Consultant Dan
01 March 2011
Australia's Carbon Partisans
At a public debate on climate change last year in Melbourne the British High Commissioner, Baroness Valerie Amos, rued how partisan the issue is in Australia. British and European political parties do not argue the toss at every point and run scare campaigns, like the Liberals, Nationals and right-wing parties.
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady herself, was an early political adopter of ‘Global Warming’, as we used to call it in those days. She had the conviction to find a conservative approach to the issue.
Fast forward to this week and the Coalition parties have made impotent attempts to pass votes of censure in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In public they have bandied about three different fictitious dollar values for the householder cost of the carbon scheme.
As I have argued previously, the antediluvian approach taken by the Opposition places it out of the mainstream of economic thinking in the 21st Century. The only reason that the Coalition parties can retain any business support for their position is that Canberra has been carbon captured and dumbed down by big coal.
However, global trends in the real economy are overtaking us and I predict that in 2011 this will start to be felt in the political economy.
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