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The Albanese government’s demented climate policies are helping drive the cost of living for Australians through the roof. So, the government is throwing money back at Australians as “cost of living relief”. To pay for the “relief”, they’re jacking up taxes on energy, which will…
You get the picture.
“Hold our shandies,” say the Hipkins government.
The Government’s effort to soothe the pain of inflation by preventing the cost of carbon from rising is coming at a cost.
By the end of March, the Crown accounts were $804 million deeper in the red than forecast by the Treasury in December, due to the carbon price plummeting.
Like true socialists, the government is trying to manipulate prices down, in order to disguise the cost of its own policies, only to find out that they’re running out of other people’s money even faster.
The carbon price fell after Cabinet late last year rejected the Climate Change Commission’s advice to change the settings of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), to enable the carbon price to rise more than it had in the past.
Cabinet feared that allowing the price to rise to a level that gave businesses a greater incentive to reduce their emissions would make the cost of living crisis even worse.
By which they really mean that it would make it obvious to even the most gibbering Green just how ruinously costly carbon taxes really are.
Still, you can’t help but laugh at the sheer idiocy of the following tale of woe:
A lower carbon price reduces the revenue the Crown receives when emitters surrender units under the ETS to account for their emissions in the previous year.
In the nine months to March, the Crown received $1.2b (or 42 per cent) less revenue than the Treasury forecast, as the carbon price was just over $30 per unit lower than the expected $54.50. Under the ETS, possession of one unit gives a polluter permission to release a tonne of carbon dioxide.
Because the Crown incurs an expense when it allocates units to industries such as forestry, the lower carbon price meant it also spent $393m (or 24 per cent) less than expected.
The net effect was that the fall in the carbon price resulted in the Crown’s budget deficit ending up $804m wider than forecast in December.
If none of that made a lick of sense — and it doesn’t — then final result ought to be a good dose of reality salts:
This is a notable sum that accounted for a third of the difference between what the Treasury expected the deficit to narrow to ($913m), and where it actually landed, at $3.4b.
But to climate-deranged hammers, all things look like taxable nails.
The Climate Change Commission last month advised the Government to take more drastic action in the future to make up for its deviation from the agency’s plan for a higher carbon price to help lower emissions in line with what is required by law.
“Without such action, Aotearoa New Zealand risks failing to meet its climate goals or potentially facing higher emissions-related costs in the future,” the commission warned.
Translation: you can either pay through the arse or just give up and admit that “climate goals” are a chimaera.
Otherwise, Kiwis will quickly find out what the reality of a carbon price really is, as Australians did under the Gillard government’s “not a tax” climate tax:
Treasury last year advised Cabinet that a carbon price of $120 per unit would increase residential electricity prices by up to 5 per cent and commercial and industrial electricity prices by as much as 7.5 per cent.
Don’t rely on anyone in the political sphere, though, to come clean and admit that the climate emperor has no clothes.
Asked whether National would change ETS settings to allow the carbon price to rise in line with the Climate Change Commission’s recommendations, leader Christopher Luxon said he would have more to say on the matter in coming weeks.
NZ Herald
Don’t bother. We all know what he’s going to say: Me too, but with a blue tie on!
