En Passant

Not only did we not save $200 a year as Abbott promised but energy prices have doubled since the Coalition scrapped the carbon tax; now, dropping subsidies for renewables is the latest thought bubble from the Nationals. John Passant reports in Independent Australia. Comments on the IA site please.  

In 2010 Beyond Zero Emissions outlined a $370 bn plan to move Australia to a completely renewable energy society over ten years. A 1% net wealth tax on the top 10 percent of wealth owners in Australia nets $60 bn a year to pay for that. Abolishing the super concessions and negative gearing or the top 10% of income earners, and abolishing the CGT concession which overwhelmingly benefits the top 10%, brings in an extra $25 bn easy. Bingo – the Budget deficit is fixed and actually addressing climate change can begin.

The fact that capitalism in Australia and elsewhere is built on fossil fuel use means it will take a revolution to achieve a totally renewable energy society. Why? Because only a democratic working class revolution can put people before profit.

This is a government which, like its Labor and Coalition predecessors over the last 3 decades, is engaged in shifting more of the wealth we workers create from us to capital. The very logic of the repeal of the Carbon Tax is to see business, not working class consumers, reap the benefits.

It looks to me as if profit and competition are the barriers to addressing climate change. If that is the case then only a democratic revolution of workers to run society to satisfy human need can address climate change. As the banners at some environmental demonstrations and eco-socialist conferences say ‘System Change, not Climate Change.’

Let’s move to a totally renewable energy Australia by 2025. In my opinion that won’t happen without a social revolution, a mass upsurge of working people to move away from concepts of profitability to satisfying human need democratically. As a slogan of the left says ‘System change, not climate change.’

We need a democratic revolution and workers’ state based on production to satisfy human need, not to make a profit, to move as soon as possible to a renewable energy economy.

Clearly that is not on the agenda in Australia at the moment. But with the failure of the Greens’ nicely nicely let’s not upset the parliamentary applecart, maybe the time has come for the Greens to abandon respectability and lead a campaign of demonstrations and civil disobedience to force governments to address climate change.

This is a draft of a paper I wrote in 2011 on the then prospective carbon tax. It has since been published by IBFD. I argued that the compensation package for workers to ameliorate the impact of the carbon tax would prove illusory over time and would make the working class pay for the environmental […]

The abandonment of the proposed floor price from the Australian ETS scheduled to start in 2015 is a political, not an environmental, decision. It means the Gillard government can say we are on track to be part of a global market in permits, although that market will do little or nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the price remains low. The neoliberal Greens have sold us yet another market dud.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees workers deserting it and some (though not that many) swinging to the Greens? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees or will see many workers holding their noses and voting for the Liberal or National Parties or even Bob Katter’s Australian Party?

Far better to blame a bogey man party like the Greens than to actually analyse why Labor is on the nose with workers.

No matter how much of a song and dance Labor make over the joys of the carbon tax, they are doomed. The carbon tax is the specific focus for general working class dissatisfaction and anger with long hours, inadequate pay, poor social services and Gina and Clive on TV every night flaunting their wealth.