JOBS, communities and even entire industries are under threat from Federal Government plans to tax carbon emissions.
A meeting of dairy farmers on Wednesday was told the Shoalhaven and Illawarra could be among the hardest hit by plans to introduce an emissions trading scheme, due to the role agriculture and mining played in the regional economy.
Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said economic modelling showed an ETS would cut economies in regional areas by 20 per cent, devastating communities in areas such as the Shoalhaven.
He claimed the proposed taxes were completely one-sided, as they ignored the fact pastures and crops on farms captured large amounts of carbon.
“It’s basically saying we have to play a game of cricket on a pitch that’s five yards long, and you’re batting,” Senator Joyce told the gathering at Pyree, which attracted about 100 dairy farmers from as far away as Newcastle, Gundagai and Canberra.
He said the scheme was “mad”, as it had not been backed up by scientific studies.
“It is a crazy, Labor Party-inspired debacle,” Senator Joyce said.
He said it was based on pushing up prices by taxing anything seen to be producing carbon, forcing people to make different choices when it came to the products they used or bought.
Yet Senator Joyce said Australian jobs and industries were in danger of being sacrificed for nothing.
He claimed humans produced only three per cent of carbon released to the atmosphere each year, as most of it came from things such as volcanoes.
Of that three per cent, Australia was responsible for only 1.4 per cent, which the government was hoping to reduce by five per cent.
It all added up to Australia’s plans reducing global carbon emissions by about two-thousandths of one per cent.
However Senator Joyce said it would not even achieve that, as production that stalled in Australia due to new taxes making it unviable would quickly be taken up by other countries, where they often had lower environmental standards.
“If we lose production it won’t make any difference, it will just move overseas,” Senator Joyce said.
In the meantime Australian families would be hard hit by higher costs, according to University of NSW Associate Professor in the business school, Frank Zumbo.
“People will be paying higher prices, when the effect on the environment will be next to nothing,” Professor Zumbo said.
In sections of the market controlled by duopolies, such as the retail sector dominated by two companies, all added costs would be simply passed on to consumers, Professor Zumbo predicted.
Local dairy farmer Winsome Watts also claimed families, and particularly farming families, would suffer under the carbon pollution reduction scheme and plans for emissions trading.
She claimed the proposed legislation was biased and lop-sided, because it taxed farmers for methane produced by animals, but did not provide any credits for carbon captured by pastures.
However other countries had provided a fairer approach to agriculture, exempting it from carbon taxes, leaving Australia’s farmers out in the cold with limited chances of economic survival.
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