It is not the floods et al. It is mr rabbot and his fearmongering and talking down of this country. All his doom and gloom, sky is falling rhetoric is making people stop spending, investing and consuming and as a consequence retail, stocks and industry are suffering. Like keating said the other day rabbots only offering is "give me the job or Ill wreck the place".
"People skills" is a powerhungry traitor out to wreck this country in his selfish quest for power.

Yabby: Meantime if I grow 100 tonnes of wheat and try to ship it to the ports, or haul back lime and other fertiliser to improve the soil, I am slugged with carbon tax, no compensation, just bad luck for farmers as there arn't enough of them to make buying their vote worth bothering about.

And after having his bitch about how unfair it all is, life goes on, night follows day, and the farmer raises his prices. And as a consequence surprise surprise is none the worse off.

You know after all the bitching that is going on from those right, I have trouble believing they actually believe a word of their professed philosophies. The reality is the carbon tax is in fact a tax cut, meaning it has reduced how much money government has to spend. Assuming Labor brings the budget back into surplus as it promises (and it is looking likely), this has to mean a smaller government providing less services.

This is exactly what the right would have the government do, isn't it? Yet here you all are, complaining about how unfair it all is.

@Shadow Minister: The point of this thread, and the articles I linked is that the timing of this tax is the very worst possible. Just as the high dollar is hurting, the carbon tax will punish these sectors even more.

How do you know Shadow? It ain't going to come into effect for a year or so. Have you got a crystal ball or something that can see so far ahead?

SM, the squawking and panicky support for all things Julia from the warmertariat is increasingly irrational. That’s because it has nowhere else to go.

But it is all a blind distraction; it’s not actually support for Julia, the ALP, the Greens the independents or the CO2 Tax. What they fear most is the “opposition” because it is the opposition that will bring down the House of Carbon and along with it, reputations and revenue streams.

The warmertariat will then have to face the reality of lost careers, credibility, respect and most fearsome of all, ridicule.

It is instructive that the whole basis behind the warmertariat has been 20 years of alarmism and scaremongering. When all they can offer now in their own defense; is to point the fickle finger of scaremongering at the skeptics, we should be very grateful and say to them, “Is that it”?

< The flood, mining tax, and carbon taxes, putting the brakes on Australia's economy. >

So is ‘putting the brakes on the economy’ necessarily a bad thing?

I think it is a mixed picture, as with the word ‘growth’, which has good and bad components as I have elucidated many times on OLO.

Firstly, we want to gear our economy away from endless expansionism and towards sustainability. The carbon tax is aimed in that direction, sort of.

We also want the profits from our resources to be better shared amongst us all and to equate to quality-of-life improvements better than they currently do. The mining tax is aimed that direction, sort of.

There are powerful forces telling us that anything that dents economic growth or consumer confidence or overseas investment must be bad. Well, all I’m saying is that it is much more complicated than that, and my first indication when the rusted-on pro-growth-forever brigade tells us this, it is likely to be, at least in the long term, just the other way around.

SM
Report on your policies from the PMs desk

Here are 5 for starters.

1-Reinstate the Pacific solution with TPVs *GRANTED
2-Review the fair work act, especially with regards to the causes of the 2% productivity drop. Re introduce AWAs. *GRANTED
3-Look at introducing nuclear power. REGECTED
4-Scrap the 3rd party insurance, and include it in the price of petrol. i.e. the further you drive and bigger car you drive, the more insurance you pay. *GRANTED
5-Make Child care 100% tax deductible to enable working mums back to work. Also look at making child care less expensive. REGECTED

Restart
Re your comments to Yabby-

*And after having his bitch .*
What planet do you live on Restart. Aussie farmers have to compete on the world market Tariffs. No they can’t just raise their prices.
You want to talk about bitching mate while the city slickers want pay rises and free child care- God dam wimps.

Farmers growing FOOD ( not Animals) but crops should be exempt. Allow me to tell you what happens to Yabby’s crop + others.
It goes through the agent who deal with the foreign desk& If its going to ME etc somebody there- or elsewhere pull out their accreditation book and add from 2% upwards on top + the next dealer gets his on top.
The only way I can think to help a bit is to set up an accreditation system here for farmers. That would work best if the farms themselves were accredited i suppose. There is NOTHING anybody can do if its going to places like Japan. They are just stuck with the problems set up by Howard because of dropping tariffs . I suppose it might be a motivation and give me something to bargain with on my pet topic .
So if a farmer gets an extra % on crops he drops live exports. That could work. Worth a try.

But restart you should never tell a Aussie crop farmer to stop bitching. Farmers have suffered more than anybody in this country