Lullaby of the Fuzzy-headed Book-Huggers

The Standard flags the keen appraisal of former Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons about the real cost and beneficiaries behind National's Emission Trading Scheme. It tallies up to $2 Billion a year in corporate welfare.
The more corporations pollute in the pursuit of their profits, the more we the people pay.

And for those keeping score of who's who as beneficiaries of our taxes: that's,
community education, poor solo mums, retirement fund = bad!
well-to-do MPs, rich polluting companies = good!

Those who warn about climate change and environmental damage are often labelled warm-fuzzies, or tree-huggers, or whatever - but I'm not. I'm a hard-arsed realist. I'm realistic, that money will always be there to be made; people will live and die, societies crumble and reform. But our world, our wildlife - our inheritance and legacy - once lost, that can't be brought back by a fancy fiddling of numbers and a pass around of the hat. That's just reality.

And people like me have been around for ages. For forty years, we've been talking about the environment and limits to growth, ever since the Club of Rome. And every time, Money talks back. And it says. "There are no limits - so long as government doesn't place any limits. We can grow forever. We'll get cleaner, promise - new technology will lead the way!"

It is a sweet lullaby: our fresh-faced economists are taught it in chapter 1 so they can set their impressionable minds at ease and they can get on with the important business of being trained to succeed within the established political and economic order.

Every five, ten years, the same conversation; every time, the same song is sung. Money Talks, and Government fails us, because industry are given no incentive to do anything different. If they paid for their pollution, that would be a good economic incentive to actually start researching and implementing that fabled new technology.

So, ultimately, who are the fluff-headed book-huggers? And who are the realists?

You know, the winged fantails used to be EVERYWHERE when I was a kid. 20 years on.... not so much. I find that sad. Fantails, gone. National Parks, dug up. Water - well, it's already scarce in Australia. That matters to me - enough that I'd like to see some of the considerable wealth of our small country - dollars are literally power in this respect - invested in protecting these things; in ambitions other than making more money that the wider community never benefits from.

And I reckon, maybe there are more of realists like me than the Money in this country is counting on. I reckon that unless they get the facts on the ground right, National might leave a door open. It only takes a small swing... Their reign might be shorter than they think.