one crazy idea gone, one to go

McRann has some forthright views on Rudd's government in this morning's herald-sun

One crazy idea gone, one to go Terry McCrann From: Herald Sun April 28, 2010 12:00AM

Kevin Rudd's proposed Emissions Trading Scheme is formally 'just resting' until 2013. Picture: Norm Oorloff Source: Herald Sun
ONE down, one to go. Kevin 'Gougher' Rudd has dropped one of his two great crazy nation-destroying policies. To coin a phrase, 'it's time' he abandoned the other equally mad, equally destructive one.
Now true, his proposed - it's so vital for the planet, we have to do it NOW! - Emissions Trading Scheme is formally 'just resting' until 2013.

But on the criteria - to use the word decidedly loosely - he set on Tuesday though, the ETS is 'just resting' in the Monty Python Dead Parrot sense.

At least he's taken it off Penny Wong's shoulder. Hopefully she'll now also stop wandering the countryside, muttering Dalek-like: Carbon will be exterminated! Carbon will be exterminated!

Really, have we ever seen a bigger prat as prime minister, and granted there've been a few?

On Tuesday he justified the 'just resting' move on the basis that the rest of the world hadn't committed to CO2 reductions.

Hullo? Knock knock? Is anyone home inside that prime ministerial body?

Barely six months ago, Rudd was demanding that we lock in place our (utterly pointless, yet punishingly destructive) ETS before Coppenfloppen. No waiting to see what the world did then. As it was always going to turn out: nothing.

Family First's Steve Fielding well and truly nailed the prime prat on this. "The PM says he wants to delay an ETS because of slow global action, yet he was happy to sign away our economy before Copenhagen."

"Imagine how ridiculous Australia would be looking now if we had allowed the reckless Rudd Government to implement its carbon tax while the rest of the world did nothing," the senator added.

I would only have used a number of different words to 'ridiculous'.

Now while it's hard to see how even the prime prat could 'wake up' the ETS in the light of what he said and what we know will happen in the rest of the world (read: the US and China) out to 2012, I remain cautious about concluding the ETS is well and truly 'resting'.

There are just too many 'climate change whackos' on both sides of the aisle, and crucially in both houses of parliament.

With apologies so soon after Anzac Day: lest we forget. That we were only saved from the ETS insanity by a single vote in the Liberal Party that dumped the man who shares a name with a former prime ministerial whacko.

A man who apparently still harbours both a lust for the prime prat's job and has a vision - perhaps, visions? - almost as green as the environmental whacko emeritus Bob Brown.

There's a subject in its own write. The way the media lets him get away with pure unadulterated rubbish, simply because he's so 'well-intentioned'. He started out wanting to save trees and has now 'got the planet's back'.

On Tuesday, Brown was demanding the government take "responsible" action now on climate change; and trust me, Brown was not equating acting responsibly with abandoning the ETS.

Yet none of the 'journalists' tested him on how reducing our emissions to zero would make four-fifths of five-eighths of very little difference to even his 'climate change'.

But this insanity has at the very least been postponed. The other one blunders on: the $43 billion mother-of all-white elephants, the National Broadband Network.

The NBN company CEO Mike Quigley 'mis-spoke' a couple of weeks ago when he said it wouldn't make money 'for 30 years'. It'd be reasonable to regard that as an 'optimistic' projection.

A week later he 'clarified' his comments, claiming that it would actually generate a "positive return on its costs" before the end of the construction period.

Well that sounds OK. Except for the fine print - Quigley was saying it would be EBITDA positive. That it would be in the black before you took out those four little letters 'ITDA'.

The devil is actually in the IDA - interest, depreciation and amortisation.

The NBN will be in the black before IDA? Big very little deal. The NBN will have hardly any operating costs. But IDA will be huge. The NBN will be bleeding real - your - money big time for decades.

The NBN makes absolutely no sense. The rational process is to build out the Telstra network.

If it doesn't end up getting Telstra's ducts, is anyone seriously going to suggest that looping fibre from telephone polls is the 21st century future?

The other obvious alternative captures the stupidity even more graphically: looping the fibre through sewers. I wonder whether that would have commemoration plates: brought to you by Kevin Rudd.

Oh, the 'Gougher'? Until now the Whitlam government has been the gold standard for incompetence in Australia. We finally have a prime minister that has managed to out-Gough Gough.