Tim Andrews, Executive Director of the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, spoke at Americans for Tax Reform’s anti-carbon-tax press conference on July 25.
Regarding the DC-swamp push for a carbon tax, Andrews says:
“This isn’t just bad policy, it’s bad politics. It’s a policy that cost two Australian Prime Ministers their jobs, one opposition leader their job, and was so overwhelmingly rejected by the Australian people as a toxic policy that there is now bipartisan unanimous consensus in Australia, in the mainstream of Australian politics, that never again will a carbon tax be introduced.”
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“The reason it [the carbon tax] became so unpopular was because of how its impact was felt. Now, one of the issues that proponents of the carbon tax don’t seem to understand, being in the elite and privileged position that they come from, is how disproportionately this hurts people.
This disproportionally hits households, particularly those, for instance like retired persons who are literally not able to run air conditioning in extreme heat waves, suffering extreme health consequences and even death in Australia because of this. This is how profoundly immoral this policy is.
And people writing for elite think tanks on incredibly large salaries who propose the carbon tax, don’t understand this. This is why the people rejected it and why the pollsters didn’t actually realize it was a thing.
They don’t realize the cost to small businesses. They don’t realize if you’re running a small café you have to pay a lot of money for refrigeration costs and you get put out of business because even a small percentage increase in refrigeration costs destroys your profit margin and makes you shut your doors and makes your workers unemployed.
If you work for a DC elite think tank who pretends to think a carbon tax is a good idea, you don’t understand this.”