Federal police in dark about climate role

One of the pernicious things about the ETS is the sticky tentacles it will extend into every area of life, even those areas over which no influence was ever intended. Take the role of the AFP for example. As we reported here ("Forget the Keystone Cops, here come the Carbon Cops"), the ETS bill will include an enforcement role for the AFP in relation to "climate crimes" - your guess is as good as mine as to what these would be, but given that there are huge amounts of money involved, you can bet that the whole scheme will be ripe for scamming and fraud.

And Penny Wong is being uncharactaristically reticent about revealing the AFP's role in all of this (and, more importantly, whether resources will be increased to cover the additional workload):

Australian Federal Police Association chief executive Jim Torr says companies who fail to comply with the ETS would be committing a crime against the Commonwealth and it would fall to the AFP to investigate.

"Someone who cheats on the scheme will gain the competitive advantage against the majority of organisations, and I'm particularly talking about larger carbon emitters where the scale of the crime would make it profitable," he said.

Mr Torr says they have approached Minister for Climate Change Penny Wong but her office will not release the details of any enforcement mechanisms in the legislation.

"This is going to become a bigger issue as the years go by, it could become the AFP's number one crime type as years go by that we investigate," he said.

He says more resources would be needed to carry out the investigations.

Can you believe it? Climate crime becoming the number one crime type? All because we introduce a totally pointless piece of legislation that will have repercussions well beyond what the government could ever imagine. Just one of thousands of reasons (apart from the main one, of course - it won't work) why the ETS is simply bad law.

Read it here.