you can buy carbon credits so cheaply now, you can emit and buy the credits. so much for clean technology!
Australians face fines of over $1m for speaking out against new carbon tax
Praised by Barack Obama as a model for the world, Australia’s highly unpopular carbon tax, set to take effect from July 1st, is set to be policed by laws which forbid business owners from criticizing it for causing price rises – with thought criminals who do so under threat of being hit with huge fines of over $1 million dollars.
“SHOPS and restaurants could face fines up to $1.1 million if waiters or sales staff wrongly blame the carbon tax for price rises or exaggerate the impact,” reports the Daily Telegraph.
According to ACCC deputy chairman Dr Michael Schaper, the warning applies, “to comments made by staff over the phone, on the shop floor or in meetings. It also covers advertising, product labels, websites, invoices, contracts and contract negotiations.”
This draconian measure will be enforced by teams of “carbon cops” who roam the streets conducting snap inspections of businesses to ensure they are not making any reference to the tax.
The characterization of dissent against the carbon tax as a criminal offense exemplifies how the measure passed last year goes way beyond merely forcing Australia’s top 500 companies to pay an extra $23.78 per each tonne of CO2 emitted. The system will be rolled into a carbon trading system by 2015.
Not only will Australians be whacked with price rises on everything from energy to food, small business owners will also be intimidated into silence when they are forced to pay out more for key supplies. Energy prices across the country have already been skyrocketing over the course of the last year.
After the carbon tax bill passed Australia’s federal parliament last year, the government set about “trying to erase any dissent against the jobs-destroying legislation,” wrote Miranda Devine.
“It’s all very Orwellian: the tax whose name cannot be spoken. We are already paying for the climate-change hysteria that has gripped Australia for a decade.”
“But no matter how Orwellian the tactics, no matter how many carbon cops are sent into hairdressing salons to interrogate barbers on the precise nature of their price rises, the truth remains: Australia has gone out on a limb, imposing a carbon tax that will send businesses to the wall, cause undue hardship to families, and tether Australians more tightly to government handouts.”
“And soon, we will send billions of dollars overseas to buy useless pieces of paper called carbon credits. Investment bankers, lawyers and carbon traders will get rich, as will all the usual spivs and scam artists ready to stick a bucket under the government spigot raining taxpayer cash.”
Although Barack Obama has largely been forced to abandon a carbon tax for Americans, instead targeting coal-fired power plants via EPA mandates, last year he praised the Australian system as being “good for the world.”
As we have documented, the entire carbon tax scam is a monumental fraud which does nothing to help the environment even if you believe in climate change hysteria, in that its primary purpose is to line the pockets of ‘carbon billionaires’ like Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
Obama’s support for Australia’s carbon tax is unsurprising given the fact that he was “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange” via millions of dollars in donations from the Joyce Foundation, with whom Obama served as a director.
Carbon trading schemes are directly connected to people in third world nations like Honduras and Uganda being brutally evicted from their land and in some cases slaughtered in cold blood. Western companies make billions from seizing land and using it to grow trees in return for lucrative carbon credits which are then sold to companies under carbon tax schemes like the one passed in Australia.
