The Prime Minister still has no qualms about making misleading and deceptive statements. On last night's ABC Q&A program, she said:

"We’ve got the biggest polluters paying the price for putting carbon pollution in our atmosphere. We’re using that money to assist industries, particularly those that are trade-exposed, to cut their emissions and to remain competitive."

The use of "carbon pollution" is deliberately misleading. The socalled carbon tax is to be levied on certain carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, not on carbon particles as she infers. CO2 is not a pollutant, but an invisible odourless gas that is essential to plant life.

There is no doubt that the carbon tax will make trade-exposed industries less competitive, because the already sky-high electricity prices will be raised at least 10% more by the carbon tax to start with, and then prices will continue to rise thereafter as the carbon tax rate rises annually. Her claim that "using that money to assist industries ... to cut their emissions and to remain competitive", is gross exaggeration. Tell that to the aluminium smelters who are shutting up shop -- an increasing carbon tax is a serious disincentive for them to stay in Australia, given recent electricity price rises and a high $A. Only a few trade-exposed industries will benefit from compensation.

Few people will forget the PM's deception in claiming before the election that there would be no carbon tax under her government. But the mother of all deceptions is that there is no empirical scientific evidence that man-made CO2 emissions -- which only account for some 3% of atmospheric CO2 in any case -- have caused any measurable global warming. Consequently, there is no scientific or economic justification for imposing a carbon price in the first place.

We had a credit boom.
This expanded credit could have gone into factories and research which would have increased the "real world" wealth.
Instead it went into inflating house prices...not better houses just more expensive ones.
This sort of ponzi finance has been shown to cause booms that are inevitably followed by the bust. (payback time is not nearly as fun as the credit splurge.)
I've noticed that industry likes to blame "green" for many things such as the privatised power industry. Massive hikes to pay for all the profit extraction, no real increase in efficiency, so now they must increase prices and blame lefty idealists.
Lets all agree that both lefty and Righty idealists are the problem...some how we must return to the rational center.