Nirvana, overseen by Greens with an apocalyptic world view, would be paid for by a tax on the rich
The Greens’ proposed utopia may provide Australians with good teeth, free childcare and uni but our winters will be cold and dark if they ever get in power.
Opinion
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It’s no coincidence radical Greens Senator Lydia Thorpe and Adam Bandt are both Victorians.
Bandt the Greens leader and Thorpe their Indigenous bomb thrower were together at the National Press Club in Canberra during the week, where Bandt continued his mindless economy wrecking plan for Australia.
His speech received a standing ovation from the Green MPs and Senators in the audience on a day the Greens party caved in on its climate posturing and backed Labor’s Climate Bill.
In typical Bandt style, he raved and ranted about how the planet will burn if Labor lets new coal and gas operations open in Australia.
New mines and gas fields are exactly what Labor intends to allow to open with the legislated 2030 emissions target of 43 per cent but this is the Greens ... you only need to talk about what you would do, not actually do it.
They caved in.
Bandt bravely – for him – stood up at the Press Club and tried to pretend his party will use their numbers to block other legislation to get their nuclear option of no new non-renewable projects allowed.
Deep down he knows this will not work and even while he was still speaking, Anthony Albanese, the new PM, held his own media conference in competition with Bandt to declare the Bill a Labor Bill not a Greens Bill.
Albanese played Bandt beautifully and thank goodness the adult in the room won.
I’ve written before about the juvenile language Bandt uses to play to his overwhelmingly young voter base, who lazily see Green and tick the box thinking their vote will change the climate and save the planet.
He was at it again on Wednesday. He makes wild claims about the Great Barrier Reef dying, how Australia will suffer more bushfires, floods and droughts and then this claim: the animals (he doesn’t say which animals) and we (humans) will die if we don’t act.
His apocalyptic view of the world hinges on Australia continuing to maximise its rich mineral wealth in coal, iron ore, gas and rare earth minerals and exporting a lot of it and using the rest to keep the lights on at home.
Bandt’s plan is to stop any new mining developments at all and at the same time giving every Australian, regardless of their income, free childcare and free dental care through Medicare.
For once the Greens have costed a policy and they calculate this would cost taxpayers — you and me — $18.2bn a year, every year, on top of his idea of retiring all HECS debt and making university free for everyone.
Nirvana overseen by Adam and Lydia and the other Green MPs and Senators will be paid for by a tax on billionaires – a wealth tax – and slugging offshore-based gas companies with higher taxes.
Obviously, Adam hasn’t quite thought through this part of his crazy plan properly. What a surprise.
I checked the top 10 wealthiest people in Australia, who are obviously billionaires on paper at least. Of that 10 (as of March this year) two live offshore — one in Switzerland the other in New York.
Four of the 10 made their fortunes in tech, one builds apartments and only three of the 10 are Australian-based and making money out of mining.
One of the miners is Andrew Twiggy Forrest, who is ploughing hundreds-of-millions of his own dollars into new green energy projects, such as hydrogen, that presumably would make Adam very happy.
How you would possibly justify slugging Atlassian software pioneers Mike Cannon-Brookes and his partner, Scott Farquhar, with a billionaire’s tax is beyond me.
Imagine telling Melanie Perkins and her Canva partner, Cliff Obrecht — another pair of software entrepreneurs, whose share price tanked this week — that they will be paying the Bandt billionaire’s tax.
Harry Triguboff is another in the top 10. The 89-year-old Meriton owner, born in China to Russian Jewish parents, has made his fortune building apartments for people to live in.
Bandt’s billionaire’s tax – an easy to quote policy designed to appeal to inner-city, left elites – would apply to each of the above presumably, and just like in ’60s UK — when a wealth tax came in — most would leave Australia and pay tax somewhere else.
Singapore would likely be the big winner. I’ve only tapped the top 10 of the estimated 137 billionaires living in Australia, but it would be fair to say they are not all parasites destroying Indigenous homelands with dirty coal mines.
In Bandt’s speech he targets major projects in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland — places such as the Beetalo Basin, a job-creating, world gas asset supported by the Northern Territory government.
Projects such as this would provide thousands of jobs – many of them for the local Indigenous people – but the Greens and their inner-city, woke supporters would rather they never went ahead.
Taxing rich people and convincing international mining giants to stay out of Australia might seem like a warm, fuzzy woke thing to do, but it won’t pay the bills or keep people warm in winter.
Under the Green utopia you might have a good set of teeth and free childcare, but it will be a cold dark winter.
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