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| Julia Gillard dreams up a big new Carbon Tax. |
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced a Carbon Pricing Scheme.
This has been met with vigorous political and public debate. In no uncertain terms the outcome of this will shape Australia's future (your home).
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News entry's form a time line of events - Newest (top) to Oldest (bottom) - See below Twitter feed.
01-03-11: The Australian. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have set out their stalls on a carbon price - a battle that could decide the fate of their leadership posts.
The PM's day, per the press office: Julia Gillard will attend the ALP caucus meeting at 930am this morning. She will then attend Question Time at 2pm. On morning radio today, Ms Gillard accused Tony Abbott of damaging the Australian economy by promising to scrap a carbon tax if elected. "Mr Abbott has had every position on this (a carbon price) it is possible to have,'' she said.
Tony Abbott has appeared on Sunrise this morning and will appear on MTR radio later to continue his campaign against Ms Gillard's "great big new broken promise''. The Coalition joint party room meeting is scheduled for 930am. Mr Abbott declared this morning "I can guarantee that I will not break my word and I guarantee that I will have a clear mandate to scrap this tax if I get in and am elected''.
Missed it by that much: Communications minister Stephen Conroy is licking his wounds today (or at least, a wounded ego) after missing the winning goal in a charity soccer game on the Senate oval yesterday.
The match was played for Harmony Week and also featured Senators Kate Lundy and Steve Fielding, MPs Bert Van Manen and Graham Perrrett, as well as SBS' Craig Foster, Les Murray and former Socceroos Ned Zelic and Zeljko Kalac.
Liberal MP Dan Tehan takes up the story: "Stephen had a chance to win it and could have sealed it. I sent in a beautiful left foot cross, he timed his run beautifully, got the ball a yard out, we had gone to extra time golden goal and he missed it. And one wag immediately called out 'I hope you don't take your eye off the NBN like you did the ball'."
And Senator Conroy? "Guilty as charged'', he told Capital Circle, "But I scored two before that!''. The final score, according to Tehan, was "something like 9-10''.
Back in business: The owners of Kingston's The Kennedy Room will be breathing a sigh of relief as the PMO's Feb Fast team finally eye a return to usual service. The six person team, led by "Tinsel'' Tony Hodges, Andrew "Whatever it Takes" Porter and Sam "Sam" Casey have raised $5185 for the Ted Noffs foundation. And you can still donate to them here.
Moving on: As previously reported in Capital Circle, Employment Participation minister Kate Ellis' chief of staff Shannon Rees is finishing up in the office this week.
Spotted outside Question Time yesterday, a trio of former Labor MPs - James Bidgood, Roger Price, and Jon Sullivan. The men were in the House, along with fellow former MPs Bob Debus and Sharryn Jackson, for a "thank you'' presentation from the Labor Caucus. Contacted by Capital Circle yesterday, both Bidgood and Sullivan promised they had no plans to run again. As Sullivan - who lost his seat to 20-year-old Wyatt Roy - put it, "I have no plans to run again, I'm 60 and there is no chance. It's apparently a much younger man's game than I had realised!''
The Australian leads with a report that Tony Abbott has vowed to scrap Julia Gillard's carbon tax and demanded she seek a mandate for the plan as Labor's closest business adviser, Heather Ridout, refused to back the Prime Minister's package. (more from Sid Maher and Joe Kelly)
The Sydney Morning Herald reports big business has reacted with dismay as the uncertainty surrounding Australian climate policy grew after a pledge by the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, to repeal any carbon price that had been legislated with the agreement of Labor, the Greens and the independents. (more from Lenore Taylor)
Bipartisan: A high-cost national insurance scheme to revamp the care of the disabled has won rare bipartisan support, with both sides backing the Productivity Commission's call for more spending on disability services. (more from Stephen Lunn and Sue Dunlevy)
Levy: The government faces a wait of another month before learning the fate of its flood levy. (more from Phillip Coorey)
Oops: Kristina Keneally says Kevin Rudd "miscalculated" when he ditched an emissions trading scheme last year and insists she has no qualms about Julia Gillard's decision to resurrect a carbon tax in the final weeks of the NSW election campaign. (more from Imre Salusinszky)
Bored: The voters of Ryde must be a boring bunch. A staff member in the office of the Liberal member, Victor Dominello, has asked to play computer games to pass the time while she deals with constituents. (more from Alexandra Smith)
The secret cost of Victoria's desalination plant has been revealed, with new figures showing householders will pay nearly $20 billion over the next three decades even if they do not buy any of the water it provides. (more from Milanda Rout)
Still in the knapsack: Malcolm Turnbull says he still supports putting a price on carbon and has not given up on the prospect of one day leading the Liberal Party. However, he concedes it is ''very unlikely''. (more from Phillip Coorey)
Hungry no more: Food prices are set to rise under the Federal Government's carbon tax with some of the nation's largest food retailers expected to be hit with potential carbon bills of millions of dollars a year. (more from Simon Benson)
Breached: Most Defence personnel believe security breaches at bases are inevitable, and about 90 per cent do not understand base security systems, according to a confidential survey commissioned by the Defence Force. (more from Dan Oakes and Nick McKenzie)
Libya: The UN yesterday warned of a tsunami of refugees trying to flee Libya, as fears grew of an escalation of what is already the most brutal crackdown by any regime on the wave of democracy sweeping the Middle East and north Africa. (more form John Lyons)
Op-eds: Michael Stutchbury writes that as a young economist with the Reserve Bank in the late 1980s, Warwick McKibbin privately warned that jacking up interest rates to 18 per cent would club the Australian economy.
Niki Savva writes when the Australian Electoral Commission released the latest figures on political donations a few weeks ago, most media zeroed in on the $22 million spent by the mining industry to kill off the super profits tax.
David Penberthy writes the other night after playing cards I started thumbing absent-mindedly through the notebook we were using to keep score. It contained a combination of shorthand notes and a few fully-written words and phrases which at first blush made no sense.
Michelle Grattan on Tony Abbott's promise to scrap any carbon tax.
28-02-11: ABC News. Leaders continue to trade insults over carbon tax. The proposed carbon tax has again dominated Question Time, with both sides trying to paint the other untrustworthy on the issue (click here to read more).
28-02-11: SBS. Former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull says he still supports an emissions trading scheme and harbours ambition for "high office" (click here to read more).
28-02-11: www.news.com.au. Carbon tax furore: Tony Abbott 'would do anything for power', says Tony Windsor (click here to read more)
27-02-11: www.news.com.au. PRIME Minister Julia Gillard has admitted she promised there would be no carbon tax during the election and said circumstances had changed (click here to see more).
25-02-11: Press Release by Barnaby Joyce. Now that we’ve all picked our jaw up off the ground, because Ms Gillard and Mr Swan have precisely done what they said they wouldn’t do and are bringing in a carbon tax, we have to organise the fight to stop it.
Yes, we are going to have to go through all the arguments again and we will win again.
Let’s start from these. The people who couldn’t get fluffy stuff in the ceiling for the rats and mice to sleep on without setting fire to 190 houses; the people who decided to go on some manic building spree in the backyard of every school ,whether the schools liked it or not and in many cases in multiples of the cost of the true price on the structures ; these same people who thought they could reboot the global economy with the purchase of imported electronic goods with $900 cheques; the same people who have got you into $181billion in gross debt; yet the same people again who looked down the barrel of a camera to talk to the Australian people and stated categorically they would never bring in a carbon tax in the term of their government; they are the people who are going to bring in the carbon tax because they have the quite evident expertise, despite all the history to the contrary ,to cool the planet from a room in Canberra.
Not surprisingly, what they have changed is the temperature of people’s disposition. There is a palpable white fury from the deceit that people feel. People can hardly afford and in some cases not afford at all the power bills they currently have. They do not need any more motivation to use less power. They are totally focused on this because they can’t afford to pay for their current usage.
People understand that you either have cheap power or cheap wages. There is another alternative, no jobs and Australia’s manufacturing industry, or what’s left of it, is well and truly in the sights of this absurd decision of Ms Gillard. I look forward to AWU Secretary, Mr Howse, in his next Mussolini impersonation behind the podium, to go into bat for these jobs, but I haven’t heard boo from him today.
In the background, literally and photographically, are Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott. Mr Oakeshott, well you can just make your own mind up about him, but Mr Windsor’s statement at the press conference is peculiar. He said, “and please don’t construe through my presence here that I will be actually supporting any scheme”. Well, Mr Windsor, what were you doing there? Did you get lost on the way to the toilet and just stumble across the Prime Minister doing her press conference and decide to stand in on it?
Please don’t tell me that we have to go through this teeth pulling agony as you stand at the front of the political church in the big white fluffy dress saying ,” I don’t know how I got here and I don’t know whether I shall say I do. Don’t construe that this dress means I’m getting married to another Labor/ Green party decision.
I was not in the least bit surprised about the white fury I’m hearing in Sydney and how some of the illuminati misread that there would be such an overwhelming reaction against the announcement of the carbon tax. I am not surprised in the slightest by the almost monastic silence of Mr Bill Shorten as he sits back salivating on Ms Gillard and her Green cohorts happily mounting their own political pyre.
Day one, round one, and we, the National Party and the Liberal Party are ready for the fight.
24-02-11: 4BC. The Carbon Tax is starting to eclipse the headlines, and Senator Bob Brown, Leader of the Greens, talks to Gary Hardgrave on 4BC Drive about why Australia should embrace the new scheme. Brown attempts to dispel many of the reported negative effects of the Carbon Tax (click here to see).
24-02-11: 2GB. Alan Jones speaks to Prime Minister Julia Gillard about the carbon tax (click here to hear).
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