the recent ban on live exports made previous failures look like hiccups. Given the capriciousness evident from your previous policies, why should Australian voters, not to mention Labor backbenchers, believe you can deliver this massive climate change policy? The jobs of plenty of Australians, including backbench MPs, are riding on a sensible policy.
On the related issue of credibility, PM, are voters and backbenchers right to be concerned that yours is in tatters for three simple reasons?First, the way you came to power by politically knifing Rudd when voters prefer to choose their leaders. Second, for recommending Rudd ditch his emissions trading scheme, which only fast-tracked his end. Third, you promised us at last year’s election there would be no carbon tax. We now have a carbon tax.
Just one final question. On Sunday we listened to you begin the big sell for your carbon tax. But is this really your carbon tax or is it the Bob Brown tax? Forgive us for being worried by the sight of Milne smiling more than she has ever smiled on camera before. Is the senator smiling because she and the Greens have secured $10 billion from taxpayers to fund their pet renewable projects even after the Productivity Commission recently found that existing renewable abatement policies were expensive and achieved little? Or could the senator’s grin signal that you, who promised there would be no carbon tax under a government you lead, have been demoted to the climate change minister in a Brown govern
argh politricks,
I wonder if her office responded to that well written letter. would be good to read the reply if they did
Not a chance of a response… Politics is about making people happy, not actually doing work.
I got a response from the Premier the other day actually….passing me on to someone else haha