Tony Abbott has to learn about bills before he commits to scrapping them. Today Tony decided to tell people that despite his pledge to get rid of the carbon tax he would keep the parts that he liked, namely the part that says carbon emitters get compensation payments. Primarily this demonstrates a profound ignorance of the carbon tax legislation as well as a lack of knowledge about what a compensation payment is. It's difficult to outline the many reasons why this shouldn't make sense even in Tony's world where you can say anything you want without concern of the media calling you up on it but I'll have a shot anyway.
Point one is that the compensation payments come directly from the carbon tax revenue. If the tax gets thrown out but the payments remain this money will have to come from somewhere else. Where this somewhere else is can only be revealed through treasury policy costing, but of course the Coalition isn't exactly keen to get this done. Regardless I'm going to take an educated guess that wherever it comes from it won't be from industry, it will be from the public, because if there's one thing Tony stands for it's not taxing industry.
Point two is that without the tax there is no reason to make the payments. They are compensation payments. Nothing is being compensated. What is Tony just going to shell out money because he likes his industry friends? Share the love Tony, I reckon the rest of the Australian public would like your free "no reason, I just felt like being generous" money too, especially given that it's their money you're being generous with.
Point three is that the amount of compensation given relates to how much of the tax a company pays which is in turn determined by how much carbon the company emits. Keeping the payments and getting rid of the tax is essentially saying "the more you pollute the more I'm going to pay you". Look, I'm not sure that the carbon tax is an effective tool of cutting emissions either but I'm pretty damn sure paying people to pollute isn't going to be very effective. There's getting rid of the carbon tax and then there's shitting on everything it stood for.
Point five is that if you remove the tax and keep the payments but work out a completely new way to determine them - which would be necessary - you may as well get rid of the whole thing and then create a law saying "Companies are legally entitled to meaningless payments from the Government." Which is all Tony's doing here anyway. Unfortunately for Tony the public would justifiably raise a sceptical eyebrow at this and he doesn't want pandering and bribery directed at industry bosses to have any negative impact on him in the polls. So he's trying to frame it within the controversial carbon tax legislation in the hope it will get ordinary people on-side, essentially hoping they will hear "scrap the carbon tax" and "compensation payments for struggling industry" and hear them as positives without connecting the dots.
Really though this again demonstrates exactly what sort of Prime Minister Tony Abbott would be. Equipped with an outstanding ignorance of issues, policy, and legislation while failing to be held to account, Tony would take your money and give it to his friends. But he doesn't have many friends and you're not one of them.
