the socialist tax

Why is Julia calling it a Carbon Tax when it's really a socialist tax?

Remember this: never trust a Fabian Socialist.


http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/opinion/post/-/blog/paulmurray/post/2534/comment/1/asc/144915/#thread

The Fabian Society must be breathless at the success its adherents are having in Australian politics under the guise of environmentalism.

For those unfamiliar with the Fabians, they belong to a movement that began in Britain in the 1880s when the marxist revolution was beginning to foment. It started as an intellectual debating group with an underlying belief that capitalism had created an unjust society.

The Fabians took their name from a Roman general, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who history credited with avoiding the huge losses of battle in favour of weakening adversaries through a long, slow campaign of opposition.

Over time, the Fabian Society became synonymous with the adoption of socialism by incremental advances, rather than revolution.

Julia Gillard and Geoff Gallop are products of the Australian Fabian Society, the Prime Minister notably making an address to the NSW chapter in 2006 devoted to a socialist critique of John Howard's political success.

Both Ms Gillard and the former WA premier had the selling skills to attain high office in a naturally conservative country despite their radical personal politics, Dr Gallop being a fully fledged trotskyite while at Oxford University.

They are also unashamed disciples of the Welsh-born former deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Aneurin Bevan, another Fabian.

Mr Bevan was one of those classic socialists of days past who revelled in lost causes.

His last speech to the House of Commons in 1959, shortly before his death, urged "ordinary men and women that it is worthwhile making sacrifices in their immediate standards or forgoing substantial rising standards" to obtain political goals.

"I would describe the central problem falling upon representative government in the Western world as how to persuade the people to forgo immediate satisfactions in order to build up the economic resources of the country," Mr Bevan said.

Those words must be ringing in the ears of our Welsh-born leader this week.

The Fabianism inherent in Ms Gillard's approach to climate change is to mix inextricably a redistribution of wealth through the tax system with the pursuit of putting a price on carbon emissions.

These two did not have to be done together. The Government has chosen this way because it achieves the political ends it wants, while convincing Australians it's about climate change.

Unsurprisingly, most Australians cannot understand how the Government's plan will cut carbon emissions because the carbon tax package has more to do with redistributing wealth.

It does this in two ways, one affecting the commerce of publicly owned companies and the other the private incomes of citizens.

The climate change package essentially moves cash flow from individuals who invested in the legitimate activities of carbon-emitting corporations in the productive "old" economy to an unknown range of investors in the currently unviable "new" economy.

The best evidence of that is the purloining of $10 billion of income from the nation's 500 biggest carbon-emitting companies to invest in untried new energy technologies through the State-run Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which can only have the effect of providing higher power costs.

That is such a classic "picking winners" strategy it almost makes you pine for the 1980s, the lessons of which were clearly not well learned by the political class of 2011.

On the more personal level, this package places the burden of the passed-on costs of the carbon tax on to the wealthiest one-third of Australians, who get no compensation.

On early indications of the Treasury's overly conservative estimation of those costs, many of the six million households the Prime Minister says are either over-compensated or "square" will be worse off when the full effects become apparent in the second half of next year.

To become politically acceptable in the 1980s, Labor dropped from its platform the socialist objective: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs".

It's clearly back. In modern language, it reads: "What's yours is now mine".

For the first time in decades, the tax rate for middle Australia will be lifted. In the $37,000-$80,000 bracket, the Government will move the rate from 30? to 32.5? next year and to 33? the year after.

The Government brags it has simplified the system by raising the tax-free threshold to $19,400. The reality is that it gives an extra million workers a free ride, ensuring they make no contribution for the government services they use. Someone else pays.

And apart from the unquantified hundreds of millions of dollars the Government will pay to take out 2000MW of coal-fired power generating capacity through a tender process, there is no evidence any of this massive tax churn will cause any carbon dioxide abatement.

There is plenty of evidence whatever we do to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide will be negated by the rest of the industrial world's emissions while we are busy providing moral leadership.

We are witnessing the classic signs of a society in which too many take its wealth and good fortune for granted. It has become so familiar to them that they no longer realise where it comes from.

That could be worth debating if Ms Gillard attends the annual meeting of the Victorian Fabians in September.

Guest speaker? Ross Garnaut, of course.