Political Weasels, And Global Warming

Australian columnist Ross Gittins is disappointed with the new Treasury minister Wayne Swan:

I think I've stumbled on a new law of politics: the harder life becomes in this capitalist economy, the more our supposed leaders soft-soap us. The harsher it gets, the harder they try to persuade us we're living in a Sunday school where no one plays for keeps.

Take the carry-on about petrol prices. Neither side of politics is prepared to speak the obvious truth about them.

Instead we have them endlessly doing their I-feel-your-pain routines (which, of course, they don't because they're on high incomes and, in any case, have most of their travel costs picked up by the taxpayer).

...Consider this exchange between Wayne Swan and David Speers of Sky News.

Speers: So, more expensive petrol is a good way of getting people to stop driving as much?

Swan: You shouldn't be putting words into my mouth, David.

Speers: Well, let me ask you then, is it a good way of getting people to drive less?

Swan: Well, what we're going to do is put together our emissions trading scheme, we've said that it should be as broad as possible, we'll publish the green paper, there'll be a lot of data and discussion of all these issues. When they're out there on the public record, I'm happy to have a much more detailed discussion with you, David, about all of those issues.

So now we know.

The trouble with all this soft-soaping is that it encourages the ignorant notion it's the government's job to solve all our problems. It hurts - fix it!

People don't get on with facing up to their problems because they imagine it just a matter of waiting for governments to act. And then the pollies wonder why the punters increasingly regard them as liars and cheats. Why their cynical behaviour breeds cynicism.

Despite the politicians' obfuscation, the plain truth is obvious: one way or another, petrol prices have got nowhere to go but up.

Prices will probably continue to fall back occasionally, but there doesn't seem much doubt that global demand for oil will continue to outpace the global supply of oil.

And that's just the half of it. The thing I find most disillusioning about the Rudd Government's performance is its weak-kneed pretence that the latest rise in oil prices is some kind of hideous natural disaster, brought upon us by a terrible god inflicting death and destruction on the innocent.

This is not a brave government. What it lacks the courage to admit is that the price rises global market forces have been inflicting on us are merely a foretaste of the price rises the Government plans to impose on us through the emissions trading scheme it will introduce in 2010.

The basic principle of such schemes is brutally simple: they force up the prices of fossil fuels so as to discourage us from using them. That's what Swan was refusing to admit in that interview.