Next stop for the taxpayer gravy train: carbon

With Australians set to have a whopping new tax on energy imposed by the Gillard-Greens government, it’s time to consider several little highlighted aspects of the at least 20-year-long campaign for this unnecessary burden on business and working families.

Firstly, its proponents delight in calling this coming tax anything but that.

They avoid the word tax, opting for Orwellian Newspeak with camouflage phrases like “a price for carbon” or “emissions trading scheme”.

Secondly, they deliberately use the word “carbon”, since it conveys images of blackness, dirt, filth and soot, whereas they’re in fact referring to atmospheric carbon dioxide gas, which is a crucial life-sustaining nutrient.

Without carbon dioxide the world would be lifeless, like the moon and mars.

Rather than limiting it – currently there’s only about 390 parts per million in the atmosphere – humanity would be better off with more. Plants and crops would grow better.

What’s the origin of this campaign against carbon dioxide that our crusading brethren within the Greens, Labor and Liberal parties (for example, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull) are so desperately seeking to tax?

A good case can be made out that the beginnings date back to the winding-up of the Cold War, which petered out over 1989-90.

What this meant was that all those activist cohorts who’d sought some sort of Leninist utopia after 1917 – for 70-odd-years – no longer had Moscow and its hard-line socialist satellites and allies to promote and hold up for admiration.

Poland’s Solidarnosc had pricked that disastrous “balloon”, and it popped so loudly the bang was even felt and heard in Moscow and Beijing.

The former saw the Soviet Empire collapse.

The latter saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese pro-democracy students shot in Tiananmen Square and their bodies hurriedly taken away for burial.

So many of the leading lights of the worldwide green crusade are either straight from the west’s long enduring pro-Communist ideological camp or they gullibly shared its weird proclivities as camp followers.

That statement of fact means leading Sydney Morning Herald columnist Gerard Henderson could write this month, without fear of contradiction in letters to the editor, the following: “Adam Bandt and Senator Lee Rhiannon either do not want to discuss, or are in denial about, their one-time infantile communism.”

Mr Bandt, for those who don’t know, was a Murdoch University student Trotskyist before turning to the Greens and being elected under their banner for Victoria’s seat of Melbourne.

New Greens Senator Rhiannon is the daughter of a long-time Sydney communist family, Bill and Freda Brown.

Here, long-time means from the 1930s, the height of Stalin’s Great Terror.

Just after last month’s election I spoke to a Canberra contact who said he’d spent several hours at the Australian National Library’s archives that day, reading through old issues of a monthly publication produced by Lee and father Bill before the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“Lee Rhiannon’s father was Bill, a stalwart of the Communist Party of Australia until he fell out with them over Czechoslovakia,” my contact said.

“He (and she) supported the invasion!

“Lee and Bill edited for a break-away group from the 1970s until the end of 1989, a pro-Moscow monthly called Survey.

“And in the last year, particularly, as the Soviet Union’s collapse approached, more and more of their focus was on environmental issues.”

That accounts for two of the 10 Greens now set to be federal MPs, who slipped from red to green.

What’s important to note is that persons with such backgrounds are highly unlikely to approach climatic and related issues in an open-minded and scientific manner.

They’re instead instead far more inclined to foster procrustian greenism to bash what they dub as unrestrained capitalism, meaning ever more controls over industry and commerce with new taxes and more charges to bankroll growing numbers of costly bureaucracies.

None other than a co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, has made this point.

Anyone doubting this can read some of his more recent writings, or just log onto Wikipedia if you like, since some are carried there.

For example: Moore says today’s so-called environmentalists have “abandoned science and logic in favour of emotion and sensationalism”, and they now “invent doom and gloom scenarios”.

In The Age of December 10, 2007, he wrote: “Greenpeace is wrong – we must consider nuclear power."

Space prohibits adding other Moore quotes.

The crusade also got a boost from UN bureaucrats who see it as a way to gain greater control over national economies.

Another crucial ingredient that cannot be ignored is the so-called fourth estate, our media, that’s failed to serve Australians well.

To their eternal shame, too many editors and journalists were content to publish unsubstantiated and false beat-ups about vanishing polar bears, melting ice caps, and similar panic-motivated nonsense.

None of the above is new.

None other than the best ever Western Australian politician sent to Canberra, former senator Peter Walsh, has said all this many times, and much better than State Scene does here.

Let’s hope his son-in-law, Gary Gray, now Gillard-Green government Special Minister of State for the Public Service and Integrity, treads in his father-in-law’s footsteps in cabinet.

State Scene is particularly hopeful inclusion in his title of duties pertaining to integrity bears fruit.

But nor should the Liberal Party’s great hero, John Howard, be let off the hook.

Readers will note that except for the Rudd-Gillard government’s foolish ratification of the Kyoto Treaty, the Howard government enacted all of Australia’s other pro-green legislative encumbrances.

The Howard era imposed upon Australians the Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme, which began with compelling electricity generators to provide (otherwise pay penalties) 2 per cent of electrical output from wind or solar farms, or other so-called renewable sources.

The Rudd government then boosted that to 20 percent by 2020.

In other words, one fifth of Australia’s electricity output in just three governments’ time must come from non-coal or gas-fired generation.

Let’s hope we don’t have to endure blackouts because of the strain this is likely to place on transmission grids.

Mr Howard also enacted the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act, which compels business to audit their carbon dioxide gas output, as a precursor to taxing this gas for no sound reason.

He established the costly Australian Greenhouse Office in 1997.

This, in the words of one notable observer, meant public “money ... was spent by the global warming zealots who inevitably staffed this institution in corrupting universities, buying up economic consultancies, and promoting the global warming scam throughout the country.”

And he banned the sale of incandescent globes.

How much public money during the Howard, or for that matter, the Rudd-Gillard eras, went to those dubbed as deniers or sceptics?

That taxpayer gravy train only ever stopped at those stations where hopeful recipients for taxpayer funds agreed to mouth the new creed – the world is heating up – or keep their scepticism very much to themselves.

Next week State Scene discloses why Mr Howard, to his eternal shame, opted to sell out business and Australia’s electricity and gas users (meaning everyone) to those promoting the global warming hoax.