Radio Australia Today Editorial

Kevin Rudd Feels The Love

16 July 2008

As I mentioned yesterday, Sydney is feeling the love big time. Tens of thousands of Christians are in town for World Youth Day, among them Pope Benedict XVI who is right now finishing up his retreat in western Sydney and preparing to face the faithful tomorrow.

The WYD festivities officially started late yesterday, and the joy has been something to behold. Smiles everywhere. Good wishes and blessing abounding. Sydneysiders have never seen anything like it. Not even the 2000 Olympics came close. The last big event in the harbour city was the APEC conference last year, and there wasn’t a lot of joy about that, just road closures and lots of men in black suits with earlpieces and other types of pieces in holsters, carefully hidden from view.

All this WYD happiness must have hit home to the prime minister Kevin Rudd, because he has shown an extraordinary bit of generosity. In these times of climate change and threat to millions of people and animals, he is about to announce today his big plan for fighting the problem. Chief in the plan is an emisssions trading scheme (which effectively means that if you are going to doing something that emits greenhouse gases, then you are going to be taxed for doing it. The taxes will go to planting trees and doing other offset things).

This trading scheme will add 6 cents to every litre of petrol. That is going to be painful, especially with the price of petrol going up and up as it is.

So Kevin Rudd got the World Youth Day spirit. He is offsetting the trading scheme petrol rises by reducing other taxes on petrol. Effectively, drivers will pay no more, but heaps of dosh will go towards helping the effects caused by the petrol they burn. This means the government has pledged billions of its own dollars to climate change. No user pays here. This is Kevin Rudd pays.

Some of the newspapers suggest that this move will encourage drivers to burn petrol.

I doubt it. Petrol is still tipped to reach $2.50 a litre here in Australia within a few years. There’s already plenty of discouragement against driving with prices as they are. The last thing we need to do is to hurt people who are already hurting. And I say this as a confirmed cyclist who has given up his car.

Climate Change is coming, but it’s going to have a fight on its hands.
– Phil