Writing in the U.S. based Forbes Magazine, Dr Patrick Michaels discusses the lessons of the Queensland election - and how a carbon tax and "green nonsense" must always be opposed:
Recent elections—including last month’s tectonic shift in Australia—unequivocally show that aggressive global warming policies are political suicide. But, will a Republican ticket headed by Mitt Romney be able to capitalize on the Administration’s fatal weakness?
On March 23, the Australian Labor Party—akin to our Democrats—held 51 seats in the unicameral Queensland Legislative Assembly. 34 were held by the Liberal National Party, Australia’s variant of our Republicans. There were four independents.
The election, over the fourth weekend in March, has been called the largest electoral rout in the history of The Lucky Country. Labor hung on to six—that is not a typo, 6—seats, and the Liberals grabbed a mind-boggling 76. Three are still in doubt and Labor may add one more.
The crack-up of the Aussie left—regardless of what you hear from Labor’s spin cyclists—has largely been over Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s support (and the legislative passing) of a carbon tax to fight dreaded global warming. While Labor didn’t say very much about it in Queensland, Liberal candidates were all over the issue.
Gillard campaigned on a “no carbon tax” platform in the 2010 national election, which resulted in neither her party nor the Liberals gaining an outright majority. A coalition of independents and a green joined with Labor, extracting from Gillard a promise to follow the advice of an ad hoc climate policy committee guaranteed to recommend the tax. In keeping her end of the bargain, she moved the bill forward through the national legislature, and by November she had her tax.
Since the 2010 election that forced the suicidal coalition, everything has gone downhill for Labor. Once in control of all six Australian states, they have now lost four of them to the Liberals.
Australia is in the process of repeating American history. In 2010, Democrats in the House of Representatives paid the ultimate price for their June, 2009 passage of the cap-and-trade bill that would have reduced per capita emissions of dreaded carbon dioxide to what they were in 1867. Every close race that they lost evicted a member who had voted for it. In the Senate, which never touched it, every close race went to an incumbent Democrat. Both houses of Congress voted for the despised health care nationalization, so it isn’t right to blame the loss of the House on that.
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