Never mind carbon dioxide; the biggest threat to our children’s future is the cluster of economic arsonists creeping through our halls of power, their claws clutching shabby virtue like the awful Tricoteuses of Paris clutched knitting-needles in their crusted fingers while delightfully anticipating Madame Guillotine’s newest victim, enjoying the sport as whole sections of society are destroyed.
The Zero Carbon bill is the fuel to burn New Zealand’s house down, and like all socialist ideologically-driven disasters it will create division, resentment and misery that will spread like an inferno through every single piece of this green and pleasant land with middle New Zealand set to lose heavily.
Austin Mitchell observed this land and its people in the late 1960s, dubbing it the ‘Half-Gallon, Quarter Acre, Pavlova Paradise’. Under the shackle of the Zero Sense Bill we will, within thirty years, have become the ‘Half-baked, Quarter-trillion, Palaver Purgatory’.
Half-baked, because that’s what the idea that we can influence nature’s grand thermometer by altering the emissions profile of our little group of islands is. It is no more than a ridiculous tilt at an overwhelmingly powerful windmill, a force we don’t fully understand nor could ever hope to control. It is bloody ridiculous idea and it is an indictment, an affront to common sense, that just a single MP voted against the sanity-free document’s first reading in our parliament.
Quarter-trillion, because that’s what it’s going to cost us. A $247,500,000,000 – by Treasury estimates – restriction on our economy’s growth caused by attempting to restrict a tiny, harmless, trace-element component of this earth’s atmosphere. What madness is it called, in an age when every manifestation of insanity has a name, when we attempt to strangle ourselves in order to save our own breath?
What does a quarter-trillion mean in real terms? It means $17,800 less, every year, for each and every ‘average’ household in the country, except there is no ‘average’ household; the hurt will not be borne fairly, or squarely. The vandalism will strike some severely. Some entire industries will disappear as early as 2025. Some households will be devastated. Some entire communities will be placed on life-support for the entirety of their foreseeable future, and their children’s. (Zero Carbon Bill Economic Analysis: A synthesis of economic impacts. Page 16, Table 5. Comparison of scenarios and key assumptions made across NZIER and Vivid. ‘Assumptions specific to each scenario’: “Closure of iron, steel and aluminium production in 2025”)
Both Treasury and the Ministry for the Environment have identified the hardest-hit under the Zero-Sense Bill – our earners. Producers will bear the brunt of increased costs and inhibited growth under the unhinged plan. The socialists will not care a jot about these people who are the backbone of our export earnings. They’ll simply say “go away and find a supplementary income stream”. The producers themselves may well say (but probably in much sterner terms), “Don’t you think that if I could find an income stream that would reward my family $17,800 per year for the next thirty years, that I would have already embraced it?”
The other group of hardest-hit will be our vulnerable. Both Regulatory Impact Statements, Treasury’s and MoE, clearly identify our worst-off for markedly brutal side effects under the Zero Sense Bill. Some of these families have household incomes of under $35,000 already; how the hell will they cope with less – relatively, much, much less?
While middle New Zealand will be forced to shell out for the afflicted economic quintiles 1 & 2 there will be limits before the extra taxation burdens start to cause further economic damage. At this point the chardonnay socialists will simply wave the poor off astern and forget about them, as ever socialists have done, caring not at all about equality of outcomes as long as they’re alright, Jack. This attitude is nicely summed up by Mr Mitchell in his book:
“With socialists equality is a matter of principle, until they reach power, when it’s a matter of amnesia.”
Palaver, because that’s what this bill is – a whole lot of talk that will produce nothing and lead to none of its stated outcomes. I could have said Bullshit; perhaps I should have, but it doesn’t start with a P.
Purgatory, because that’s what we will, as a society, become, a place of eternal punishment for trusting that these economically-illiterate goons would not deliberately harm the people of this country in such an utterly meaningless and comprehensively ridiculous way for not a grain of benefit.