Op-Ed: Oz Carbon Tax A Brave Start From A Government Gripped By Fear

[hatrack]

Australia's Black Saturday fires of February 2009 burned over a million acres of land and killed 173 people. It happened because of record high temperatures and an exceptionally dry summer. It was what climate experts had been predicting for some years: the megafire. A megafire is hell come to earth. The energy equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs was released in a fire storm that saw rivers of flame – sometimes rising 100 metres in the air – flowing through the countryside, generating winds of up to 120km an hour with new fires spotlighting 35km ahead of the main fire front.

Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change. And yet support for action on climate change, which was a key factor in the ending of 11 years of conservative government in 2007, has now largely collapsed.

In a story of ironies, a Labor government rarely characterised in recent times by either vision or courage has just announced a raft of measures, centred on a carbon tax, to reduce Australia's carbon emissions, an act at once brave and visionary. It was, though, forced on them by others.

It has been the strangest of battles that has already claimed two opposition leaders and one prime minister. And depending on who wins it, the rictus smile of Australian public life – behind which has hidden for years a paralysis of thought and action and has seen the coal and iron ore barons, the shock jocks and the Murdoch press seeming to set the political agenda as much as parliament – will continue or begin to break.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/10/australia-carbon-tax-modest-beginning