McCrann and the great big new tax on dirty bits of grit

“Astonishingly,” says Herald Sun columnist Terry McCrann, “the PM, the Cabinet and members of the Canberra Press Gallery don’t know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide.”

Apparently it has to do with nomenclature, because the Gillard Government wants to put a price on carbon, rather than carbon dioxide. McCrann seems to believe that carbon comes in only one form, namely “dirty bits of grit.”

The reason the term is used by Gillard is an exercise of quite deliberate despicable dishonesty. It is the modern political form of those subliminal advertisements that are banned.

To suggest that it is about stopping dirty bits of grit — the very real carbon pollution of yesterday’s coal-burning home fires which gave London its sooty smog and killed thousands every year.

Most people are familiar with the term ‘carbon sink’, which has been around for decades, but perhaps only a very few including McCrann believe it refers to something that absorbs dirty bits of grit.

McCrann also excoriates the Gillard Government for “peddling” another lie, that “putting a price on carbon is the 21st century equivalent of the tariff reforms of the 1980s.”

This lie has been peddled not just by the government but also by Treasury. Be afraid, be really afraid that we have a Treasury which is that incompetent.

I’ll indeed switch from being mildly amused if McCrann or somebody can refer me to exactly where Treasury said that.

There’s no doubt, however, that McCrann’s niche readership of the habitually afraid will find his exposition really, really frightening. They’ll indeed find confirmation that the guv’ment wants to tax human respiration.

The last word on this belongs to a commenter on an online forum, who seems to be precisely on McCrann’s wavelength:

Remember if they could kill you they would.