Barnaby Joyce has an online petition for people to sign, re. the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). It literally only takes a few seconds to sign it.
Please let everyone know who you think may be interested, because otherwise we’ll have yet another massively expensive turkey foisted on the poor old wage slaves & small business owners – with carbon-trading middle men in sitting in their CBD offices, laughing all the way from the stockmarket to the bank. At our expense. And in reality it’ll do little for the environment. There’s a truckload of other incredibly simple stuff the government would do first, if they were serious – eg a compulsory energy efficiency rating scheme (heating and/or cooling, as geographically applicable) on all new suburban residential buildings & offices, so there were no more cheap hothouses built with black roofs & non-opening windows; they’d make it compulsory for all (new) washing machines & dishwashers to have cold + hot water connections [so solar hot water can be used]; a compulsory refund on all glass jars & bottles, as they still have in SA – etc). Oh but there’s no goldmine for share-trading middlemen in any of that stuff!
Malcolm Turnbull has clearly been hanging around with too many of his chardonnay sipping ‘conservation is fabulous darling but not-in-my-backyard’ middle-class suburbians again. The sorts of people who fly around the world on holidays but who insist on participating in ‘Earth Hour’ and using low-energy light globes; who have gardens full of mown grass & non-native plants, but who invest in ‘feel good’ conservation projects that buy up cattle stations out in the sticks; who always take their green bags to the supermarket but who consume far more fashion throw-aways than the average household.
This backing of a 3-legged horse, against what the general population wants, reminds me of Malcolm Turnbull’s backing of the poorly planned republican debacle a few years ago. Many people think a republic is a good idea, but not how they proposed it. If Malcolm had been listening to the general population instead of just those in the same social circles, he’d have known that. Malcolm, liven up, eat some humble pie, and start listening! Residents of Sydney’s North Shore and Eastern Suburbs are not representative of the majority of Australians! No point in only listening to people who have had the same upbringing as you have.