Cate Blanchett and the Carbon Tax Ad

Of course Cate Blanchett has the right to express her opinion on the carbon tax. The real question is whether anyone should listen to it.

The government is suggesting using a tax to couple two very complex, highly non-linear systems: the climate and the economy. I doubt pretending to be queen of the elves qualifies one to pass judgment on this.

Instead of open, extensive debate on taxes, compensation for consumers and existing industries, subsidies for new technologies and the role of government as a venture capitalist for the green energy sector, we have the shallow spin of an ad campaign, saying little more than: “C’mon Australia, let’s get behind it. It’s the right thing to do”.

Is it? I don’t know and neither does Cate, or Michael Caton for that matter. Interesting that he has received a lot less criticism than her for doing the same ad.

I suppose if you’re a multi-millionaire, left leaning arts luvvie, supporting an economic policy you clearly don’t understand, which has a negligible effect on your own hip pocket even if the tax is ten times what is being proposed, despite your carbon footprint being many times the size of the average person’s, then you’re bound to cop a bit of flak.

The economics of climate change is a broad and very complex issue. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the problem, I doubt there is currently anyone who can demonstrate the optimality of any particular policy.

This is why we need open, rigorous, evidence based debate to arrive at a meaningful synthesis of arguments.

Instead, we have scaremongering from the opposition and a government completely out of its depth, making up instead of deriving the answer and trying to con the public into support with hollow propaganda ads.

Here are some questions I believe need to be publicly discussed and answered in the process of constructing a coherent economic policy to deal with climate change:

• Why are we not also taxing oxides of nitrogen and sulphur?
• How, exactly, are emissions to be measured and what sort of error margins exist?
• Will we tax imports from countries who have a lower carbon tax rate?
• How will we verify other countries are not rorting the system to favour their exporters, particularly those with unaccountable governments, like China?
• How will the carbon generated by transportation be taken into account without a massive administrative overhead?
• If we introduce a tax, which consumers and existing industries should be subsidized? By how much and for how long?
• Should some revenue from the tax be allocated to a venture capital fund for green technologies?
• Should we switch to DC for bulk electrical transmission?

Good policy derives from openly debating questions like this, not ads with actors following the script of their chosen side.