The Clive and Al show rolls a divisive tax

SELF-PROCLAIMED global leaders Clive Palmer and former US vice-president Al Gore gifted Prime Minister Tony Abbott a sweet victory in his campaign to repeal Julia Gillard’s carbon tax.

With the American blowhard at his side in parliament’s Great Hall, the Queensland Snoarasaurus undermined the plans of the Labor Party and the Greens to thwart the Coalition’s determination to implement its promise to “axe the tax”. Whether Gore understood what was happening is uncertain. Palmer rushed him away for an early dinner (triple banana splits all round?) before the assembled media could put any revealing questions to the duo. What’s certain is Gore’s statement indicated a profound ignorance of his host’s character and Australia’s existing carbon tax regimen. Par for the course for a man who has received a Nobel Prize for his support for the global warming cult based on discredited computer modelling, which failed to predict the universally acknowledged lack of global warming over the past 18 years. Trying to find a pony in the heap of horse manure Palmer and Gore were feeding the media, the global warmists’ handbook, The Sydney Morning Herald, even tried to take some credit for what it understood the duo’s garbled message to be — that repeal of the carbon tax was to be contingent on some future emissions trading scheme. In its infantile and misleading editorial, it wrote of the Palmer United Party’s position: “Crucially, PUP will only do so if it is replaced with a dormant emissions trading scheme (ETS) with the carbon price set at zero — as the Herald has suggested — until Australia’s trading partners implement a similar scheme.” Without wishing the Herald’s senior editors to collapse into their usual hysterical state, they should note that the PUPpies repeal of the carbon tax is only contingent on the obvious savings being passed on to consumers. Nothing else, despite the flaky hopey-wishey Fairfax views. The Herald serially misinformed its readers in its leader. Not only did it erroneously claim that the ETS was part of the trade-off, it also said the PUPs would “demand the present 20 per cent renewable energy target — which some in the Coalition are urging the government to scrap — remains in place and that the government ensures that all of the savings from lower energy costs are passed on to households”. The Snoarasaurus even told his media bestie Tony Jones on the ABC’s Lateline program that the “repeal of the carbon tax is contingent upon the government bringing into law a system where the energy producers will refund the benefit to their consumers.” Jones then made clear what Fairfax didn’t want to recognise and repeated what he had just been told: “But you won’t make your repeal of the carbon tax contingent on any of these other things you want to see happen? That’s a critical question to answer tonight.” Palmer, giving the clearest answer of the day, replied: “That’s right, yeah.” Palmer and the Coalition are reading from the same sheet on this issue. Abbott went to the election with a pledge to axe the tax for two reasons that were obvious to those who voted Labor out of office. The first was that the tax was implemented after Gillard lied to voters in the week before the 2010 election with her claim: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” The second reason was the obvious need to remove the financial burden the crippling carbon tax placed on the economy and every household. Palmer has at least recognised that the government should be permitted to fulfil its mandate and he is tacitly acknowledging, to the chagrin of both Labor and the Greens, that no other country has an economy-wide carbon tax or emission trading scheme. As Abbott was able to tell Green MP Adam Bandt in Question Time yesterday: “The world is going against the Green view, the problem the Greens have is that as far as they’re concerned, Copenhagen never happened.” Palmer roped the gormless Gore into his circus with his eyes firmly set on the opportunity the 2015 UN Conference on Climate Change will provide when leaders get together in Paris. As an individual with a professed love of history, he should be aware that such conferences have so far been as successful as the Titanic in reaching their goals. Gore should have reminded his host that the US sank the 2001 conference when it refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, that the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit is derisorily referred to as Flopenhagen, and that last year, China and a bloc of 132 countries walked out of the Warsaw conference. The bottom line, unhappily for elitist global warmists like Gore, and other well-heeled envirofreaks, is that developing nations want to grow their economies and help their people achieve the same benefits as those fortunate enough to live in the West. High flyers like Gore and Palmer may enjoy their private jets and triple banana splits in the first world but the inconvenient truth is that in the third world, feeding people comes first. As India’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar said last week: “Unless we tackle poverty, unless we eradicate poverty, we cannot really address climate change. To that end, we need to grow. Our net CO2 emissions may increase.” WHINGERS TRYING TO DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE HAVING been offered and then denied an Opera House platform to spruik his irrational arguments for an extremist form of Islamist doctrine Uthman Badar, the chief propagandist for the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, clutched at the shield of victimhood to avoid scrutiny. That’s the default position for every group of multicultural whingers caught out trying to defend the indefensible. Badar, invited and then disinvited to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, a taxpayer-funded love-fest for ageing angry dissidents whose minority views are otherwise ignored, was given a topic headlined “Honour killings are morally justified” by organisers. There was no question mark but there is no question that such killings — murders — could ever be justified no matter what the religion or status of the individual who might be so lacking in humanity to contemplate such an outrageous proposition. At an otherwise uninformative press conference, Badar tried to defend his participation saying: “The point of the speech was to question some of the assumptions on the issue of honour killing … and really to show that the issue isn’t about violence towards women but about cultural and political imposition, about imposing liberal values in third world countries.” He wasn’t joking. Badar, whose organisation proselytises to the young, disillusioned and impressionable, is angered by the very values which permit him to spout his poisonous brand of Islam in our country — the values he wants to see replaced by the repressive culture of the medieval caliphate, along with such primitive punishments as stonings, beheadings and the lopping of hands. Australia, and a number of nations from both the East and West, have invested heavily in Afghanistan trying to stamp out the terrorist Taliban, who want to install a government which shares Badar’s beliefs. Which begs the question, if young Australians die protecting Afghans from people with whom Badar would be more at ease, why do we permit him to enjoy our liberal democracy when he so clearly hates it? The only thing we owe Badar is a smidgen of gratitude for exposing the idiocy of the organisers of the festival and its sponsors.