Australia is losing its economy

Contributed article from Nicholas Steel

In the short time that Australia has had a Carbon Tax, it has lost a significant amount of business activity.

A large gas project off the coast of Western Australia has been cancelled, further expansion of Olympic Dam has been cancelled, the Shell Refinery in Geelong has been put up for sale, Ford has pulled out, the last of our hosiery manufacturers is moving offshore, Target have sacked 250 workers and business bankruptcies are at unprecedented levels.

Most worrying of all, Holden is making the kind of noises that indicate they are also considering abandoning Australia. If that happens, Toyota is sure to follow, and Australia would then be at the point where it has lost its machine tooling capacity. If that point is reached, then Australia has lost its manufacturing for good and effectively it has lost its economy.

Should this happen, the effect upon our standard of living would be disastrous. When Ireland lost its shipbuilding industry in the early years of the twentieth century, the daily life of its citizens went back to the nineteenth century.

The social effects of such a change in Australia would be equally catastrophic. When people lose their ability to make a living, they acquire an unmanageable amount of credit card debt, their mental and physical health nosedives, alcoholism and drug-taking rise, marriages break up, suicide rates rise, the level of prostitution rises, and years are slashed off a person’s lifespan. In essence, if you take away a person’s ability to make a living, you destroy the person and their family.

The reason that the Carbon Tax is causing so much damage is self-evident. It resulted in an increase in the cost of doing business far in excess of the predictions of the initial modeling. In addition, to impose a carbon tax on a nation that has one per cent of world carbon emissions is rightly interpreted by business investors, both domestic and international, as being irrational and business unfriendly.

With the exception of Holden boss Mike Deveraux, business leaders are reluctant to cite the carbon tax as the reason for shutting up shop. They know that the left deal with their critics by making them a target and specifically attacking their career and ability to make a living. Professor Blainey is an example of this, but there are countless others.

The Labor Party imposed this tax against the back drop of a broken promise, simply because they wanted to be the Government. They were thinking of their careers and not the nation. Tracing back the desire for a carbon tax ultimately brings one back to the desires of the inner city left. The inner city left have the demographic of white, childless professional couples with significant disposable incomes. They lead bountiful, worry-free personal lives, and have much higher personal carbon emissions than the rest of the community. They work in areas such as the academic world, a plethora of bureaucratic bodies with a social engineering character, like the Equal Opportunity Commission, and an even bigger plethora of bureaucratic bodies with an environmental focus. There is a river of Government grant money flowing to them. Rarely do they work in value-adding sectors of the economy such as manufacturing, agriculture and mining and their employment is immune to economic downturns. In short, their incomes come out of the taxes paid by the mainstream community that they despise.

The Carbon Tax satisfies them on an intellectual level, whilst at the same time destroying the value-adding sectors of the economy that provides them with their high incomes.

The Carbon Tax is arguably the most unpopular policy in the political history of Australia. It is even more unpopular than conscription. To say that it is unpopular is to understate it – it is intensely unpopular. It is unpopular amongst the broader community, but particularly unpopular with the Labor Party’s blue collar core.

The Labor Government shot to the current low position in the polls when the tax was first introduced, and have stayed there ever since. This is because Labor Ministers are forever talking positively about the Carbon Tax. How often have you heard them say: “We have made a number of reforms including putting a price on carbon”? On the very day that 250 Target workers lost their jobs in Geelong, Ms Gillard again called the Liberals misogynists, but was silent on the job losses. Many of the ex Target workers were in tears and were begging employers on camera to give them a job. That the Labor Party is out of touch with the entire community is without doubt. A characteristic of being out of touch would appear to be that you don’t know it and keep on replicating obvious missteps.

The imposition of the Carbon Tax also crystallises the betrayal of the working classes by the Labor Party. For many years, safe State Labor seats in Melbourne’s western suburbs have had fewer trains and fewer police than other electorates. The people in those electorates earn less income, and need public transport and a police presence more than anyone, and they are not getting it in Melbourne’s Labor heartland.

There are many eyes on Bill Shorten at the moment. He is being cast by the media as the Labor Government’s saviour. There was an occasion on the ABC’s Q&A discussion program where he was asked a question about climate change by a senior gentleman with a mainstream accent. Shorten’s response was in the form of a rude putdown. I suggest googling Shorten, Q&A, rude.

The Carbon Tax has been a terrible occurrence for the Australian economy; of course, there are other factors involved as well, having tariffs far lower than our competitors and the sometime high Australian dollar, but the impact of the Carbon Tax should not be underestimated.

The imposition of the Carbon Tax is an indication of the utter powerless of the mainstream community. This powerlessness is expressed most vividly in the fact that the community’s taxes are being used by the left to fund the destruction of every single facet of our nation – its economy, its culture, its community and its future.

Comments

  1. Well said! As a fourth generation Australian I have witnessed in horror the destruction of our economy. Many of our jobs are unattainable for Australians and are, for some strange reason being advertised to people overseas, particularly Indians and Pakistanis. I have been a teacher for almost two decades. I was forced to resign from my last full time teaching position due to family illness. My own 26 year old son is deeply depressed due to his life situation. He lost his last job due to health issues and has had a hard time ever since. No company wants to give him a go and there are no agencies willing to help him cover costs related to his multiple illnesses stemming from his allergies. I have been forced to rely on casual work as a relief teacher so I can care for him. In the past the only full-time teaching positions I have been able to get have been in the far north of South Australia despite being a highly qualified and experienced teacher.
    So in order to stay in Adelaide to care for my son I have no other choice but to be on call as a relief teacher. I am lucky to get one or two days work per fortnight! When I do work, it is alongside many foreign relief teachers from India and Pakistan. They have terrible accents that students struggle to understand. Their teaching techniques are inadequate and often their knowledge is poor. I feel that as I am an older Australian my expertise doesn’t mean anything and it’s all about giving people from oversees a career. When will politicians wake up to this?
    I would like to study another degree to give me the edge over these foreign invaders. I looked up the costs of degree courses and was stunned at the cost of higher education these days. The course I would like to do will cost over sixty thousand dollars. When I left Uni back in 1993 after completing a teaching degree I was left with a ten thousand dollar Hex debt. Now the same degree is triple that!!

    Had Enough!

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