http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/truth-is-that-garnau...ROSS Garnaut has the policy paradigm, and a lot else, completely wrong on the Gillard government's proposed carbon tax. He sees it as a battle between the forces of economic reform, in the tradition of the Hawke, Keating and early Howard governments, and the old pre-Hawke, anti-reform days.
This is dead wrong. Rather,
the Gillard government is trying to move Australia's political economy towards a European model.
Like the US, we understand that wealth is not a given but has to be created, whereas Europeans assume national wealth can always be further taxed and regulated in the interests of some allegedly moralistic cause.
Nowhere in the world does Australia suffer any serious reputational damage from its climate policies or its asylum-seeker policies, except for small parts of the European elites.
The first and most important thing about the carbon tax is that it makes government much bigger. It gives government a lot more money. In an almost perfect inversion of normal usage, Garnaut trashes anybody who objects to a big, new tax as a sectional interest, whereas, in perfect socialist European terminology, those in favour of a giant new tax are supporting "the national interest". In his deeply flawed report, Garnaut gives almost perfect Australian expression to the European sensibility. Garnaut's description of the international environment is wilfully misleading and flatly contradicted by the much more impressive Productivity Commission report.
There is also something profoundly offensive to democratic practice in the way the Gillard government has shovelled out vast amounts of public money to long-term friends of the Labor Party, such as Garnaut and Tim Flannery, so that, with a wholly spurious and confected institutional credibility, they can declare: government good, opposition bad.
Garnaut tells us that Australia is a laggard on climate policy, in danger of being left behind, that we have done less than other developed countries. But the Productivity Commission, restricted to surveying a group of countries already skewed towards those who would do more on greenhouse emissions, finds that we are about in the middle, that our efforts are fully commensurate with the US and China.
These conclusions cannot both be true. One is right, one is wrong.
Like Garnaut, I have no qualifications or expertise in climate science, but I have followed a lot of international agreements through several decades of work in international affairs. One thing I know for sure is that grandiloquent pledges to lofty goals are never met. Part of the dishonesty of the Garnaut report is that it takes the windiest, or to put it more politely, most ambitious, pledges of other countries and accepts them as proven policy.
This sleight of hand underlies the whole misleading picture that Garnaut gives of the world. He even claims that the collapse of efforts for a legally binding climate change agreement at Copenhagen was really a wonderful breakthrough because it led to a pledge and review situation instead, in which countries are now more ambitious in their pledges. To take this seriously you'd have to be barking mad. Countries can be as ambitious as they like at the declaratory level and take no action about it at all.
I lost a great deal of respect for Garnaut when, on ABC1's Lateline recently, he attacked Opposition Leader Tony Abbott as arguing in favour of ignorance. Garnaut's report shows a disturbing slide into egomania, with a Kim Jong-il-like introduction about how in one meeting he brought a smile, a lifting of the spirits and a recognition of the truth to the Prime Minister and associated politicians. This is really slightly nutty.
But ageing professors often decline into self-glorifying tics and gestures. His attack on Abbott was different. Garnaut has every right to be insulting, patronising, condescending and shrilly partisan. We're a free society and it's fair enough to criticise Abbott. But it is surely an offence against the spirit of democracy if the government pays you a vast amount of money as a provider of allegedly independent policy advice and you then behave as a partisan barracker. The government is essentially trying to con Australians into thinking the whole world is going down this carbon tax route. Yet the Productivity Commission points out: "No country imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse gases or has in place an economy-wide ETS."
The dynamics of the carbon tax debate are similar now to those of the illegal immigrant-boatpeople debate.
There is a great divide between the evangelical elites and ordinary people with common sense and prudence. It is the very essence of common sense to see what costs comparable countries are imposing and move at a comparable speed. This does not justify a unique carbon tax for Australia.
I travel a good deal in Asia, the US and the Middle East, and climate change barely figures in the popular debates in those countries, which means that their governments are not under much pressure to do anything.
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