The climate change spokesman for Australia’s conservative Liberal-National opposition has said the coalition will never introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
“I don’t see it’s ever likely to happen,” Liberal frontbencher Greg Hunt said during an ABC TV discussion program, Q&A, last night.
Responding to a question Mr Hunt said Canada had recently rejected a carbon tax and China “is not going anywhere near this”.
He said the minority Labor government’s carbon price laws, aimed at addressing climate change, were, in fact, an “electricity tax and gas tax” and he denied they was reducing carbon emissions.
“I can guarantee you that China will not be imposing a nationwide electricity, energy and gas tax,” Mr Hunt said.
His statement completely ignored the fact that China has announced a progressive rollout of pilot ETS across a number of its major economic regions, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, which cover more than 100 million people.
Labor’s Health Minister Tanya Plibersek, appearing on the same TV program, said Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had “described himself as a weather-vane on climate change and then said it was bull***.”
“This is the man who wants to be prime minister, take that with a grain of caution,” she told ABC TV.
She said emissions had come down by 8.6 per cent since the Labor government last year introduced a price on carbon pollution.
Ms Plibersek said by the end of the year one billion people will be living in a country, city or state with an emissions trading scheme or carbon price.
Last week, United States President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, told Congress to either introduce a market-based mechanism to tackle climate change, or he would take executive action on the matter.
Why do we continually have to be insulted by these idiots in the government about the carbon tax. The real reason emissions would have dropped is because more people are putting solar on their homes along with the fact that people are using less electricity and fossil fuels for one reason.They can not afford to pay the ridiculous prices anymore and we having a rapidly growing percentage of our population that are in dire financial stress because of this poor excuse for a government. Please don’t make us wait until September, bring it on now so we can oust the circus before they can do any more damage.
Report this comment
Lionel some bad news for you the Liberals are also on the Green fascism band wagon – there are two reasons that it was labor who gave us Carbon Tax first Howard did not get another term or he would have given it to us second in the formation of the minority Government Abbott out bid labor with the independents and the Greens but they choose Gillard as Abbott had bad mouthed them through the media to many times -if he had not bad mouthed them it would have been Abbott who gave us Carbon Tax -dig up the book written by Abbott in the book he explains why we must have a Carbon Tax
Report this comment