The Carbon Price announcement, or: How much of Tony Abbott’s scaremongering was even vaguely accurate?
A thread to discuss the Prime Minister’s announcement tonight of the details of the agreed carbon price scheme.
I’m not going to say anything else in advance. My speculation’s no more illuminating than Tony Abbott’s has been over the past six months. Let’s hear what the Labor Party, the Greens and the Independents are actually going to legislate.
PS: all these claims about increases to family budgets assume precisely no reduction in energy consumption, don’t they?
UPDATE: If anyone’s wondering why the Daily Tele readers don’t like the plan, this web poll might indicate why:
Sixty-four percent of them think climate change is “a myth”. A figure for which News ltd should be very proud.
The Tele is actually trumpeting that result as if it’s an indictment on the government, and not them.
As reader James points out via email:
It’s worth mentioning that all News ltd style websites (news.com.au, heraldsun, etc) have a common problem with their online polls – there’s no unique visitor verification beyond saving cookies (which are incredibly easy to clear or block outright), allowing people to vote multiple times. or, in the case of some extremely suspicious poll results, use something like Selenium (seleniumhq.org) to automate poll clickthroughs – no proof without seeing their backend, but the extremely steady rise indicates there’s something going on. It’s probably also worth pointing out that the reason the no-carbon-tax.org website went down was because their webhost (Dreamhost) has extremely strict processing limits that often automatically takes down sites with more than a handful (~20-30) of concurrent users.
But don’t let that stop them running it as “‘news”.
UPDATE (Monday): News.com.au leads with this:
I like the way they compare the $9.90 and the 20c so that a careless reading might make it seem like the average punter will be left $9.70 worse off. And the complete lack of acknowledgement that this completely contradicts all their scaremongering that we’d all be worse off. let alone any mention that for many – probably most – of their readers, they’ll be much better off than 20c extra a week.
Also – note there’s a “carbon losers” section but no “carbon winners” section.
