On the new carbon tax in Australia
“ ‘Families earning more than $110k will feel the pain of the carbon tax,’ warned the Herald-Sun, straightfaced. ‘Households face a $9.90 a week jump in the cost of living.’
$9.90.
Cry me the mothertrucking Nile.
Households on less than $110k would be even less affected. Some would have their 10 bucks a week partly compensated, others would be fully or over-compensated.
The tax, after all, was not on people, but on 500 high-polluting companies. The compensation was to guard against costs those companies might pass on to their customers.”
…
“In being part of the luckiest couple of generations of people to yet walk the earth, most of us still like to imagine we’ve got it tough. When you grow up with a certain standard of living, you get a sense of entitlement. If someone threatens that standard, they are depriving you of what is fundamentally yours. To your mind, you have a right to live like this, because you’re lucky enough to have lived like this.
Except you don’t. So if you claim you can’t afford 10 bucks a week, I call Shenanigans, with a healthy dash of You’re a Dill. One schmick dinner would make up your year’s liability in one hit. The less well-off will get compo, but even they could afford it if they had to. One less deck of smokes a week. Two less beers. Leave off the Foxtel subscription.
Whatever it is, remember that you live in a country where drinkable water comes out of a tap inside your house, and the power runs 24 hours a day. This in itself is a goddamn privilege, and if you are going to bitch and moan about having to pay for that privilege, you can bugger off and die in a ditch.
Because you do not have a right to this way of life. No-one does. We just have the extreme good fortune of enjoying it, and that won’t last forever. We should appreciate it while we can.
Perversely, part of me wants to see what would happen if the sea levels rise a couple of metres, the coastal cities get swamped, the rainfall dries up, the power goes out, the militias take to the streets. Part of me would love to see the squawking indignant right-to-luxury crowd learning how to live in the dust, scraping out dried plants from the earth and hoarding their remnants from the Beforetime.
It’ll be a sight if it happens. Dirty red skies will rise up from the ground each morning like a curse. The only creatures that seem to thrive, the cockroaches and carrion birds, will swarm black against the sand and the sunset, rasping dry songs with their throats and with their legs. The water will be gone. The world will not remember ice floes. And for her sins, for ten dollars a week from each and every one of us, Julia Gillard will hang from the garret at the gates of Troy.”
- Geoff Lemon
From http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2794652.html (Accessed July 17, 2011)
two thousand and eleven