POPULAR sceptical blogger, Jo Nova, has responded to Labor’s defeat in yesterday’s Australian federal election with the headline ‘Voters crush the carbon tax and corruption – worst Australian government gone’. 
I’m not so sure. It remains my view that the previous Coalition Government lead by John Howard was a disaster, particularly when it came to mismanagement of both the economy and the natural environment.
Indeed the Howard government, of which our new Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, was a senior Minister, was instrumental in introducing a raft of very damaging legislation.
Top of the list is perhaps the renewable energy certificate, an ongoing economic disaster as detailed in an article by Ray Evans and Tom Quirk entitled the ‘The Ruinous Privileges of Renewable Energy’:
“THE mechanism through which electricity consumers pay greenmail to the owners of windmills and solar panels is the mandatory Renewable Energy Certificate, introduced by John Howard in his 2001 MRET legislation. As James Delingpole explained in the Australian on May 3, writing about the ghost town of Waterloo in South Australia (now depopulated by the impacts of the sub-audio frequency vibrations generated by the nearby wind farm), a 3-megawatt wind turbine, costing $6 million, will be lucky to generate electricity worth $150,000 in a year, but will receive $500,000 in RECs, paid for by the hapless electricity consumer.
[Read more…] about Remembering Appalling Policies Introduced by Previous Coalition Governments (Part 1)
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.