Gillard dodges truth on carbon tax plan
11/08/10
Prime Minister Julia Gillard repeatedly refused to come clean on her plans to introduce a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme last night on ‘The 7pm Project’.
Labor don’t want the truth of their great big tax on everything to get out, which is why Julia Gillard refused to answer the question no less than seven times.
PRESENTER: ...Are we going to know before Saturday week, exactly when you will do something with a carbon tax?
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 1) I can tell you the answer to that right now and I share everybody’s sense of frustration that we didn’t get the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme through the Parliament. We did a deal with Mr Turnbull, shook hands. Along came Tony Abbott, no more deal.
PRESENTER: Indeed, if you’d gone to a double dissolution election you probably would have won with that as an issue.
JULIA GILLARD: Well…
PRESENTER: And history would be very different.
JULIA GILLARD: You know, political commentators can do the ‘could have been, should have been, may have been.’
PRESENTER: What are you going to do? When are you going to do it?
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 2) But what we will do, if we’re elected, is as follows. We will start acting to bring the renewable energy which we’ve invested in so heavily through transmission lines into the electricity grid. A problem with renewable energy is that it’s generated in remote parts of the country. We want to do that. We’ve got the renewable energy target of 20 per cent…
PRESENTER: When are you going to put a price on carbon and when are you going to…when are you going to put a price on carbon?
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 3) I’m going to come to that, but a few more measures. Gonna make sure that there are no…
PRESENTER: Actually, how about we just stand to Steve’s one because we are short on time.
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 4) Ok. But climate change, complicated and we want to act on it. The transmission lines are important. No new coal fired power stations that are dirty, is important.
PRESENTER: Still haven’t got an answer on carbon…
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 5) …greening our car fleet, greening our buildings and then striving for a community consensus about pricing carbon. We’ve said we would review at the end of this period of the Kyoto commitment, so that is in 2012, but I want to make sure…
PRESENTER: Sounds like a delay to me.
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 6) …the community comes with us on this. Because if we’re going to transform our economy and the way we live through a price on carbon, we’ve got to make sure the reforms last for the future, that it isn’t there for a few years and then the other side of politics gets in and knocks it away. We want to make sure it lasts but we’re going to be acting in the meantime; renewable energy, changing where we work, how we travel, no dirty new coal fired power stations. These are important things.
PRESENTER: We only have a half an hour programme so please no more.
JULIA GILLARD: (Evasion 7) (laughing) I should have interrupted him more.
Fronting a different audience on “Q and A” on Monday night, Julia Gillard confirmed her real intention – she will introduce a carbon tax or ETS in the next term of Government, regardless of what her “Citizens Assembly” says:
JULIA GILLARD: ...I believe we’ve got to cap carbon pollution. I believe to do that we need a market-based mechanism....
TONY JONES: But what if the citizens assembly says ‘we don't like this idea, we don’t believe in climate change the way you do’ or alternatively ‘we do not believe in emissions trading schemes’?
JULIA GILLARD: Well, first and foremost I believe Australians are people of good sense. Secondly, we never said the citizens assembly would determine our policies, but it’s an engagement mechanism to help the community work through the kinds of things we will all need to do to have the settings we need on climate change and the pricing of carbon.