Ever sat back and wondered who on earth buys those late night products; everlasting youth, a cream to cure baldness, something to scrub the dead skin off your feet to deliver a self administered podiatric bloom, to reinstate your nubile sole? The marketer always has your best interest at heart, it is about you and it is about goodness. They just have to kick that steed called Credit Card in the guts and get it to clear the hurdle called scepticism. Let us be honest, they are shysters in the hunt for the gullible or not so much the gullible but the gullible’s hard earned money.
Well suited to the late night television advertisement for those in search for love, friendship or idle lust and smut, would be an advertisement by the Greens, Labor and Independents that they, single handed, can cool the planet from a room in the building on a hill in the middle of this town. Just buy the tax and goodness will be yours, you will be virtuous amongst your peers, you will be noble and enlightened. And if you choose to buy that ticket, well good luck to you, it is a free world after all. The problem I have is that they categorically, with earnest unblinking gravitas, stared down the barrel at the Australian people and promised they would “not introduce a carbon tax in their term of government”.
Curtin, Chifley, Menzies, dare I say it Whitlam; the office of the Prime Minister is supposed to reflect a nobility in character that insists not on a reprieve from the heated contention of debate, but that your word on key policy is good. Ms Gillard and Mr Swan, regardless of a position on global warming, have proven in an indelible way that they can not be trusted. What is the point of the promises and warrants they make now, they mean naught.
Ms Gillard occupied a podium last Thursday with Senator Brown who has claimed that the “coal barons” were responsible for the floods. Ms Gillard occupied the podium with Senator Milne who said that Cyclone Yasi was caused by global warming and that a carbon tax was essential to mitigate future events. Not even the most prominent scientists in the global warming debate would agree with them on this sensational rubbish, yet the Greens were front and centre in the development of the carbon tax and now you are suppose to believe in the validity and competency of their argument that a gesture, that no one away from Australia cares about, will be instrumental in changes to global weather. In fact you have to back their argument with your money and Senator Milne has already foreshadowed that the Green/Labor/Independent Government is desirous of the carbon tax going on fuel. Labor’s Leader in the Senate, Senator Evans, gave the err-um answer; the stumbling non answer, when I asked him to clarify this position in the Senate on Monday.
Mr Windsor just looks absurd with his “don’t construe by my presence here that I support a carbon tax”. Ok then Tony, what were you doing at a press conference to announce a carbon tax. We have been on this merry little ride with Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor before. This feigned torture of Hamlet, will or won’t I say I do, or more to the point will I or won’t I be able pull the wool over my electorate’s eyes one more time. The threats to Tony Windsor from anonymous sources are disgusting and abhorrent. But Mr Windsor himself would be wise to temper some of his own more caustic remarks.
If Ms Gillard acted with honour, and I acknowledge she is totally entitled to change her view, she must go back to the people with whom she made the warrant, which was crucial in how so many cast their vote, that she would not introduce a carbon tax. This crucial change in central policy requires the Australian people to deliver their imprimatur at an election. If her position is strong then she will win.
The spurious argument is that it is a predicament of the last election; well how so? The political non sequitur. Did she tell Labor voters that her promises were dependent on the policy aspirations of The Greens? It appears now in fact they have primacy as the driver, the initiator of policy. The Greens stood in every lower house seat, if Labor voters wanted to vote for the Greens they could have and Ms Gillard, they did not.