Joyce clarifies position against an ETS

ACM is glad to read this article in Australia.TO, in which Barnaby Joyce clarifies his position on an ETS - it appears the Courier Mail were a little to hasty in painting Joyce as a potential supporter of an ETS (see here), even a modified version proposed by the Coalition:

I didn’t think this needed to be said again however after some media speculation today I feel that I need to clearly put on the record, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, I won’t be supporting the ETS.

Furthermore I believe that the ETS, which I’ve said so many times, will be the Employment Termination Scheme or the Extra Tax System, take your pick, is nothing more than a moralising revenue raiser for a Government going broke.

The ETS will fit hand in glove with a new wave of bureaucracy which will entangle the lives of ordinary Australians, whether it’s through the price of food at the supermarket or the capacity for Australians to hold onto jobs especially in the manufacturing, coal and agriculture industries.

The ETS is a new form of tulip-mania type economics that possesses the human species from time to time throughout history.

Calling the ETS a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is misleading; carbon is not pollution, if it was rainforests would be rubbish tips.

There will be benefactors to this scheme but it won’t be the environment or the Australian people or the working families who have to pay for their groceries or the farmers who produce our food or the coal miners who have contributed to the standard of living all Australians have grown accustomed to for the last 40 or so years.

The benefactors from this scheme will bankers, brokers and bureaucrats who will be making an almost immoral amount of money from trading a product that relies on a very nebulous form of accounting but at a very, very real cost.

In the hypothetical world of suggestions of how would you vote if it’s amended this way or how would you vote if its amended that way, the simple truth is Minister Wong says it wont be amended at all, so there is no point even addressing this scenario.

Because you don’t contemplate an amended scheme is read by some that you would contemplate voting for it. I don’t know how they make this leap but they seem to have done it today.

Some of the suggested amendments that are making the rounds are so holistic such as what if we amended a cow to have a beak, little yellow wings and get it to lay eggs; would you, or would you not vote for that cow. Well the problem is it’s no longer a cow, it’s a bird!

So let us just cut to the chase, there is only one ETS and that’s the one being put forward by Minister Wong and Mr Rudd, it’s an economic suicide note for so many areas in Australia and I will not be voting for it.

Read it here.